Dr. Rick Yount

Finals are over. As I stood with students looking over the Answer Key I had taped to the wall — explaining incorrect answers and celebrating good outcomes — I yet again reflected on my own experiences on the dark side of education.

The worst testing experiences of my academic life happened in classes taught by God-fearing, born-again, Christ-centered professors. They loved the Lord, knew their subjects, but had little or no appreciation for the principles of item writing or test construction.

“What was Lottie Moon’s  [1]  cabin number when she sailed for China?”

“What animal figured prominently in the story of missionaries Tom and Jane Smith?”

“Describe the nature and work of Jesus Christ.” (This was one of ten ‘short-answer’ essay questions).

“Define God and give two examples.” Well, no, this last one was a tongue-in-cheek example of a bad test item given by Dr. Leroy Ford (1975) in his currriculum design course. But the other three are actual test questions. I forget Lottie’s cabin number. “Elephant” is the answer to the second. I refer you to “The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah” (Edershiem, 2 Volumes) for the third.

These questions burned themselves into my memory over 30 years ago. I have continued to hear testing horror stories for thirty years, from students of every kind of Christian college experience.

“Our teacher asked us true-false items that contained 100-150 words. ‘True’ meant ‘perfectly correct.’ If anything in the paragraph was untrue, the correct answer was ‘false.’”

“My history teacher did not give exams, but had us write papers. He determined grades by carrying the stack of papers to the top of the stairs, and dropping them. Papers falling to the bottom of the stairs received an “A.” B’s, C’s, D’s and F’s were determine by step counts!” [This last belongs, I suppose, in a post on "assigning grades," which is another topic!]

The problem is much larger than anyone in leadership wishes to admit, but our students suffer from the abuse regardless. Many “grow up” to be teachers that abuse their students in the very same ways!

A pastoral student of about 35 came into my classroom the first evening we met, slammed his books down on the desk, and sat down with a visible thump. The anger on his face was obvious. He certainly did not want to be in this one required education class. I silently prayed for him, and decided I needed to . . .  let him work through his issues for a while.

I led the class in prayer, called the roll (“What name would you like me to use?” I asked each student. “Andrew is fine” he harrumphed through clenched teeth.) I went over the syllabus, introduced the course and subject, and conversationally worked through the first lecture. Many of the students responded to my questions, and engaged in discussion. But not Andrew. When we dismissed three hours later, he snatched his books from the desk, and stormed out of the classroom.

The next week, Andrew seemed to be less angry, but remained silent and detached. But the third week, something happened.

We had been talking about the Disciplers’ Model, and were discussing “building relationships.” Andrew spoke for the first time. I had no idea what he would say, and was shocked, pleasantly so, when the words came.

I want to apologize to the class for my behavior these first few weeks. I am a pastor and should be able to deal with frustration better than I have. Last semester was my first, and I suppose I am still dealing with my anger from last fall. I studied harder for my three classes than in any other class I’ve had in my life. Two of the classes were difficult, but fair. The third was a nightmare. The professor forced us to read hundreds of pages each week, and then lectured over topics that interested him. When I asked him how I should prepare for his examinations, he simply said “Know it all.” There was no syllabus, no study guidelines of any kind. He treated us like children, and bothersome children, at that. He would often refuse to answer our questions, saying “you should already know that.” I didn’t. It was my first semester.

But the worst aspect of the course was his examinations. The questions were arbitrary, vague, and poorly worded. It was hard to understand what he was asking. And the grading was worse. He told me that I answered every question “correctly,” but because I “did not write as much as other students” in the class, I was docked. Though I answered every question correctly, I received a 68% on the first exam! I worked harder for the second and third exams, but I still had no idea what “know everything” meant, or how to prepare.

