A table. My professor had flipped a table. These were the insane thoughts that flitted through my mind during the class that followed our midterm exam. It was the last semester of my undergraduate career, and I was struggling with the course “World History since 1500.” I studied profusely for this midterm. It was a high-stakes assessment, being worth 30% of our final grade. Your performance on this exam was a pretty big identifier to whether or not you would pass the course. The two-part exam began with an essay that you had to turn in during finals week. This essay was a constraint in itself as it took up most of your studying time while counting for half of your exam grade. The second part of the exam was an in-person paper test. The test required matching questions that led into short-answer questions.
A third of our class failed the exam. We knew that something had gone horribly wrong because our professor entered the class in a fury and flipped a table over because of our poor test scores. Then, he passed out a third of the graded exams, announced that these students had failed, and suggested that they leave immediately as there was no hope in them even passing the class. Now, I realize that there are many things wrong with the picture I have just painted you, but I am going to focus solely on the assessment. What made this so awful that approximately 33% of students failed it?
High-stakes testing, such as this exam, cause students a lot of stress and anxiety to perform well. Students' ability levels, intelligence, and worth are unfairly decided by a single test, rather than the hard work and growth they made throughout the class. Jesse Stommel criticizes collegiate grading expectations by suggesting that professors “demean student work by crudely quantifying it” (Stommel, 2021). Our professor tore us apart for the sake of grading, not for the sake of learning.
Although the professor did include a variety of formats within the test (essay, matching, short answer), the lack of choice prohibited any student agency within the exam. This limited our ability to showcase what we know in a manner that we are confident in. We were assessed in a uniform test when we are individual, diverse learners. The matching portion of the exam, which led into a short answer question, was not a concurrently valid assessment of our knowledge. This is because answering the matching answer incorrectly directly affected your short answer response. If you missed part of the question, you missed all of it.
After my classmates left the lecture hall, reeling with the news that they had failed their exams, I sat with the remaining students. We were collectively shocked and terrified and ashamed. What I took away most from this course was not colonization or the major world wars, but how a teacher can fail a class by administering an unreliable, inaccessible, unfair assessment.
Photo of my MSU roomies and me (circa table-flipping experience)
Reference
Stommel, J. (2021). Grades are dehumanizing; Ungrading is no simple solution. Jesse Stommel. https://www.jessestommel.com/grades-are-dehumanizing-ungrading-is-no-simple-solution/
Comments