Re: A course where no one ever gets an A Originally Posted by nurse educate 
I assume this is a not a school where there is team teaching? What is the schools policy on reviewing exams, going over item analyses, etc? Do you use a test bank? Is there any peer reviewing going on? Where I teach, we are all in each other business it seems, which I don't think is such a terrible thing. It's a small school, and when students complain, or we see that too many people are not doing well, we scrutinize the situation.
I do find it a bit odd, I must say. While I do agree that the majoruty of students should not be getting As in classes, there does need to be a distribution of grades. My students hate my reply when they aske me how they did on an exam (before grades are posted): they say, in unison "It was a nice curve"
This particular course is team taught. One of the instructors (the team changed in Spring 09) is brand new to teaching, the other has about 1 1/2 years of didactic under her belt. Our policy is to do an in-class review of exams with students (I'm not sure that is what you mean), giving rationales, etc. We do have a Scantron which is capable of giving a detailed item analysis. It is my opinion that the members of this team don't entirely understand the meaning of the KR20, point bi-serials, p-value, etc. I'm not sure how my help would be received....I recently passed the CNE (Sept 08, only one on our faculty) and I don't want to be seen as a "know it all".
Test banks are used by, I'd say, most faculty. I use them myself, but they are pretty heavily edited, because, frankly, most straight-up test banks are awful. I have my own personal test bank of questions (tried & true.....good analysis) that I have collected over the years. I wouldn't be surprised at all if this team used exactly the same tests handed down to them from the previous team. I do not team teach (everyone avoids OB, like the plague).
Peer review is something I really would like to see used where I work. We've had a recent faculty turnover of about 25%, and I think this could be very productive. The only other faculty member who has ever darkened the door of my classroom is our division chair! Then again, I've not observed other faculty teaching myself, but would welcome the opportunity to be reviewed (and to review).
A's are definitely NOT easy to come by in our program, but it just seems that semester after semester, this course has no A's at all; just...strange.
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