The Midterm Examination
My Dad gave me lots of good advice, and some terrible. (an example of terrible advice was to “make friends with people who know how to fix things, cause then they can help you out.” This mercenary approach to friendship has never sat well with me and so I abandoned it years ago. Alas, now I have to call a plumber when my toilet runs). An example of great advice was right before I left suburban New Jersey for suburban Michigan (oddly enough, they looked and felt exactly the same!): “if it’s important to the professor, then it will probably be important on the exam.” True, Dad, but only in good classes from wise professors. I had a class or two where the course exams did not match the course material, and nothing enraged students more.
Exam writing is like writing and evaluating writing: clarity and consistency are key. Each question and topic should connect to material we focused upon either in lecture, discussion, or the reading. A cardinal sin of teaching is to have examinations that do not reflect the main body of work.
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| Unless panic will make you study more – then panic. |
So from day one, my students know what’s important to me and the exam reflects the main points. First, it’s critical that they read and be familiar with the textbook. For years I assigned one and could never think of an effective way to test it (except for reading quizzes, which bored me and them). Hist offers a great way to test: 50% of the exam asks a question directly from “the reasons why” sections. Each chapter has a short insert addressing a major problem from the age. One Gilded Age chapter, for instance, asks why so many Europeans immigrated to the United States during the time and offers four main reasons. For my exam, students must present the main reasons and then fill each one in with details from lecture, the textbook, and Major Problems. The E student won’t know the reasons; the D student will know them, but little else. The C student will have one example for each; the B student will have two or three; and the A student will fill that blue book up with example after example after example for each main point. This way, I’m forcing them to take the textbook serious and I can differentiate among them.
Second, it’s important to me that students read and know the Major Problems documents. Since their essays force them to quote directly from the documents, the exam focuses on the broad points. And for this, I merely test the main points of the documents, which are encapsulated by the document titles. The titles are some of the best, and easily overlooked parts of Major Problems, for they distill the main points for students. A question might be, “Whom did Reconstruction poet Francis Miles Finch mourn and celebrate in his 1867 poem “The Blue and the Gray”? The answer would be “Soldiers” as nicely and clearly stated on the poem’s title. I know what you’re thinking: this can be learned from rote memorization and students will forget it after the exam or the semester. Maybe, but maybe some of it will stick. Also, since I ask a set of verbatim questions from this exam on the next one, I force them to learn the answers. They’ll know that Jane Addams was in charge of Hull House … they’ll know it for Jeopardy, they’ll know it playing Trivial Pursuit, they’ll know it when they’re child takes U.S. history. We may not like memorization and we may know that everything can be found on google, but if you don’t know to search for “Hull House” or for “Jane Addams” than you may never know why she’s so important. And hell, I’ve got to have some measure to grade that is somewhat “objective.”
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| Who advocated “civic housekeeping” in 1906? Oh, I know: Jane Addams |
And here is what I do not do: I do not give out a study sheet with key words, concepts, and ideas. Students can easily figure out those out from the textbook and from lecture Powerpoints (which I also do not distribute). I found that when I gave out a study sheet, I was bound to ask questions from it and was doing too much of the work that students should be doing (filtering which information is most important); I also found that when I gave my students the PowerPoints, attendance dropped dramatically (but then students had no idea why there was an image of Cheaper by the Dozen on the slideshow). I’m not saying that it’s wrong to give test preparation sheets or to furnish students with the slide shows. But at some point I asked myself, what’s their responsibility and what’s mine? I determined that it is the students’ responsibility to show up to class, take notes effectively on lectures and the textbooks, and determine which material to study. The responsibility of the professor is to be clear with what will be tested and how it will be evaluated. Good luck, History 110 super scholars, you’re going to need it!
This is the first time I’ve taught the second half of the survey. The midterm I’m giving tomorrow is in two parts.
Part 1 is a series of short-answer questions (fill in the blank, multiple choice, etc.) drawn exclusively from the pages we’ve read in Foner’s “Give Me Liberty!” This is meant to ensure that the students know at least _some_ of the key names, events, laws, etc. I’ve told them to revisit their reading quizzes and the outlines/notes from my lectures to determine what I find important in Foner’s text.
Part 2 is a series of seven essay questions, of which the students choose five to answer in paragraph-long responses in their Blue Books. Here I have encouraged them to make use of material discussed in lecture (which is often drawn from complementary sources and not found in Foner). The best answers, as I’ve told them, will outline a theme or development that was threaded through multiple lectures. It’s a chance for them to show they can think through history, not just spit back memorized answers.
