"Group quizes"?!

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My wife is currently in the nursing program at a local college. They are doing something in her pediatriacs class right now which I've never heard of at the college level: group quizzes. This has got her completely disillusioned with the program and ready to quit, for reasons I'll now explain.

First, the term "quiz" is a misnomer for the way these are graded: there are to be 3 of them, and each is worth 10% of the final grade. Each "quiz" is only 10 questions, which makes each question worth one full point of her final grade for the class. I've never heard of such a heavy weighting on a "quiz".

Second, the group aspect: the class is broken into groups of three students each, assigned by the instructor. The group is supposed to arrive at a answer together, and all members of the group have to give the same answer.

I think this is absolutely appalling. It gives a tremendous disincentive to study, making poor students even less likely to study on the expectation that someone else will know the answers, and they are rewarded with a grade they didn't earn based on the performance of the high achieving students in the group. It also produces a environment not conducive to taking an exam - a noisy, chaotic room full of people talking and arguing about answers to the questions.

Besides potentially elevating underperforming students with grades they wouldn't have earned on their own, this system potentially hurts good students with grades lower than they would have earned on their own. This happened to my wife on the first of these group exams (I can't call them "quizzes" anymore with the absurd weight they are given): her two "teammates" disagreed with her on two of the answers, but as one them even admitted , they hadn't read the material from the book. My wife had studied it and knew the right answers, but since she was outvoted she got them wrong. That's two full points off her overall class average. She's furious, with good reason. She's always been a straight-A student, with one medically-related undergraduate degree in another area and many years of work experience already under her belt.

Has anyone else heard of this kind of group-exam scenario? Is this common in other nursing programs? I simply do not see how it achieves anything other than uniform mediocrity, while driving away high-achieving students. It certainly will not produce better nurses.

Would you spend your hard-earned money and time on a program if you knew your final grade was to be determined largely by committee vote, rather than by your own effort and intelligence?

Thought?

Thanks!

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She might benefit from assertiveness training if she's letting people who admit they haven't even read talk her out of what she knows are the right answers...

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She might benefit from assertiveness training if she's letting people who admit they haven't even read talk her out of what she knows are the right answers...

It isn't a matter of being assertive enough (trust me, if you met my wife, you'd know). It's the rules of the game: all must submit the same answer. What is she supposed to do? Get in a knock-down fight with them over it? In the context of a timed exam, there is only so much time to argue, and no available resources with which to support your position. It's not a matter of "being talked out of the right answers" - the answers are essentially decided by democratic vote. If two people agree on the wrong answer, the third person is screwed. End of story.

Since when is an exam of subject matter comprehension and knowledge retention supposed to be a fight over who is a bigger bully? Haven't you ever met 20-something year-olds who are simply positive that they're right, even as they admit they are lacking in relevant knowledge?

How is this sort of testing context useful to anyone, and how does it produce better nurses?

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Specializes in Gerontology, nursing education.

I've heard of group quizzes being used as a type of active learning, a way to encourage group interaction and learn to problem solve together. I think they COULD work, especially if they were not graded (that is, used as formative assessment, a way to gauge learning before a graded activity) or if the grade earned by the group counted for a very small percentage of the overall course grade. I think having these quizzes be worth 30% of the total grade defeats the purpose of what the group is supposed to accomplish because it puts too much pressure on some students and allows others to slide through with less effort. The focus gets put on the grade rather than the learning.

I don't think your wife should let this sour her on her entire program because it sounds like it's just this one class in which this learning experiment is taking place. However, she might wish to take this up with her instructor and point out that in two instances she was "outvoted" regarding an answer.

This situation certainly sounds frustrating and I can't say I blame your wife for being upset. I'm all for innovation in nursing education but innovation has to be grounded in common sense as well as educational theory to be effective. Frankly, the situation you describe sounds pretty doggone flakey to me, and I'd be frustrated, too!

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Specializes in Gerontology, nursing education.
It isn't a matter of being assertive enough (trust me, if you met my wife, you'd know). It's the rules of the game: all must submit the same answer. What is she supposed to do? Get in a knock-down fight with them over it? In the context of a timed exam, there is only so much time to argue, and no available resources with which to support your position. It's not a matter of "being talked out of the right answers" - the answers are essentially decided by democratic vote. If two people agree on the wrong answer, the third person is screwed. End of story.

Since when is an exam of subject matter comprehension and knowledge retention supposed to be a fight over who is a bigger bully? Haven't you ever met 20-something year-olds who are simply positive that they're right, even as they admit they are lacking in relevant knowledge?

How is this sort of testing context useful to anyone, and how does it produce better nurses?

Again, it's SUPPOSED to foster communication and the ability to come to a consensus but it doesn't seem to be working that way. You bring up a good point about stubbornness and bullying.

I've met a lot of folks, not just 20-somethings, who think they're right even if they lack relevant knowledge. It's very hard to deal with these kinds of personalities in a work or social situation, and miserable if you have to do group work with them.

Please tell your wife not to give up hope. As long as this practice doesn't continue in other courses, she should still be able to get through this with her sanity intact. Nursing education sometimes seems like a series of hoops through which one must jump. It would be nice to actually learn something when progressing through courses, but, unfortunately, some courses are nothing but hoops.

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We had group quizzes after an exam which was worth so many extra credit points, but as far as any normal exam or quiz it was all individual.

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I would have a real problem with this and would be discussing this situation with the powers that be.

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My program does "group exams" for half the exams given in one particular semester. Basically you take it on your own as normal, then you're put in a group of about 7 students to re-take the same test, and if the group does better than an individual did on their own, they get X amount of extra points. Each group had a leader determined by their scores on previous tests. I was a group leader for this, and a few of the classmates in my group who ended up just sliding by and passing on to the next semester (due extra points from MY studying) failed the subsequent semester. I won't make a value judgement on this system of group quiz/test taking because I do not know the reasoning behind it, but I will say that I encountered it and what the outcome was...

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I ran in this once that I could remember and it was only for one exam. Needless to say it did not turn out well. Thank god we didn't have put the same answer as the other person because I ended up higher then my teammate. Probably what your wife's teacher is trying to do is promote teamwork. As students we are largely solitary creatures but out in the nursing world it is all about team work. What I suspecting is happening here is that neither your wife or the other members are either not listening nor explaining to each other why such and such answer is right.

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Specializes in Telemetry.

We do cooperative testing after each of our exams. Our teacher breaks us up into groups of 5-6 and we all take the test, if we get an "A" as a group we get 2 points added to our test grade and if we can a "B" then we only get 1 point. However as far as quizzes go, I have never had experience with group quizzes that are weighted so much.

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We have group quizzes like that (we only have one paper for each group so we all have to agree on the answers) but they are only used as bonus points, and even then the only group that gets the points is the group that gets the most answers right. Sometimes we will have a "for real" quiz where our teacher will let us work in our group, but there is no rule that we all have to put the same answer. That's ridiculous.

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