I did slightly better on these exams, but so did others in the class, and so “the curve” hurt me. I passed the course, but just barely, and the D hurt my grade point average. I understood his lectures, and believe I understood the course, but his vague examinations, and the unfair docking of points, forced me into a D grade. I was angry and frustrated and depressed, ready to quit school altogether, but after prayer, decided to give it one more semester. I suppose I was still very angry over that class, and came into this one with a wrong attitude. Thank you all for being patient with me.

Then he said some very nice things about our class and the students. He was a model student the rest of the semester, and successfully graduated a few years later.

He had been a 35-year-old “little one” (Mk 9:42) in the class of his worst professor, a little one who was caused to stumble by a leader who did not know how to help students properly prepare, or how to write good questions, or how to grade answers fairly. I know that his story is repeated thousands of times every semester in Christian schools around the world. Beloved, it ought not be this way. We will be judged by this sinful  behavior unless we repent and learn to evaluate student learning with “fair weights and measures” (Pr 20:10).

Here are other examples:

A student averages a 96% on four course exams, but earns a D in the course, because many students in the course scored better than he did. The grading scale for that semester, given at the end of the semester, was 99% (A), 98% (B), 97% (C), 96% (D) and less than 96% (F). Simple fairness dictated that every student should have received an A. Were the exams too easy, or did the students excel? If the former, the professor should have awarded As to all students and re-written the exams for the next semester. If the latter, the students deserved As. Adherence to an arbitrary distribution of grades (A-F) is sinful, especially when the grade point equivalents are determined after the grades are earned! [2]

A teacher copies sentences out of the course textbook, and converts them into true-false questions. (This practice always produces faulty items, because the sentences are taken out of context.)

A teacher exams students over footnotes and captions under graphics. (If the information were of major importance to the author, he would not put it in footnotes, or relegate it to captions.)

A teacher makes an exam so difficult that only 50% of the students pass. He brags to colleagues standing in the graduation line that the exam scores dropped his students (who had done “too well in his course that semester”) into an “appropriate” spread of grades. He actually admitted, with laughter, that some of his students cried when their course grade dropped a letter grade or two as a direct result of his “killer of a final.” (No commentary is necessary here).

A teacher requires students to read twenty books for the course. One question on each exam takes a random paragraph from one of the texts, and scrambles the words. The students must “reorganize the words of the paragraph into its original form.” When confronted over this travesty by a friend of his who was taking his class, he explained “students who have thoroughly read the texts should be familiar enough with the authors to enable them to reproduce the appropriate paragraph from the scrambled words.” His friend gave him another view of the testing approach. (There are no grounds in testing theory, or the Scripture, to justify this practice.)

Many teachers reduce objective questions to factual recall – the ability of students to call to mind bits and pieces of factual information, divulged in hours of lectures. The worst incidents of these testing situations focus on arbitrary or irrelevant factoids, which have little relevance to life or ministry.

Teachers who ask these kinds of questions want to know if “students listened closely.” The result was that students learned to write down every word written on the board, and every fact of every story told in class, because any bit of information, no matter how trivial, might well find its way into their next examination. Studying for examinations meant memorizing this mass of trivia rather than understanding underlying concepts, major principles, or creative applications for their life and work in the Lord. “Recalling factual answers to trivial questions” is not the same as “learning.” Much of what students memorize is lost by the following semester. As Russians say, “Zubree-Oshka, ZDAL, za-BIHL” — cram, pass, forget. Their thinking has not been changed by the trivia unless they themselves have taken the initiative to process the information on their own and make meaningful connections.

