If my congested head is upright today, I must be administering final exams.
This puts me in mind of a question that has not come up this semester (and, with luck, will not), but that has come up on occasion in the past.
I frequently teach multiple sections of the same course in a given semester. On the one hand, this simplifies things, because it means that I have fewer exams to write. (A single final exam works for both section of Philosophy of Science.) But, since our final exams are scheduled based on the regular meeting days and times for the courses, there are then necessarily multiple sittings of an exam for courses I teach in multiple sections.
In practice, what this means is that the first group of students taking the exam can end up being your beta testers.
Of course, when I’m writing my exams, I strive to make them as unambiguous and clear as possible. I want them to give me information on how much my students have learned and understood, not on who can untangle confusing instructions. But every now and then, a set of instructions or the wording of a test item will be less clear to students than it should be.
Sometimes we catch this early during the first sitting of an exam (especially if multiple students taking the exam come up to me to ask me about the bit that’s not as clear as I intended it to be early in the exam period). In that case, I can announce a clarification to the students in the first sitting. And, to be fair, I can preemptively announce that same clarification at the beginning of the other sittings of the exam.
However, sometimes a bit that’s not as clear as I intended it to be is only identified very late in the first sitting of the exam (e.g., by a question asked during the last 15 minutes of exam time, after at least half the students who were taking the exam in that sitting have already left). Does this warrant a preemptive clarification at the beginning of the other sittings of the exam? Would there be something unfair about issuing such a clarification, given that at least half the students in the first sitting of the exam weren’t given this clarification? Or is the fact that so many students in the first sitting of the exam didn’t seem to need this clarification evidence that the bit of the exam in question was clear enough to get the job done?
What about when a bit that’s not as clear as I intended it to be is first flagged in the second sitting of the exam? Is there any reason to worry that announcing a clarification to students in the second sitting in somehow unfair to students in the first sitting, none of whom heard this clarification (because none of them asked about this bit of the exam)?
For the record, my tendency is toward more clarification rather than less. And given that I do not grade on a standard-deviations-from-the-mean scheme under which others’ success can hurt your grade, I haven’t had student complaints around this kind of issue. However, I have taught in environments where competition for grades is fierce and where the smallest perceived advantage or disadvantage is made into a Very Big Deal. I think that piece of my teaching history is what makes me wonder about this sort of thing.
If you’re not a “grades will be forced to a strict Gaussian curve” person, I would certainly give the clarification to the second group. You’re looking at how much each individual knows, not how they compare to their classmates.
If you’re looking to correct perceived injustice/inequity, I would think more about the first period people who didn’t get the clarification, rather than the second period people. Are you lenient toward answers that make sense based on the question-as-written, but not necessarily the question-as-clarified? I absolutely detested teachers who would mark as incorrect an answer which solved the question-as-written, but which didn’t incorporate some detail/clarification that the teacher thought was “obvious”. I’m taking a class in Science/Math/English, not in Mind Reading – please grade accordingly.
That said, I wouldn’t expect any leniency for people who just left the answer blank – especially if you’ve made it clear they can ask clarifying questions during the test. If they were unable to answer the question due to confusion, it was their responsibility to ask the proctor about it.
How much cheating goes on? I would expect a few in the first section would give answers to some in the second section.
I agree with the idea of giving a clear signal to students, hopefully on the first day of classes, on the syllabus, and at each exam that they should ask for clarifications immediately. One tactic to encourage this might also be to announce that if there’s a clarification that is missed in the first session that clearly gave other sessions an advantage that the question might be dropped for everyone (or everyone gets full credit, whichever is less of a headache). This encourages even the people that “get” the question without the clarification to ask for it in order to get the credit.
If they were unable to answer the question due to confusion, it was their responsibility to ask the proctor about it
What about disabled student doing their exams separately from the rest of the classroom?
I’ve had a few exams where I couldn’t produce an answer to a question that was poorly worded and sometime, it is not possible to phone the proctor. In these case, some professors decided to drop the question or award the point to everyone.
monson @2, there has been no evidence of such answers-from-the-earlier-sitting cheating in the whole time I’ve been at this university. I used to make different exams for each section — same topic coverage and same format, but different in particulars — just to guard against this. But people seem hardly to know the other students in their own sections, let alone other sections of the courses they’re taking. (That’s actually a little sad, isn’t it?) Also, those who seem inclined to cheat in my courses are pretty much never smart enough to pull it off.
Plagiarism I get (although — fingers crossed on those research reports yet to be graded — none this semester). However, that’s usually students ripping off someone the don’t know via Google.
Autistic Lurker @4: I definitely cut extra slack on questions that turn out, for a number of students, to have required clarification when I’m grading the exams of the students who had an accommodation to take the exam in a quiet room at the Disability Resource Center. And there have been a couple of instances where I decided that a test question was sufficiently flawed that everyone was going to get free points.
RE: fairness.
I teach online, and finals are handled by a central exam services department. and every semester there are problems. ths semester: one form of the exam (of two forms) went out to proctors without the last page – the page with the essay questions on it. half of my students had the essays they were dreading. the other half had only the multiple choice section. and there’s no fair way now to settle the grades.
My own piece of teaching history was in the community college sector (DVC, Geology, now retired), where the usual case was 4-5 sections of the same course for consecutive decades. I learned that in this environment at least, grade competition was always fierce, and grade inflation made that competition fiercer. Grades became the main detractor from actual learning.
The only fortunate thing was the prevalence of the unfortunate thing you commented on in passing: the lack of communication between groups of students. I was able to hone the wording of questions over the years with no apparent impact on the grade distribution. I think I could write a book about this subject, but it wouldn’t sell. Here are a couple things for you to reflect on that were helpful for me.
First, I put all my hard stuff in mid-term exams, so I wouldn’t be under the time pressure while grading written answers, as opposed to multiple choice. In my later years, the multiple choice questions came from a test-bank, and I passed out a mass of them a week before, from which I took a random sample on the exam, so any wording problems were a) not my fault and b) could be dealt with prior to the exam itself.
Second, I did not require that students take the exam at the time scheduled for their section. They could come to any of the scheduled meetings, without prior arrangement. In the occasional instance of an exam disappearing from an early section, I could make up another with a different random draw of questions.
All of this is predicated on a system of grades that put the role of the final really as a last chance for the students at the bottom to get themselves up in the satisfactory class. The top level students had already sorted themselves out.
By the way, I was not a popular instructor (see http://www.reviewum.com).
I work hard to ensure that everyone takes an exam under similar conditions. If I can’t clarify for everyone, I would prefer to throw out the confusing question or grade their unclarified responses as best I can. Even though I don’t assign grades by deviation from the mean, grades are by nature a measure of performance relative to some expectation and I can’t fairly compare to any standard if the conditions were significantly different.
monson @2, there has been no evidence of such answers-from-the-earlier-sitting cheating in the whole time I’ve been at this university.
Janet,
how do you know this, what do you do to look for this? I’m sceptical, because we’ve had incidents where students doing the same exam in different countries on the same day but in different time zones have passed on details of the exam, even though there is no formal contact between the students during the semester, so the idea that students at the same campus don’t know that they are getting the same exam seems unlikely
cheers
Martin
I’m with Martin: I’m shocked that there is no evidence of cheating. I give slightly different chemistry exams to my different sections to avoid this, and my questions have very little short answer / conceptual stuff.
Are these essay exams? If so, I would be VERY surprised that there is zero passing on of information. I’ve encountered cheating in every class I have taken (since 10th grade, including all grad classes) or taught, so it always gives me pause when there is a clear opportunity to cheat but no evidence of it. Perhaps your students are better than mine!