Instructors...solve this mystery for me..<please>

castens · Jun 22, 2007

It's not that they don't want you to have the information on the exam... it's that there's a lot of money that can be made by selling exam copies online. A lot of money -- like hundreds of thousands of dollars. For that matter a lot of money has been made by frats and soroities by keeping many years worth of exams on file and using them to cheat in later years.

It ain't you... it's the idiots before you.

justme1972 · Jun 22, 2007

It's not that they don't want you to have the information on the exam... it's that there's a lot of money that can be made by selling exam copies online. A lot of money -- like hundreds of thousands of dollars. For that matter a lot of money has been made by frats and soroities by keeping many years worth of exams on file and using them to cheat in later years.
It ain't you... it's the idiots before you.

Hey, thanks for the kind reply...and I can understand about the "test bank" being lucrative.

Most students, like me, think, "Well, why don't they just make a different test for each semester, how hard can that be?"

.....or is it more difficult than I think it is and that is why alot of instructors don't?

I promise I'm not getting into instructor-bashing...I really, really want to understand the "other" point of view.

castens · Jun 22, 2007

It IS difficult making tests, as I'm sure you've discovered when you've had a bad test. Questions have to be valid. Actually it's not necessarily the "ABCD" questions that are hard but when you have a good essay question or case study or critical thinking question, it's question death if that gets out.

Not only that, but from a nursing education standpoint, the instructors have a lot to do besides think of test questions. There are care plans and papers to read, current research and literature that needs to be reviewed (or written/conducted), and clinicals that have to be proctored. Once you have a good and valid test, a lot of free time is cleared up if you don't have to recreate it every semester.

llg, PhD, RN · Jun 22, 2007

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Most students, like me, think, "Well, why don't they just make a different test for each semester, how hard can that be?"
.....or is it more difficult than I think it is and that is why alot of instructors don't?
QUOTE]
Yes ... I is extremely difficult to write good test questions. A good question not only has to be based on information provided by either the text or the lecture ... it also has to discriminate well. In other words, the best students need to be able to answer it correctly while the worst students can not. If the question is so simple that everyone can answer it, it's only use is to show that the students know the basic material. If the question is so difficult that very few people get it right, then it only identifies the very top students and the students that made a lucky guess. A really great question is answerable by the people who know the material well, but is really tough for those who don't know the material well -- so that the grades reflect the students' actual level of performance and not just luck. That is super-difficult to achieve. Good test questions are a valuable commodity in the education world that need to be diligently guarded.
Also, faculty members often don't want to get bogged down in relatively minor details while the "big picture" is going unnoticed. That often happens when people start dissecting the wording of particular questions.
In answer to the comment:
"Things like this irritate me, because isn't that like...HIS ENTIRE JOB?"
No, it may actually be a very small part of the instructor's job. College faculty have many different responsibities in addition to teaching classes. For many instructors, their teaching duties represent a very small portion of the obligations to the university and teaching may make up a very small portion of his job evaluation and criteria for tenure and promotion.
Faculty members are expected to be guardians and developer of the knowledge base -- expected to conduct research, publish articles and books, speak at conferences, etc. For many, that it the largest component of their role. They are also expected to advise both undergraduate and graduate students and supervise their research and other academic work. Faculty are also expected to serve on several committees that are necessary to keep the school running, such as the applications committee, the evaluations committee, the tenure committee, search committees for various positions, comunity relations committee, etc. There is a long list of committeess.
The actual teaching of classes is just one (sometimes small) component of their role.

castens · Jun 22, 2007

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Faculty members are expected to be guardians and developer of the knowledge base -- expected to conduct research, publish articles and books, speak at conferences, etc. For many, that it the largest component of their role. They are also expected to advise both undergraduate and graduate students and supervise their research and other academic work. Faculty are also expected to serve on several committees that are necessary to keep the school running, such as the applications committee, the evaluations committee, the tenure committee, search committees for various positions, comunity relations committee, etc. There is a long list of committeess.
The actual teaching of classes is just one (sometimes small) component of their role.
This is a great point - much better than I said previously. A great misconception is that academia exists to teach. Rather, academia exists to store knowledge. While teaching and professional training are a part of that, they are not the biggest parts.

smk1, LPN · Jun 22, 2007

Everyone makes mistakes, but if I can show you in my required reading material that I paid 500 dollars for why the coded answer is incorrect according to the text, in most cases points back should be awarded. Some teachers are good about this, others will not give you points back even if it is clear that their coded answer is way off base according to the texts. That is frustrating. Some times I long for the days of the dreaded essay tests. At least then if there is some ambiguity in the question you can show off your thorough understanding of the material by answering the question and encompassing all the needed information. But alas, the NCLEX is not an essay test so we need to deal with multiple choice and those awful pick all that apply questions.

justme1972 · Jun 22, 2007

I want to thank EVERYONE for a really great insightful responses.

I just didn't think of things that way, how difficult a test must be to come up with, and when you know you have a good one, you want to make sure that you get it back.

