End of the Term

After the weather troubles of the past day or so, Simpson got back on track with final exam week today. And it was a little bittersweet, as it was the last meeting of my first-year Liberal Arts Seminar. A great group to work with, and I took advantage of our last class to snap this photo. 

In the front are Abby Grover, Liz McKee, Robin Whitford, Brandon Herbert and Morgan Olson. In the middle are Sarah Keller, Nathan Frederick, Megan Cook and Macy Koch. And semi-circled around the back are Tim Ellwanger, Mallory Tandy, Ashley Katch, Brittney Jepson, Bruce Dahlhauser, Curt Tennison, Lexie Hagerty, Colleen Johnson, Erin Floro and Catie Ellingson. A couple of our group were gone the last day: Danielle Caswell, who was taking a Spanish final, and Manuel Gomez, who was winging his way spend the holidays with his mother in El Paso, Texas. Thanks for a great term, and we'll see you in the spring!

A (Very Rare) Snow Day!

If you're not in the Midwest, thank your lucky stars today. We're having a heck of an ice storm, and it's resulted in Simpson College calling off final examinations for the day. The driving is very difficult, the walking even tougher, and the trees are bending due to a heavy coating of ice.

This is pretty rare at Simpson: We're a residential college, and 90 percent of our students live within walking distance of their classes. We've called off classes only 3-4 times in the 18 years I've been at Simpson, and I understand that the college has called off classes so rarely in its 150 years that you could count the number of snow days on two hands. Joe Walt, the college's historian, probably could give me the exact number.

We'll be back at final exams tomorrow, pushing the schedule back a day for everyone. But the forecast is looking better, and it looks like we'll be able to get through to the end by the end of this week.

It's Final Exam Week

The semester comes to a halt this coming week with final exams at Simpson. Everyone talks about how stressful the week is for students, and it is. It can be stressful for faculty as well.

How so, you ask? After all, the students are taking the exam. You're writing them, deciding what they need to know. (Feel the power!) It's all a little more complicated than that.

The first stress is finding the time to write the exam. Many textbook publishers will give faculty exams that they can either give as is or adapt to their needs. These are called test banks. I've never been a fan of them. For one thing, my lecturing and discussion style inevitably leads us far afield of the text (not off topic, mind you — let's just say that I try to add value to the textbook presentation). The other thing is that I'm pretty sure that textbook publishers don't know the first thing about writing exams.

For me, much of this weekend's been taking up with writing and editing exams. My final exams are multiple-choice affairs, with much of the previous assessment of the course based on students' writing and critical-thinking activities in the course. And I cranked out 3 exams of 50 questions each yesterday. It took about 8 hours of my day, which was OK, given the crappy weather here in Iowa.

The second stress is editing the exam. To make for as fair an exam as possible, I start with an exam from an earlier semester and go over every question carefully (inevitably finding editing errors from the previous semester — ugh!). I never teach a course in an identical manner two semesters in a row, so that means a lot of questions from the old exam get thrown out and thus must be replaced with new questions. Those usually aren't too hard to write; I never seem to lack for material.

But then there's the detailed line-by-line editing. I teach copy editing at Simpson, so I'm a bit of a stickler for this. You're looking for the obvious typos, bad punctuation, etc., but you're also reading for clarity and the existence of (in my mind, at least) one clear answer to each item. There's nothing that bugs a faculty member more than a student claim that a question was a "trick" question — not because we want students to sit down, shut up and take the exam, but more because we feel that we've failed them in giving them a fair assessment of their knowledge. So I go over each question carefully, changing the order of questions if needed, making sure references to other questions in the exam are accurate, taking extra care to make sure there aren't two or more correct answers to an item.

How long does this all take? For each exam, it's 3-4 hours of work that goes through three or more drafts of an exam before a final copy is printed out.

In other words, anyone who says that faculty give multiple-choice exams because they're lazy and just want the semester over typically have never written one themselves.

Oh yeah, there's also 10 internship portfolios to grade this week, along with 20 papers from my Liberal Arts Seminar class. So it's going to be a busy and stressful week.

But I'll make it.