I have been hard on theology professors, but education professors are not immune. One professor administered the following as a final exam. Students were to bring the 75 separate educational booklets, leaflets, periodicals, and leader guides they had accumulated over the course of the semester. He provided them with a list of 20 words and phrases. Their task was to find and list “the resource and page number” where this word or phrase was located among the 75 pieces. The first time I encountered this bizarre approach to testing, I found his class sitting along the opposing walls of a main hallway, backs to the walls, resource pieces laid out in rainbow fashion before them. My eyes caught the eyes of one of the seated students, one of mine from a previous class. He looked at me with anger mixed with despair. I walked over to him. “What are you doing?” I asked. “This is our final exam,” and he explained what they were required to do. I could not believe it, and so went to see the professor. The professor was not defensive at all. “I love this approach to exams! I have over 300 words and phrases. I just randomly pick any 20 from the list of 300, and I have an new exam!” But what possible value is this to students and their ministry? I asked him. He swelled up and quoted a phrase he had learned in an adult education course: “One of the primary tenets of adult learning is that it is better to understand where to find information is than to memorize it. So I am forcing them to know where the information is!”

The truism has its place. Teach adults how to locate information rather than simply memorize it for an examination. But this particular approach to testing was at least a misapplication of the principle, and certainly an abuse of students. The worst part of this story is that the professor only accepted the locations he had found the terms as the correct answers. My former student found all 20 words or phrases in the periodicals, but he was docked for four answers (-20 points), because his answers did not match the professor’s. The student “earned” an 80 on the exam, and a B for the course as a result, because he could not overcome an impossible situation.

Sadly, all of these stories are true. There are many more, but these suffice to make the point. All of these stories reflect students who were made to stumble over poorly designed tests and test questions. They were hurt, not only in their grades – which is paramount in an academic institution – but in their souls, in their ability to trust their teachers, and in their sense of fairness within a Christian context. While these stories are the worst, drawn from over 35 years as a student and professor from various places, none of them should ever have happened. And yet stories such as these, less severe and less destructive perhaps, repeat themselves multiple times over, year after year. They reflect a more general tendency to unfair weights and measures than a few extreme anecdotes. Millstones, anyone?

Christian teachers produced these tests and created this unnecessary pain. They test others as they themselves were tested. Students abused by teachers grow up to be student-abusers when they teach, learning by imitation. I suspect few if any of these student-abusers have taken a formal course in how to write an exam, or an exam question. And yet examination quality has more tangible impact on student attitudes, for better or worse, than most other factors. The reason is obvious: exam grades determine course grades, and course grades determine future opportunities.

If you are one responsible for writing your own examinations in an academic setting, you will do more for student attitudes, future study habits, and your own reputation by providing clear test objectives and then writing test items in accordance with them (re: Leroy Ford). For guidelines on how to do this, take a look at Chapter 15 “Measurement as Motivation,” Created to Learn, 2nd ed. This resource can help you ask “live” questions in the classroom, or write entire exams that are both challenging and fair — tests that demand the best of students while providing them the support they need to succeed.

“You must not act unfairly in measurements of length, weight, or volume.
You are to have honest balances, honest weights,
an honest dry measure, and an honest liquid measure;
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.
You must keep all My statutes and all My ordinances and do them;
I am the Lord.”
Lev 19:35-37

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[1] Lottie Moon is as close to a patron saint as anyone in Southern Baptist history. She literally gave away her life to minister to the Chinese in the 1800s. She begged for support in letter after letter, but received very little. She gave away what little food she could manage to starving children, and eventually died as a result.

[2] The faulty reasoning goes like this: there should be few but equal numbers of As and Fs, more but equal numbers of Bs and Ds, and the most falling in the middle with Cs. This is considered “fair.” Let’s apply this evaluation standard to, say, counseling. There should be few but equal numbers of clients who overcome their problems and those who commit suicide, more but equal numbers of clients who get better, and get worse, and finally most clients who fall in the middle: they stay the same. Of course this is nonsense.

Teaching, like counseling, is a direct intervention. The best result, in teaching or counseling, finds everyone excelling. While I have never had a class in which everyone earned As, it is not because of built-in traps and minefields to trip up students. In my most difficult class (research design and statistical analysis), about half earn As (having worked very hard all semester), another third earn Bs, and a few earn Cs. Only a dozen or so students have failed the course over the last 30 years.