Rory McElwee wrote: Apparently, in the past, not much rhyme, reason, or motivation was given to students to take the test, so they didn't prepare for it and thus tended to do quite poorly. Have any of your institutions had this problem? Suggestions for ways to encourage the students to take it more seriously?
We use such an exam as part of our comprehensive exam system. Minors have to score above the 35th %ile to pass: majors above the 50th%ile and above the 90th %ile to qualify for an honors oral exam. That works very well. We very rarely have more than two out of fifty majors fail and sometimes we get as many as 20 who score above the 90th%ile so they seem to be motivated. It also encourages them to prep and any time spent helps with the GRE. I think the review of psych it encourages is helpful as a part of our capstone experience. We get some group norms so we can assess various aspects of our program (our students usually score above the 95th%ile as a department). The bonus is this keeps us ahead of the assessment people and allows us to avoid a lot of that hassle. We also can refer to the scores if anyone questions one of our innovative approaches to teaching. For example one of my junior colleagues teaches a general psych course without a standard text (a topical approach using books like "the Bell Curve" to examine intelligence etc.) and we know his students don't show up any differently on the senior level exam. I cover only a limited number of disorders in abnormal and the students scores indicate that I'm not hurting our students by taking an in depth rather than a survey approach in that course. Bob Grossman Professor of Psychology Kalamazoo College
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