To emphasize that memorization isn’t everything, I’ve included on the exam’s final page an alphabetical “index” to our semester listing all of the key terms we’ve discussed to date. They’re welcome to pore over the list in order to help construct their arguments for Part 2. (I assume the intrepid among them will check their answers to Part 1 against the list, too.) Those who already know what they want to say will find some of the terms they need to say it. Those who don’t know how to answer the question will likely not be aided by the two-column list of 75 or so names and phrases, not least because it includes terms irrelevant to the questions I’ve asked.
The midterm is worth only 20% of the semester’s grade, less than the cumulative grade for the (random, but near weekly) reading quizzes. I hope that this two-part structure allows for the different ways students prefer to express their knowledge. I hope, too, that as we move forward the students will think both about individual details and synthetically about developments across time.
Brian
Ed,Thanks for your reflections on this. I’m with you on the no study guide approach, especially since my exams focus on what I have emphasized in class or have pointed out as significant in the reading. My standard response when someone asks if I will hand out a study guide (which someone always does) is to say “I already have. . . . it’s called a syllabus.”
I did have a first this quarter: last week a student sent me a study guide she created for herself and asked me to look it over to make sure she had adequately covered everything she had to know. The student was a freshman. I don’t often teach first-quarter freshman, but I am getting the sense that learning how to process and filter information without support in the form of study guides, review sessions, summary sheets, etc. is a big part of the transition from high school to college.
Happy grading!
I tried to add this comment earlier, but reloading the site timed out.
PS – I also want to say thank you for starting this site. Discussion of issues pertaining to teaching the survey, however informal, are very helpful, especially at a moment when teaching support is increasingly scarce. I have enjoyed reading both posts and comments as I’ve worked on the structure of my course and individual lectures.
I make my students create the study guide. In every class I teach that has an exam with IDs, every student is responsible for coming up with 2 IDs and sending them to me. All I do is compile them and distribute them. They may miss a couple that I think would be important and include ones that I think are less important, but it doesn’t really matter. I tell them the IDs will be from the study guide they generate and they study from it (most of them, anyways). They think I’m helping them when in fact they’re doing the work. I also have them write exam questions–which is helpful n part because it shows them the challenge of writing a good, answerable question.
That said, I’m also of the belief that one should be able to tell students the final exam questions on day 1 since a good exam question captures the major questions and issues of a course. Again, they see it as helpful, I see it as obvious/transparent. And they still have to read, study, and learn to do well. Everyone wins.
I completely agree Rachel – and I like your idea of having them develop the questions, study guide, etc. It is the case when students know the questions, they learn the material. What better motivation. For instance, I love Reconstruction and let my students know I want them to learn a lot about it … and wink, wink, there will be big questions on the exam about Reconstruction. I find that way, students really do learn a lot about Reconstruction!
Professor Blum, I just want to say thank you! From a students perspective, so many teacher’s, like you said, take the “Gotcha” approach. We, as students, spend hours on end studying the material that we learn in class, hand cramps after hand cramp trying to put 2 months of material on note cards. It really does help to know, not necessarily specifics about the test, but what you advise us to study, and knowing that it actually is what we should be studying. It’s always so disheartening when you know you have prepared so hard for a test and your confidence is at an all time high as you enter on test day, then when you sit down and read the first two questions you are already second guessing yourself. Like you said today in class, I think it is more effective to study/memorize a small range of information rather than a large range of information that we barely know.
So again, thank you!
Professor Blum, upon finding the Reasons Why section you described, I am curious on what examples you are looking for to support the four main reasons of the essay. All four reasons refer to issues that take place in Europe. Just looking for some clarification on this topic. Thanks for the hints on the essay!
S. Pizzo (Hist 110)
Hey gang, be sure to thank Rachel’s blog post; it was the inspiration; for the wink, wink, I’d pay a lot of attention to chapter 16 on Reconstruction.
Professor Blum,
I definitely agree with R. Rodriguez! I know many of us students want to say thank you for helping us prepare for this midterm. Being a freshman, I did not know what ways to approach studying for this exam and after today’s class, you helped all of your students out; especially us freshmen. With your advice for what to study, I feel like I can prepare more for this midterm. But since we know what sections and topics we are going to be tested on, we can memorize a smaller amount of information rather than everything and barely understand it.
Thank you again for helping all of us students out! Have a safe trip!
I do like the idea that you do not put PowerPoint’s on blackboard because it rewards does students that come every time to class and punish those that don’t showed up. I disagree with your argument that you should not give out study guides, for your 101 class; come on they are just freshmen’s. I kind of feel that is okay for students to get a break on their first year, but then after that, they should be ready for anything. And I argue that the problem with not giving study guides is that sometimes we as freshmen’s don’t know how to study. I felt that when you’re freshmen you are trying different things to learn how to study, like note cards, study keywords, and other things. Study guide gives the opportunity to find different approaches to studying for an exam. I don’t know maybe I just want things the easier way, but I am just going on by my experiences.