Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Ah, the Joy of Giving Final Exams

I will do you the benefit of NOT making this a whine post about final exam week.

I thought you might be interested in something, though.  If you were educated in the developed world, you probably went through a curriculum that developed your analytical skills.

You know--you were asked the question "Why?" a lot.  Or "How?"  As you thought deeply about the question and supplied an answer, neurons fired and new connections developed in your brain.  You became smarter.

It's funny how I take that for granted.  In the UAE, as well as in the former Soviet state Uzbekistan, memorization is emphasized instead.

So when I give a final exam, the students tend to do really well with questions requiring an answer that they have already memorized (if they've studied).

But every exam, I like to add a question that tests basic common sense.  I either do that or else I add a question that requires students to follow basic instructions.  Here's the one that I gave this year:

There are three lines below these instructions.  On the top line, write the number 57.  On the middle line, write the number 16.  On the bottom line, write the number 4.  Once you have followed these instructions, you have finished this problem.

______________

______________

______________

Simple test of common sense.  Can my students follow instructions?

. . . Any guess at the percentage of students that got this question right?

Well, since I'm making a blog post about it, you're probably guessing a low number.  Yep.  Fifty-eight percent of students got this one right.  Hello, F.

[Edit: I graded a second class.  They scored 86 percent on this problem.  Six out of 7 got it right.  Maybe the first class was unlucky?  Overweighted with dumb ones?  Not sure.]

What did the other 42 percent of students do?  They added the numbers.  They subtracted them.  They put them on the wrong lines.  They put them side by side on the top line.  Or they left the question blank.

To be fair, I have failed at these common sense questions too.  In high school, I got handed a "test."  At the top, it read:

Instruction: Read all of the problems before doing any work.

There were about 20 problems.  Number 1 required me to solve 6 x 8 + 6 - 18 / 3 * 21 without a calculator.  Number 2 was similar.  Then the latter problems got progressively harder.  I marched right down the page, answering them all . . . until I reached the final problem, which read:

20.  Do not answer any of these questions.  Just write your name at the top of the page and hand it in.

Oh . . . right.  I guess I wouldn't feel like such a doofus if I had bothered to follow instructions.

Oops.

3 comments:

  1. Fifty-eight percent of students got this one right.

    Amazing. Do the students who got it right correlate with anything? In other words, do the smart students and the dumb students miss it and the ones in the middle get it right? Or, do mostly the smart students answer correctly (for example)?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great question. With the super easy questions--like this one--and the hardest questions, the smartest students and the weakest ones tend to do best. The B-to-D students tend to do slightly worse.

    The B-to-D students catch up on the intermediate questions, where the bad students suffer.

    Figuring out why the smart students get this common-sense question right is easy to understand. They understood it.

    But the weakest students getting it right? How could that be? My guess is that the middle-of-the-road students have learned some of the material, but not the tricky exceptions. So they choose the red-herring answer and tend to be wrong the most often.

    The weakest students haven't bothered to learn the basic material, so they don't recognize the red herring. Instead, they just guess at random . . . and end up doing better than the C students.

    As for this problem, I can't tell you why the weakest and the smartest students did the best. I don't see any red herrings here.

    Maybe the intermediate students sense a trap? Maybe they think, "It can't be this easy!"

    The weaker students are just glad for a gimme.

    Just speculation on my part.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Edited my post after grading a second class, which did much, much better. 86% correct on that problem.

    ReplyDelete