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 Non-unilateralism gets somewhere with North Korea? | Back to blogs for industry | Badgers fall | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Megan McArdle: But why do faculty, particularly at the undergraduate level where the task is mastery of a basic body of knowlege, set exams where the majority of the students can't answer a majority of the questions?The thing that makes writing exams hard for me is knowing that questions that I think are easy can be misread in amazing ways that cause students to not only crash and burn on what was supposed to be a gimme, but also waste so much time that their performance on the rest of the exam suffers. I've learned to tell my students to come talk to me during the exam if a question looks tricky. I really, really don't try to be tricky. Unless you count my practice of asking multiple choice questions where the wrong answers are true statements that don't answer the question. I started doing this when I realized that students often don't look at the answer keys we post; the tendency of profs to use the same wrong answers leads these students to think that all their profs share the same wrongheaded ideas that they hold. My means and medians are typically in the 70s. But since that includes partial credit, it may be the case that a majority of my students can't answer a majority of the questions.
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