776. The Case for Common Examinations
February 13, 2007
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"Providing a continuing occasion for faculty inquiry and discussion, insuring grade comparability across classes, making instructors more reflective about their grading practices, dampening the effects of grade inflation, and encouraging students to be more intentional about their curricular choices-these are significant benefits of common examinations that far outweigh the increased time and effort required of faculty."
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Posted by markep on February 13, 2007
776. The Case for Common Examinations
February 13, 2007
Folks:
In this month's Carnegie Perspectives Lloyd Bond, senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching makes a strong case for the use of common examinations for all sections of a course as a powerful form of assessment as well as a fruitful context for faculty deliberations about their goals for students. It is #31 in the monthly series called Carnegie Foundation Perspectives. These short commentaries exploring various educational issues are produced by the CFAT
Regards,
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
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The Case for Common Examinations Lloyd Bond
The notion that all students who take the same course at a given college should take common examinations has been around for a long time. But programs that regularly employ common examinations are still rare, primarily because they require a significant investment of faculty time and effort. Because of the many benefits they entail, when effective programs can be found, they are worth serious study. Glendale Community College, one of 11 colleges in the Carnegie/Hewlett grant project, Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges, is a case in point.
Beginning in 2000, the Glendale mathematics department instituted a common final examination for all sections of its developmental course in precollegiate algebra. The department produces tabularized information after each examination that shows, among other things, the dropout rate and mean GPA for each class, as well as the performance of each class (properly coded to insure anonymity) on the overall test and on subtopics.
The faculty as a whole discuss topical areas that students appear to be learning well and those they are still struggling with. Individual instructors examine the performance on the test of their own students in various ways that reveal important aspects of their teaching practice and grading standards. For example, instructors whose A and B students do relatively poorly on the final examination must ask themselves whether their standards are too lax. Instructors whose C students perform well on the test must ask themselves if their standards are unrealistically high. The entire project stimulates faculty discussion and reflection in ways that did not occur before.
The benefits of common examinations
The single most important benefit of common examinations is that everyone must run the same race. Because of this, common examinations can be a powerful hedge against two persistent problems with grades: grade inflation and the wide variability across teachers in grading standards. Regarding grade inflation, an instructor who awards A's and B's to students who do poorly on every common examination must ask himself whether his grading practices and standards are appropriate. Is he awarding inappropriate weight to class participation, effort and personality, say, at the expense of genuine learning?
Teachers differ in virtually all of the factors that contribute to grades: the amount of course content actually taught during the semester; the quality of instruction; the difficulty of quizzes, examinations and other class assignments; the leniency or stringency of standards; and so on. How much is taught and how well it was taught over the semester surely varies from instructor to instructor. But instructors typically test only material that they have taught. In a class where a mere 60 percent of the intended material was taught, an A means that a student mastered only that material. Yet a B in another course section might well mean that a student learned more material because the second instructor taught 90 percent of the intended subject matter. If an A student in instructor Jones' class is a C student in Smith's class, what meaning can we attach to grades at all? Currently these complications remain largely unexplored, but common examinations could shed considerable light on the situation.
The very process of developing and coming to consensus on an assessment framework, along with the development of exercises and a scoring rubric, all tend to get faculty on the same page about what is important for students to know and be able to do. Instructors who entertain idiosyncratic notions about grading or essential content must defend their ideas to their colleagues in an open forum where departmental objectives and disciplinary considerations are the reference standards. A program of common examinations will encourage honest discussion about the appropriate weight to be given to effort over outcome, to growth over absolute level of achievement, to test performance over class participation.
The above benefits focus primarily on how common examinations can positively affect teachers and their practice. But what about students? Several instructors at Glendale have noted that their students tend to be fearful of common tests. The students understandably have achieved a certain comfort level with their instructor and the prospect of a common examination developed by the entire faculty is intimidating. The math department at Glendale responded by instituting a practice of putting former tests on the internet so that students could get a clear idea of what was expected of them. To be sure, the research evidence on this interesting topic suggests that mild test anxiety is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it more often than not serves to motivate rather than paralyze. But common examinations may have an even more constructive effect on the intentional learning of students. If the examinations constitute a significant part of their grades, students may well resist the nearly ubiquitous inclination to enroll in classes of known "soft graders." For if students perceive that they will be evaluated impartially and even anonymously on what and how well they have learned, perhaps they will seek out the great teacher, rather than the easy grader.
A matter of professional development
Providing a continuing occasion for faculty inquiry and discussion, insuring grade comparability across classes, making instructors more reflective about their grading practices, dampening the effects of grade inflation, and encouraging students to be more intentional about their curricular choices-these are significant benefits of common examinations that far outweigh the increased time and effort required of faculty. But at Glendale there is one additional benefit that, in its long-term effects, may prove to be more important than all the rest. It is exemplified in how the math faculty use test results in professional development. Noting that some instructors' students repeatedly performed well above average on the examinations or on particular topical areas, the department began a program of having faculty observe these instructors in action. The department appears to have taken to heart the sage observation of educational policy scholar Richard Elmore, who claims that one of the most powerful professional development experiences possible is to study carefully someone else who does what you do, only better.
© 2006 The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
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Comments about this article: [5]
Why stop at multi-section courses? Every argument in favor of common exams made here also applies to the idea of common exams for all students in a major to take before graduation.
