An exam that went badly wrong

[Hegemony]

I just gave an exam that went badly wrong.  Out of 40 students, 2 got an A.  The highest score among the rest was a B-.  Quite a common score was something like 40/100.

This has been an affable, talkative, fun group of students, but I've noticed that the students have started to slack off in reading the required texts.  We had two easy texts, one day each, and a number of students missed class, so I think they skipped those texts. Then we had a harder text that covered six hours of class time all told. I called on people at random and at least ten of them admitted that they hadn't read the text.  Imagine a cloud of irritation rising over my head.

The exam covered only the two easy texts and the one harder, longer text.

So a number of these students have failed the exam because I think they simply never read the texts.

At the same time, I think the exam may have been too hard.  I put a number of questions on designed to catch students who had merely listened to discussion in class, so they couldn't slide by just by hearing about the text.  So I mentioned some important points that hadn't been discussed in class.  Unfortunately, a lot of the students who had read it missed those too.

It galls me that the students didn't even care enough to cheat!  The "harder" text is a frequently taught classic — think "To Kill A Mockingbird." There are dozens of summaries online.  They didn't even bother to read the summaries!  I asked them a few short-answer questions and they bombed the simplest things.  "What job does Atticus Finch have?" "He is a salesman."  "What is the central conflict in the novel?" "He doesn't want his daughter to go to the prom."

So — lower the boom on these miscreants?  And how to do so without just failing most of the students, including the ones who did the reading but missed a lot of details?

[research_prof]

You might want to discuss that with your department chair. I know quite a few people that when they started at a new university, they did not have realistic expectations from the students. Talking to your chair might help you better understand what to expect from the students there. Grading students on a curve would do the job of having a grade distribution (you can also say so to the students, so that they know eventually they might get a better grade than what they expect), but the major issue I see based on your description is that most of the students are supposed to fail the class based on their performance so far. I know you may be doing your job fine, but still the students might not be willing to spend time to study. However, failing most of the students will look bad on you at the end.

That's why I would suggest that you talk to a few trusted senior colleagues or the chair of your department too if you trust him.

[Hegemony]

I *am* the senior colleague.  I've been teaching at this university for literally 30 years, and there is only one person in my department who's been here longer than I have.  This is the first time I've had so many students fail to read the text, and the first time I've had such bad exam results across the board.  I'm hearing similar complaints from others here and elsewhere — the practice of not reading the text seems to have spiralled out of control in the last few years.  (I did have one student actually tell me, "I don't like to read, so I don't want to do much of it in this class."  I said, "A literature class might not be the right class for you."  Q.E.D.)

[research_prof]

I *am* the senior colleague.  I've been teaching at this university for literally 30 years, and there is only one person in my department who's been here longer than I have.  This is the first time I've had so many students fail to read the text, and the first time I've had such bad exam results across the board.  I'm hearing similar complaints from others here and elsewhere — the practice of not reading the text seems to have spiralled out of control in the last few years.  (I did have one student actually tell me, "I don't like to read, so I don't want to do much of it in this class."  I said, "A literature class might not be the right class for you."  Q.E.D.)

Oops... thanks for the clarification. :-) I suppose then if you have been at your university for like 30 years and you are still asking about that on the forum, the situation must be serious.

Honestly, I do not know what to say. If every year the difficulty of your exams is roughly the same and this year students blew it, well... S@@t happens.. I think you should give them grades that you feel are fair. You have 30 years of experience in evaluating students, I am pretty sure you know what grade a student deserves based on their performance.

[wwwdotcom]

Lower the boom. Unless you have some evidence that your exam was overly difficult (and I don't think low scores is evidence alone), I favor giving them the grade they earned. At some point they need a consequence for not reading the required texts in a literature corse, no less.

[wellfleet]

I've taught many, many literature courses and I feel Hegemony's pain. I would probably do two things: 1) lower the boom, including a "wow, I'm really surprised and sad" class moment, and 2) provide a partial get-out-of-jail grade adjustment for students who do some sort of project that showed that they had read the texts *now* that was also very painless for me to assess. I might also start planning more "let's all read" activities in my classes, ranging from helping students get better at reading aloud in front of others (a skill most of them totally, totally lack) to structured close reading practice to hosting evening poetry slams to asking my students to volunteer to help local school kids or young library patrons practice reading. The students didn't get into this horrid situation entirely on their own, and they might well need help getting out of it.

If the campus is losing a culture of reading literature, the English department better be out there on the front lines.

[polly_mer]

If the campus is losing a culture of reading literature, the English department better be out there on the front lines.

This.  If you've been there for 30 years and the situation is not a one-time oddity with one section, then starting the discussion on what to do in English and/or general education at large may be the best option.  I'm stunned that so many students didn't even bother to read readily available synopses.  That's not a good sign at all.

[RatGuy]

I have seen this on a midterm exam, and I indeed lowered the boom. Then I responded in class that the grades weren't up to previous averages, and it makes me think that students aren't reading. I then tell them group work and quizzes will follow if it doesn't improve. I also remind them that the final is constructed in such a way to result in an inverse bell curve -- easy As for the readers, Fs for the non-readers. I've seen that that's a fairly effective course corrective.

