Acing the final exam
By BILL DUNCAN As a college instructor teaching journalism, I was required to give a mid-term and final exam. I remember when I was an undergraduate, I despised instructors who deliberately had trick questions in an exam. To me, college was about learning not trickery, so my teaching strategy was to keep my exam questions to what was in the textbook or in my lectures. However, I did always add one question to the final exam that some students thought was trickery. Admittedly, it was a bit unorthodox, but I felt students needed to know. The question was “where is the reference section located in the campus library?” Journalists need to be fact checkers and in the course of my teaching the students had been exposed to the reference section of the campus library many times, so if they had paid attention, they surely would know the location. One student wrote on his exam: “Honestly, I don’t know, but as a journalist I am trained to ask questions, so the minute I go into the library, I stop at the information desk and get directions.” He got an “A” for enterprise, another attribute of a good journalist. There isn’t a teacher or professor alive who hasn’t come away from grading exams without finding at least one enterprising answer. One student was asked to write an essay question on the ways to save the environment. He wrote by not writing a long discourse on this subject, “I am not using but one sheet of paper, therefore I am saving a tree.” His short, quick-witted answer earned him an “A.” But some exam answers can make teacher’s feel like failures, if they don’t laugh at the answers. Like this one to a question asking an explanation of the Magna Carta. The student wrote: “It means that no man should be hanged twice for the same offense.” Or this one: To the question, who is Johannes Gutenberg, a student answered: “The man who invented the Bible.” On a history exam, a student was asked the meaning of the saying: The sun never sets on the British Empire. The student wrote: “Because the British Empire is in the East and the sun sets in the West.” There is a story about an eccentric philosophy professor who gave a one question final exam after a semester dealing with a broad array of topics. The class was already seated and ready to go when the professor picked up his chair, plopped it on his desk and wrote on the board: "Using everything we have learned this semester, prove that this chair does not exist." Fingers flew, erasers erased, notebooks were filled in furious fashion. Some students wrote over 30 pages in one hour attempting to refute the existence of the chair. One member of the class however, was up and finished in less than a minute. Weeks later when the grades were posted, the rest of the group wondered how he could have gotten an A when he had barely written anything at all. His answer consisted of two words: "What chair?" A medical student was asked an essay question about the benefits of mother’s milk over formula milk. He indeed wrote the medical reasons that mother’s milk was more healthy for the infant, but got the “A” for his conclusion. “Besides,” he wrote, “the packaging is much more appealing.” (Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)
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