Thanks again!

island40 · Jul 1, 2007

I instruct nursing students at a CC and it is tough. Students literally fight for every point and can rip and instructor to shreds over thier grades. Teaching is also a customer service industry and in some facilities (most CC) the customer is the student and they have the power to get a teacher fired (or asked not to return next fall) with negative feedback on testing, availability.... The instructor must be familiar with the text being used no matter when it was changed, perform departmental duties, make tests, make lesson plans (not the old fashioned ones where you lecture but PowerPoint, integrated, interactive and interesting to the Y generation performances), advise students and continue their education as well as work on the classes specific to gaining and retaining the ability to teach under the department of education. All of this for $42,000 a year! (I live in IA it might be higher or lower where you live)

I love to teach. I have my MSN in Nursing Education. I am not leaving but many are.

justme1972 · Jul 1, 2007

It's odd that I posted this thread...I just finished last week an AP I class, and I'm starting AP II tomorrow (Monday).

Our professor used PP for lecture, but the problem is he didn't have a copy of our textbook (he was using one from a couple of editions back). The terms didn't match our book, neither did the illustrations. I asked for a copy of this but he wouldn't send it to me for whatever reason.

I ended up with a B in the class, and I really should have got an A.

On every exam..he threw out at least 3 questions...because even HE had the wrong answer. I have never seen a professor that had this many exam errors in my entire educational career, but it wasn't a mystery as to why.

He admitted that he was often still "working" on the exam as late as 45 minutes prior to us taking it. (He didn't use an exam bank). How in the world can he come up with a valid test rushing through it?

When we had a "review" for an exam, he just gave us a "cliffnote" of his PP...he never prioritized anything. He also, never wrote down anything he told us, so on about every other exam, he would tell us that we had to know EXTREMELY complex charts (that would take hours to memorize, and even if you didn't sleep, you couldn't do it in a day), the DAY BEFORE the exam...and these would be the same charts that he told us to disregard the details on a few days before. If we reminded him of the descrepancy, he would always deny it.

I even went to him at the end of the first week of class (I took this Summer I term over the course of 5 weeks) and asked for assistance in prioritizing the material so I could get the "big picture". His advice? "The book"....as if I wasn't reading it already...which I was...along with the CD that came with it, his notes, looking up additional information on the internet, I was making note cards, re-writing things in my own words, etc...my point was...I was spending 3x as long preparing for an exam as some of my classmates that were getting higher scores and wanted to know why.

Am I wrong...or do should people like this not work in education?

My philosophy on the class was this: Just because he didn't care about teaching a quality class, doesn't mean I didn't care about taking one.

vickynurse · Jul 2, 2007

Oh, my. This thread just goes to show that whatever an instructor does, s/he will be torn to shreds by students who didn't get the grade they "deserved" on the exam. This is a very challenging high wire to walk. I always make one or two adjustments just so students will feel that I'm flexible. This prevents a lot of discord and doesn't affect my board results. In the end every question is evaluated by an item analysis and that is what the adjustments are based upon.

I do remind students that they will not be able to negotiated the NCLEX questions. However, in reality, my exam questions probably don't have the reliability and validity of those test items. So I don't mind making an adjustment here and there.

Best wishes to all of you hard working faculty out there!

justme1972 · Jul 3, 2007

Oh, my. This thread just goes to show that whatever an instructor does, s/he will be torn to shreds by students who didn't get the grade they "deserved" on the exam. This is a very challenging high wire to walk. I always make one or two adjustments just so students will feel that I'm flexible. This prevents a lot of discord and doesn't affect my board results. In the end every question is evaluated by an item analysis and that is what the adjustments are based upon.
I do remind students that they will not be able to negotiated the NCLEX questions. However, in reality, my exam questions probably don't have the reliability and validity of those test items. So I don't mind making an adjustment here and there.
Best wishes to all of you hard working faculty out there!

In all due respect...my post wasn't to "rip an instructor to shreds" because I didn't get the grade I "deserved".

It was a valid question...what do YOU think of an instructor that throws exams together (by his own admission...not my assumption), an hour before the exam is to be given, and because of this, they contained so many errors that students would often have to go up to him in the middle of the exam because the correct answer didn't appear on the exam....and that is just the errors we were able to catch. How valid do you think an exam is that is constructed in an hour or so?

I'm not talking about one of those "best" answer-type questions...a cut-and-dry question to where only one answer was possible and was missing...on EVERY exam we had, it contained at least 2 of these.

As I'm reading here, and have learned that good instructors put a significant amount of time into exams to make sure they are valid, which more than answered my question (and I COMPLETELY agreed) of why some exams are not given back to students...so they aren't sold or show up on the internet somewhere.

If GOOD instructors are willing to put in that kind of time to prepare for lecture...what do GOOD instructors think of those that don't care to?

My point of my last post...was that a few points worth of errors on an exam, can make the difference between an entire letter grade for a student.

Out of 29 students...4 had A's...all 4 students that got an A were from a high school (as Freshman) of where they had a course of study to prepare students for medical fields and could take Anatomy and Physiology (at their high school) in place of two years of an advanced science.

So out of all of the students that had never had Anatomy and Physiology before, I actually had the highest grade, and we had 3 other students that had completed Biology and Chemistry degrees in our class that were applying to Pharmacy school.