On Wed, 3 Nov 1999, Molly Straight wrote:
> I am in my first year of teaching at a small private college. I only
> have 3 students in my class! I just gave an exam on 2 chapters and had a
> D and 2 F's. And this was a computer-generated exam from the test bank
> that came with the text! I had even given them a study guide, which I
> wrote after I had made up the exam!
Although there are some good questions in the test banks that come with a
lot of textbooks, there are also some that are amazingly picky. My guess
is that if you allowed the computer to randomly pick questions, you
probably got a lot of those picky questions--particularly in the
intro/methods/physio chapters. As a graduate student myself, I sometimes
forget that after several years of psychology classes at both the
undergrad and the graduate level, General Psychology students don't have
the background in the subject that I do. Thus, what sounds perfectly
acceptable to us is probably requires an unreasonably detailed reading of
the chapter for a first-year undergraduate.
For the future, you have several options for changing your testing
procedure if you choose to do so. My personal preference would be change
the testing format. With only three students (wow, I'm jealous!), it
seems reasonable to give short answer and/or essay exams (perhaps with a
little multiple choice or matching thrown in, based on the type of
material). Another option would be picking questions from the test bank
manually--probably with a little editing--based on things in the text
and/or lecture that you emphasized.
However, you need a solution for the past exam. One thing that I use on a
regular basis in the "at-risk population" general psychology class I'm
teaching now is a "half-back" option. For every question students miss on
the exam, they have the option of correcting it to earn half the points
back that they missed originally. Thus, a student who earned a 50% can
turn that into a 75%. The procedure for multiple choice would be to (1)
identify the correct answer, (2) explain WHY the correct answer is
correct, (3) tell what page in the text (or date in the notes) they found
the answer, and (4) explain why EACH of the wrong answers is wrong. The
procedure is slightly different for other types of questions (matching,
short answer. . .), but I'll leave it to the interested reader to apply
the procedure to these other types of questions as an exercise. :)
This procedure has the advantage of allowing students to earn some points
back without "giving" them away. To get the points, they still have to
show that they understand the information (which is the goal of testing,
right?). One caveat, though: Make sure that you insist students follow
"the rules" (whatever you decide they are). They will probably try to
just give you a letter, such as "#3 is C" and be happy with it. That
doesn't really show that they understand *why* the answer is C, and it
defeats the purpose of the exercise, in my opinion.
Good luck.
Jeff
================================================ ____________________
Jeff Bartel Grad Student in Social Psyc | Manhattan >
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Dept of Psychology | x \_
www-personal.ksu.edu/~jbartel Kansas State U. | |
Syllabi page for psychology instructors: | |
www-personal.ksu.edu/~jbartel/syllabi.html | KANSAS |
================================================ |______________________|
Reading an email message about a new email virus? Getting a note that's
been forwarded to a dozen other people? Before you pass it along, drop by
http://www.US.datafellows.com/news/hoax/ for a list of recent hoaxes and
chain letters.
