Once upon a time, I was an instructor. It was at a tech school, and I think I was a pretty good teacher for a 24 year old kid with a Bachelor’s degree. My current very slow career trajectory is to return to teaching one day after going back to school part time and getting my B.Sc. and Masters in Biology. It will be a decade of effort, but it’ll be worth it. I loved teaching, but in order to continue they wanted me to get a Masters degree in Information Technology, and between no real interest on my end and way too much on my plate (I was teaching full time, consulting 200 hours a month, had two daughters and a wife, a band, and was actively writing and editing a literary zine) I finally decided that I had to walk away. My life is different now, and I have the time, the interest, and passion to do this.
As a student I hated tests, and not because OMG I HAZE 2 STUDE HURD but because almost always I found that a given test was not really about assessing my knowledge on a topic so much as my ability to regurgitate. I remember a Management course I was required to take that was totally that way. We had four major tests in the course with the lowest mark dropped, and that made up 30% of our final grade. I understood the topic fairly well, but failed the first exam miserably because the instructor was looking for particular words rather than conceptual understanding. I learned to simply memorize the words in his notes and got full marks on the three subsequent tests. But that didn’t show that I understood the principal, it simply meant I was able to regurgitate his words verbatim.
When I became a teacher, this hate grew. I was teaching a course on Systems Analysis, and my first major exam was a lesson in frustration. I came up with a series of valid questions about the course content and then tried to craft multiple choice responses. This was a painful process. What I found myself doing was trying to come up with answers that looked right but weren’t to trick the student into guessing wrong. The results of the test were that the people who could spot the defects in my answers got them right, but it didn’t seem to me like I had truly learned whether or not someone knew the topic.
And wasn’t that the point of the exercise? to determine which of the students had a good grasp on the subject? Remembering definitions of key points was valuable, but hardly practical. I thought long and hard on the subject and my next major exam was leaps and bounds better. It was a single question about a paragraph long that contained all of the information the student would need to answer it, and it required them to actually do what I had been teaching them all along. And it worked.
I was able to see in the exam who understood and who didn’t, and also, which areas I had and hadn’t effectively communicated. When too many students showed that they didn’t understand a given concept, I knew that it meant either the topic was entirely complicated or that I hadn’t clarified it enough, and a review was in order. I began to use tests as a gauge of my own teaching ability as well as assessing the understanding of my class. My goal as an instructor was not to weed out the losers, but to do my best to inform my class of the topic at hand and make sure that they were able to use those skills.
This all comes from an article I read today on Science Daily entitled Useless Online Student Quizzes that talks about some research that has gone into courses that are compensating for heavy enrollment with self-study quizzes. It triggered all these thoughts on my end, and made me once again scratch my head.
It sounds like the purpose of these tests is to supplement the fact that they know the education the student is purchasing isn’t good enough. Overcrowded courses are a tool with a specific (and necessary, I think) purpose; you want a large number of students who will not graduate to cover the overall expense of the students who will. It isn’t fair to the students, but it’s just the way things are done. And this is a new way to pile even more people into a course and weed them out. But it seems like a real dick thing to do.
Jim