Posted by: Doug Shapiro/The New School on February 15, 2007 09:53 AM
Common examinations may be fine the way the post describes them (I'm not even sure of that) but when the dept. chair makes all the tests AND a final exam without consulting anybody, the idea doesn't work! This was my experience in the 1970s with a particular dept. and chair, not a pretty situation.
Posted by: jim scandale/SUNY@Buffalo on February 15, 2007 09:57 AM
I first started college teaching under a system of common examinations. It was the most miserable teaching experience of my life. Along with other junior faculty, I was assigned a section of the introductory course, in which all instructors used the same textbook and gave the same final exam scored by machine. The final examination consisted of 100 multiple-choice questions selected by a committee from the test bank supplied by the textbook publisher.
When I found out about this system (as is typical, no one mentioned exams before I accepted the job and I didn’t ask), I questioned my role in the classroom, and felt obliged to share my reservations with the students. With the final exam based strictly on the textbook, I doubted the value of students coming to class, other than to seek clarification when something was unclear, and this would require a Q&A rather than a lecture format. I suggested to the class that it might be more valuable for them to stay home and read the textbook. Attendance at my lectures dropped by two-thirds and, at the end of the course, I received the lowest student evaluations of my career. However, there was no indication that the performance of my students on the final examination was any worse than that of other instructors.
I was demoralized by this experience and vowed I would not teach again under this system, in which instruction appeared to be separate from evaluation. I say “appeared to be” because, after the course ended, another instructor informed me how he and his colleagues handled the situation. In addition to the standard final exam, midterm examinations contributed to student grades and these were composed and graded by individual instructors. By including material in the midterms not covered in the textbook, students would have to attend class and take notes.
In retrospect, I don’t believe I disadvantaged my students by suggesting that they stay home and read the textbook. I still came to class even if most students did not, and was available to answer questions and elaborate on points in the textbook. The basic factual information, including major theories, concepts, and research findings can be (or should be) provided in the textbook. This does not eliminate the need for instructors but changes their role. Instead of lecturing about issues contained in the textbook, they can lead discussion sections and supervise laboratory, studio, or workshop sessions, besides being available to answer student questions. What is eliminated in this system is lecturing on material already in the textbook or that can otherwise by provided to students online or in hard copy.
Posted by: Bob Sommer/University of California, Davis on February 15, 2007 01:00 PM
There are lots of things I don’t like about common examinations, some of which are alluded to in the long response by Bob Sommer (?; the light grey font makes it difficult to read the author of a response). Two things struck me about the article, however, which perhaps inform my response: The example given was (1) from a Community College and not a University and (2) the subject was mathematics.
First the subject: I can imagine that common exams make some sense in mathematics and perhaps the exact sciences (physics, chemistry), because these are taught linearly. Generally there is a reasonably well prescribed sequence of concepts, and these concepts can be tested by having students answer problem sets on the exam. Although each instructor can inspire or bore students with his/her personal style of teaching, the material taught probably varies rather little, and common exams may make some sense.
Many other fields in the softer sciences, or social sciences and humanities (I’m a professor of Biology) are not so constrained. For example, when I taught one of four sections of a huge first-year Zoology course many years ago, the syllabus was only vaguely defined as (these are not exact words): about half the course should be a survey of the animal kingdom and the final half some principles of animal function. For such a syllabus, there is no obvious sequence of concepts (or rather, only some very general ones), let alone a prescribed set of illustrative examples. Each professor designed the details of his/her section of the course independently, and examined the students independently. I will go as far as to say that if a student attended lectures in section A, (s)he would likely get very low marks, perhaps even fail, if (s)he wrote the exams of section B.
When our core courses were re-vamped about a dozen years ago through the merger of several departments into a single Biology Department, the decision was made to have a common syllabus for all sections of each core course (although there couldn’t be a single, common exam for all sections, because some sections were in term one, and some in term two). This common syllabus accommodated the desire to have a single website for all sections. I refused to take part in the core course corresponding to the Zoology course I had taught for years, because I feel strongly that at a university, the professor should control the syllabus. This may well not be the case at Community Colleges, where there isn’t the same concept of “academic freedom”. The concept of “academic freedom” goes way beyond the narrow idea of protecting one’s right to speak out freely on relevant issues, but is mostly about freedom to craft the courses we teach according to one’s expertise and teaching philosophy.
In some professional faculties (eg: the Health Sciences, Engineering, etc), the requirement for certification by outside bodies may well necessitate common curricula and examinations.
In brief, although I can accept the concept of common exams in some circumstances, I see no value or justification for them in general.
Posted by: reuben Kaufman, U. Alberta, Edmonton, Canada on February 15, 2007 06:42 PM
Common exams are the way to assure adequate coverage and to asses both the students and the faculty and the program also. I took diocesan exams in grade school and high school that were curved across all the thousands of students in all the parochial and diocesan high schools.
I recommend common exams for undergrad courses that can have correctly written questions. See multiple sites on Bloom's Taxonomy that give examples of crafting exam questions for each lelvel of the taxonomy. It also needs considerable effort to build them and it should be done by senior faculty.
Now it is perfectly feasible to use term papers and demonstration lectures and group projects in recitation to allow for instructor preferences and research specialty.
VJM
Posted by: Vincent Marchionni / semi-retired on February 23, 2007 10:53 PM