Challanging Exam Questions

[wrigliarows]

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[Fermata]

Compound that with the presence of grade grubbers in the class.....

 

[ColoMD]

Compound that with the presence of grade grubbers in the class.....

It's definitely the gunners who whine and complain about every question that they get wrong. Hey, guess what...just because you missed it doesn't it mean it was a bad question.

 

[lattimer13]

It's definitely the gunners who whine and complain about every question that they get wrong. Hey, guess what...just because you missed it doesn't it mean it was a bad question.

generally i'd agree with you...but if you had seen our immunology exam you'd be giving our professor grief over the grades too. most poorly taught class i've ever had (med school, undergrad, high school, mid school, you get the point).
when over 70% of the class is getting certain questions wrong, it's either piss-poor teaching or piss-poor question writing. med micro and immunology has been historically poorly taught in recent years, this year they went with a change in course directors to see if that'd resolve the problem...hopefully they'll just get all new faculty next year to teach it. thank god for my lange review book to get me through the class.

 

[NateatUC]

I would be embarrassed if I was a PhD that kept writing poor test questions. It really can't be that hard, is it they are lazy or just incompetent?

In our case, it wasn't the PhD's that were the problem. They actually have time to write good questions. Also, all of our exams are closed, so they pull questions from banks that they've been using for at least a couple years. And before these questions counted, they were field tested (put on exams and didn't count toward the grade, just looked at to see how well we did on them).

Some of the MD clinicians that lectured for our intro to clinical practice class, though, couldn't write a decent question to save their lives. We'd routinely have 6-12 questions dropped or have multiple answers accepted on these tests.

 

[thackl]

This was common at my school in yrs past with Biochem giving about 10pts/test back. We are the first class to have a 'new' test policy...... we don't get to see them....... ever! This has been the single largest pt of contention this yr. Most of the prof's are even against it.

 

[DrMom]

This was common at my school in yrs past with Biochem giving about 10pts/test back. We are the first class to have a 'new' test policy...... we don't get to see them....... ever! This has been the single largest pt of contention this yr. Most of the prof's are even against it.

That's a horrible policy. Not only do you not get to contest questions, but you also don't get to learn from your mistakes.

 

[dsblaha]

At Wake all of our exams are taken on computers they give us. The testing software allows us to write comments about any questions, ie if you think a question might have 2 right answers explain your reasoning and they may accept both of the answers. It really is a good system. We usually have about 2 questions thrown out and 2 with multiple answers per 100 questions.

 

[thackl]

That's a horrible policy. Not only do you not get to contest questions, but you also don't get to learn from your mistakes.

Preaching to the choir sister 👎

I keep walking out of biochem thinking I OWNED it, and end up with high pass (still very respectable and acceptable). Am I making stupid mistakes? being over critical of choices? not learning it correctly?

They potentially doom me to making the same mistakes over and over.

 

[Stinger86]

I would be embarrassed if I was a PhD that kept writing poor test questions.

Then you wouldn't fit in with the faculty at my school. They take pride in their pathetic question writing skills

 

[fourthyearmed]

Common practice to challenge questions at my school as well.

 

[missmod]

There are always a few questions thrown out in my class for every exam... most of the time it's because the professor wrote a really bad question and nobody knew what he/she meant by it.

I think that the more you know about the subject, the worse your question-writing skills. It's like these prof's know so much, they make a lot of assumptions (that seem clear in their own mind) and once the question gets written--nobody else knows what they meant.

 

[krabmas]

At my school too the same people always whine about questions.

We even have this whole system set up with 2 people per class selected to talk to the professors and argue questions for the entire class so the whole class isn't just yelling at the profs at once. There is always one or 2 people that can't seem to keep their mouths shut and every wrong answer start yelling and almost throwing fits in class.

Some of the professors get so sick of hearing these voices that they cave and give back questions that were fine to begin with.

 

[Firebird]

Our class seems so much more laid back than all these others. I can't think of any major fits that have been thrown this year.

The only thing that has really annoyed me was on the first anatomy exam when we had five or six questions that had 9 choices on the multiple choice portion. It was something like this:

Choose the best answer:

A. Hand
B. Foot
C. Leg
D. Arm
E. Toe
AB. Both A and C are correct
AC. Both B and D are correct
AD. A, C and E are correct
AE. C, D and E are correct

I thought that was a bit much, but whatever.

 

[Discobolus]

Then you wouldn't fit in with the faculty at my school. They take pride in their pathetic question writing skills

You would have loved one of the questions on our last microbiology test. The question was something to the effect of "Which term would you match with METABOLIC ENZYME?", and the answers were 26 choices (literally A to Z)of antibiotics that all worked through enzymes.

 

[W222]

I have heard of med schools typically giving several (5-10) questions per exam back. Crazy because you would think that if it was on the exam the professor would have read it and cleared it before, either that or the entire class is a bunch of whiners (Doubt its all the classes fault). I think this problem mainly stems from the use of test question banks that have out-dated and false questions.

 

[macdown]

There have been rumors flying around my school that they intentionally miskey questions or throw questions out to "appease" the whiners. Its a bit too conspiricy theory for me to believe, but in a year and a half of medical school there has not been a test where at lest 4 questions were given back, in neuro we had 16!

 

[CallawayDoc]

it's pretty common to have 3-5 questions successfully challenged. the preference of the class and faculty is to accept alternate answers. it gets pretty frustrating when a weak professor will throw one out (thereby penalizing those who got it right) because of something as stupid as syntax. that usually helps one whiner and hurts 120 others. if someone can prove another answer was good, i'm all for it...but don't hurt the rest of us because you're mad you missed a question.

the opinion of the faculty is pretty diverse. the faculty views appeals as a "privelege"...i'm of the opinion that it is a so called "right" b/c if they can ask a bad question, then we can appeal it. it seems much of the problem could be avoided by proofreading the test. they claim to do it, but sometimes i wonder.

 

[krabmas]

Have any of you actually sat down to take a test and it was the same test you took 2 days before for a diiferent class?

Or was the midterm given again at the final by accident?

This really prooves that the Profs do not review the tests!
😱

 

[macdown]

it gets pretty frustrating when a weak professor will throw one out (thereby penalizing those who got it right) because of something as stupid as syntax. that usually helps one whiner and hurts 120 others.

That bothers me to no end!!! Missed honoring in infectious disease by 0.5% a percent because 2 questions got thrown out (both of which I got right) Luckily the course director for our cardio core is good and when he throws a question out he makes it a bonus question (ie extra credit) for those who got it right.