Exams

(No pictures on this one; after all, what would the picture be? Me hunched over a desk?)

Well, the exams are over. The trouble with my exam was that I intended it to be easy. It turned out that my plan was anything but that.

My reasoning was simple, I teach an easy class (lets face it, the class is pure fluff), so I should have an easy exam. Using this as a guiding principle I thought about a way to evaluate them on something that they do well. The trouble is that I mistook, "claim to do well," for, "do well."

My plan was to use VOA Special English news and play a few one minute segments and have them summarize them. I have not used VOA special English in class because the students tell me that they all listen to both the Special English and the Regular English broadcasts, daily, in their dorm rooms. I had no real reason to disbelieve them.

I came to class about a week before the exam with some samples, four of them to be exact, in order to insure that there would be no problems. One thing I can say that helped was that this first trial class was a class of about six. It was a disaster, they were simply unable to tell me what the news stories were about. It was not a case of getting the details wrong; it was a case of being unable to give any summary whatsoever. We have been summarizing NPR stories all term so I thought that they were prepared for this considering that NPR is much faster; however, I have been walking them through the NPR stories. So, I walked them through the VOA stories too. My big problem is that by the time I realized that this was not going to work, I had already reported that this would be the format of my exam. In a sense, I was stuck.

(There are about fifty enrolled in this first class; but, it seems, about six who bother to come to class, and yes, you can hear the difference in their speech. I can talk to a student and, generally, tell if they cut class on a regular basis without even looking at the role. Keep in mind that a student who is cutting my class all term is also cutting other classes all term as well.

One thing I find interesting is a student that I often talk to, at this point. She told me that at the beginning of the year she was trying to decide if she would continue coming to class after the first week, I was so hard to understand; however, some of her roommates decided that they didn't have anything else to do and they would come to class so she made the decision to attend regularly also. She was very proud to tell me that she now understands me, and other English speakers, well and has been told that her English is now the best in her class. Very simply, it is. I hate to say it but the reason that her English has improved so much is that she made the decision to go to all of her classes, not just mine.)

By the second class I was doing test prep with I knew that the one class was not just a single problem, I had the makings of a disaster. My solution was to tell the students to be sure to bring the notes from the exam prep to the exam, that they would be useful beyond compare. Of course I recognized that this would turn my exam into little more than a roll call. That is okay because that is something I needed to do; to get an accurate roll of who was still in my class.

I graded pretty liberally, it was a 90% to just write what I said in class, that dropped to 85% if the student tried to copy me and managed to butcher it. The score rose to a 95% if the student wrote something original (indicating that they were listening) and they got 100% if they wrote something original and got it right.

I still had two that left me in a quandary. For review I had played four pieces. In the exam I played three (Lets face it; the election in Senegal was no more interesting for me than it was for them). I told them that if they were not sure about what they wrote then they should write about all three but that they only needed to write about two. I got two papers that had two summaries, direct copies of what I had written on the board as I reviewed the material, and one of the two was the one I did not play. It is one thing to cheat; it is another to be downright stupid about it.

So, my exams are done, my grades are turned in (which I am sure that all can guess by recent increase in output) and I am preparing for the summer.