Reading Notes #5

Reading Notes #5 Comm 702 10/13/11 Margaret Brady

I found this weeks readings regarding grading to quite timely for me. Although I have been teaching Anatomy & Physiology for several years, out of the same text book, and for the same student body regardless of institution, I have found that grading can be quite interesting. I am very committed to helping my students succeed in my classes because the material is so difficult with lots of foreign vocabulary and physiological processes that occur at the cellular level. What I have noticed is that when I write a test that I am worried is too difficult, the majority of the class (and this has happened semester after semester, will do very well on it, which is really super. However, on the contrary, when I have written a test that I think is ‘way too easy and that I’m not truly “testing” them, they will all fail, well not all, but the scores are significantly lower across the board.

Another thing I struggle with is when I have given an exam for several semesters and there is a pretty typical distribution of grades and then I’ll give the same exact exam to a class in another semester and they all perform very poorly. I have sometimes wondered about “testing to the class.” Although I haven’t done this as of yet, in one of my General Biology classes I am currently experiencing a situation where a fairly “easy” exam has turned out to be overwhelmingly difficult for the majority of the class. Although I have experienced this in large lecture classes vs. small classes and summer semester vs. school year I always wondered if it had something to do with class size and student course load in those cases But my current Biology class is only 30 students and we have done a lot of group activities and review sessions! I have even given them the answers, well they didn’t know they were the answers, just before a quiz and then erased the board and the majority still failed the quiz! So, does one “test to the class” give this situation or not?

As far as writing answers on a test as opposed to multiple choice, I really believe that writing out the answers exhibits knowledge of the subject as opposed to recognition of the correct term. One time I had a student who traced the flow of blood through the heart (ironically this was my teaching demo!) absolutely perfectly on the essay portion of the test, yet got every single multiple choice question regarding the heart wrong! This was very interesting to me. Also, the situation always exists where the student says “you tricked me” on the multiple choice exam as opposed to essay or short answer where they can show me what they know without any “tricks.” I never set out to trick anyone but a person needs to give choices and some of those choice may be similar.