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Richard M. Felder
North Carolina State University |
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In Embracing Contraries, Peter Elbow (1986) notes
that faculty members have two conflicting functions—gatekeeper and
coach. As gatekeepers, we set and maintain high standards to assure that
our students are qualified to enter the community of professional
practice by the time they graduate, and as coaches we do everything in
our power to help them meet and surpass those standards. Examinations
are at the heart of both functions. By making our tests comprehensive
and rigorous we fulfill the gatekeeper role, and by doing our best to
prepare our students for them and ensuring that they are fairly graded,
we satisfy our mission as coaches. The suggestions given in this paper
are intended to help us serve well in both capacities. Clearly, adopting
them can take time, but it is hard to imagine an expenditure of time
more important to our students, their future employers, and the
professions they will serve. |
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It’s the middle of December. A colleague of yours
who teaches mechanics has just gotten the tabulations of his
end-of-course student evaluations and he’s steaming! His students
clearly hated his course, giving him the lowest ratings received by any
instructor in the department. He consoles himself by grumbling that
student evaluations are just popularity contests and that even though
his students don’t appreciate him now, in a few years they’ll realize
that he really did them a favor by maintaining high standards.
He’s probably kidding himself. Although bashing student ratings is a
popular faculty sport, several thousand research studies have shown that
student ratings are remarkably consistent with retrospective senior and
alumni ratings, peer ratings, and every other form of teaching
evaluation used in higher education (Cashin 1988; Cashin 1995; Felder
1992). While there are always exceptions, teaching rated by most
students as excellent usually is excellent, and teaching rated as
atrocious usually is atrocious.
If your colleague decided to take a hard objective look at those
evaluations instead of dismissing them out of hand, there is a good
chance that he would find that his examinations play a major role in the
students’ complaints. Not the difficulty of the exams per se: the
research also shows that the highest evaluations tend to go to some of
the more demanding teachers, not the ones who hand out A’s for mediocre
work (Felder 1992). With the exception of outright sadistic behavior,
what students hate more than anything else are examinations that they
perceive as unfair. Tests that fall into this category have any of the
following features: (1) problems on content not covered in lectures or
homework assignments; (2) problems the students consider tricky, with
unfamiliar twists that must be worked out on the spur of the moment; (3)
excessive length, so that only the best students can finish in the
allotted time; (4) excessively harsh grading, with little distinction
being made between major conceptual errors and minor calculation
mistakes; (5) inconsistent grading, so that two students who make the
identical mistake lose different points. Most students can deal with
tests that they fail because they don’t understand the material or
didn’t study hard enough; however, if they understand but do poorly
anyway for any of those five reasons, they feel cheated. Their feeling
is not unjustified.
If you teach a course in a quantitative discipline, there are several
specific things you can do to minimize your students’ perception that
you are dealing with them unfairly on examinations.
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