Happy Exam Week, everyone!

I’ve been trying to get out from this pile of papers all week, so that I can be buried in blue books over the next few days.  This time of the semester is so intense for all of us, faculty and students, as we stand at the end of the course and try to make sense of what held it all together and what was actually learned.

I am once again running my women’s seminary assignment, where I ask my women’s history students to design a 19^th century school that would educate young women to fulfill the ideal roles of the time.  Once again I’m really happy to see the creativity of my students come out in these papers even while they show me everything that they’ve learned, drawing together material from throughout the second half of the semester.

Exam writing brings up these issues for me.  How do I design a test that gets them to show me that they’ve learned what I actually want them to learn?  This year I’ve had one new section to the exams that I’ve been pretty happy with.  Well, not entirely new, but shifted from what I’ve done before.  Back when I was TAing, I had a professor include a quotation ID section on the exam.  Students were given a passage from a primary source reading and had to identify the author, approximate date, and significance.  The passages seemed pretty obvious choices if you’d been paying attention, and students got to show some of their skills at analytical reading.  I thought this was great.

Last year, I included a quotation ID section on my exam.  My students hated it and thought that it was totally weird.  They didn’t really get what I wanted them to do and stressed out a lot about how they would be able to identify particular readings, even while I promised them that they would be very identifiable and hinted heavily that they would probably be the passages that we had spent a lot of class time talking about.  They actually did pretty well on that part of the exam, but the level of stress seemed unnecessary to me.  Did I really care if they knew that “whatever it is morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a woman to do” is Angelina Grimké?  Maybe not.  (Actually, probably yes I do.)  What I really care about is that they know why she said that and why it mattered.  So this year, I’ve adjusted that section of the exam.

Now, this is the “primary source analysis” section on the test.  I give them the attribution for all the quotes.  They can choose 4 out of 6 to discuss.  But they have to tell me why the quote matters and what it has to do with our class as a whole.  They did a great job with this on the midterm, and I’m hoping that they rock it again on the final exam.  What I like about this part of the exam is not only that it drives home the importance of doing the reading (which it does), or that it shows me that they can connect the readings to the lecture (which it does), but most importantly, that it shows me—and them—that they are able to take a passage of 18^th or 19^th century text and make sense of it.  This part of the exam actually tests them on critical reading, that skill that we all say that we want them to learn.  In the end, I don’t know how many of my students are going to remember Angelina Grimké or Catharine Beecher, though I hope that all of them do.  They are, though, going to have to read difficult passages and try to make sense of them.  So while the whole exam is trying to get at their critical thinking, I like that I have one part set aside where it is completely clear to them that this is what they’re being tested on, and this is what I hope they’ve learned.