But for a final exam? That's tough. I think I'd give them the grades they earned, but find ways to motivate them more in the future. After all, sometimes you just get a bum class.

[dr_codex]

I gave a midterm like this, in the Spring. Lots of A's, but then LOTS of F's. I even gave a 10% bump to everybody, to ensure that the curve wasn't worse.

I wasn't asking plot questions, but I was asking basic literary term questions. My office-mate had a similar experience, with students not being able to define "epic", even when having it defined in class, reviewed before the test, and even asked in exactly the same way when office-mate insisted that they all retake the midterm.

The reading is an issue, absolutely. But I find the "did you actually read this?" questions so demeaning, for all of us. Especially if they are things that could be answered with Sparknotes. Maybe I just have to get over that.

[aside]

All things being roughly equal from semester to semester and the exam being a good one, I would assign them the grades they earned.  There have been times when I realized the exam was too difficult or questions were somehow vague or misleading to the point the students were not sure what I wanted.  In those cases, I would adjust.  But not if I knew the test was good and a significant number of students were not doing the work.

[Antiphon1]

At this point in the semester, I'd assume extreme spring semester fatigue.  Perhaps a rewrite of one section with a maximum grade increase of one letter grade.  Not to be too harsh, but sometimes this kind of washout is an excellent teaching/learning opportunity.  Offering a bit of mercy gives the students some hope with out relieving them of responsibility for inaction.   

[Parasaurolophus]

My commiserations. I just gave my summer class their first test, and although I'm only halfway done grading them, my results look pretty much the same as yours. My test was definitely very, very easy, though. I don't think I could have made it any easier. And my chair did warn me to expect a failure rate of >50%.

I'm wrestling with what to do about it, and wondering whether there's anything I can do that will prove effective. I'll have to have The Talk at the end of class, of course, and I think I'll graph their results for them so that they can see the magnitude of the problem. But beyond that, I'm at a bit of a loss.

The results indicate to me that not only are they not doing any of the reading, but they don't actually understand most of what's going on in class. That's not entirely surprising, given the language barrier and their total lack of participation (which means that they're not spending any time applying the concepts I'm teaching), but I'm struggling to figure out how to reach them. Every activity I've tried so far--Socratic method,  group-based discussions, reflections, structured group work, games--has been an exhausting exercise in pulling teeth amidst a determined and stony silence. I just don't know what the key is. Maybe I need to ask them?

Surprisingly, their case study presentations have been pretty good. I'm re-tooling this week to try to use those as more of a starting point, but my hopes aren't especially high. I'm on the verge of bringing in a fish bowl filled with their names, and cold-calling over and over and over until they get the hang of things.

[ergative]

When this sort of thing happened to me in the past, I offered students the opportunity to correct their exam for half credit back. This tends to be extremely popular, although it usually prompts requests to apply the same boon to the final.

One year I also made a really, really hard study guide (much harder than the actual final exam) and the final homework assignment was to answer x (forget how many) questions from the study guide.

[ohnoes]

It seems to me that the exam - as a means to determine student learning - worked. 

The same thing happened to one of my classes with the 'objective' portion of my final.  Students mistakenly believed that coming to class, participating, and having textbooks would be sufficient.  While they scored far better on the application portion of the exam, it was clear that their efforts were focused on strands that, for numerous reasons were really narrow.

I checked the test items, and there were only a few that caused problems for everyone.  After adjusting for these, I let the grades stand.

[the_geneticist]

I just gave an exam that went badly wrong.  Out of 40 students, 2 got an A.  The highest score among the rest was a B-.  Quite a common score was something like 40/100.

This has been an affable, talkative, fun group of students, but I've noticed that the students have started to slack off in reading the required texts.  We had two easy texts, one day each, and a number of students missed class, so I think they skipped those texts. Then we had a harder text that covered six hours of class time all told. I called on people at random and at least ten of them admitted that they hadn't read the text.  Imagine a cloud of irritation rising over my head.

The exam covered only the two easy texts and the one harder, longer text.

So a number of these students have failed the exam because I think they simply never read the texts.

At the same time, I think the exam may have been too hard.  I put a number of questions on designed to catch students who had merely listened to discussion in class, so they couldn't slide by just by hearing about the text.  So I mentioned some important points that hadn't been discussed in class.  Unfortunately, a lot of the students who had read it missed those too.

It galls me that the students didn't even care enough to cheat!  The "harder" text is a frequently taught classic — think "To Kill A Mockingbird." There are dozens of summaries online.  They didn't even bother to read the summaries!  I asked them a few short-answer questions and they bombed the simplest things.  "What job does Atticus Finch have?" "He is a salesman."  "What is the central conflict in the novel?" "He doesn't want his daughter to go to the prom."

So — lower the boom on these miscreants?  And how to do so without just failing most of the students, including the ones who did the reading but missed a lot of details?

Argh!  I feel your pain.  Maybe toss out a few of the "overly hard" questions, the ones that even the best students struggled with.  Other than that, I'd lower the boom.  The fact that they are fun and talkative doesn't mean that are excused from reading in a literature class.  Maybe, just maybe, offer a way for them to earn back some of the points.