Do Your Schools Have Exam Rescores?

[Isoval]

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Just curious if this is a 'just us' thing or if it's universal.

 

[mistafab]

No

 

[Raney Schauer]

yes

 

[Goro]

Just curious if this is a 'just us' thing or if it's universal.

Ahhh, pedagogy.

Do you mean like going through the poorly performing questions and throwing out or giving bonus points for poorly performing ones? If so, at my school, yes.

Our reasoning is that if, say 40% of the class gets the question right, it's a bad question. The question is either badly written; one or more answers are confusing or badly written, there are no truly correct answers; there is more than one correct answer; or the topic wasn't taught properly.

It's OK for questions to be hard, but it's on the Faculty to teach the students well on the concepts being assessed.

This is different from curving, which in my view is artificially and arbitrarily changing or setting the grading lines to match some theoretical bell shaped curve of grade distribution. It has no purpose in post-graduate education.

 

[sunshinefl]

Ahhh, pedagogy.

Do you mean like going through the poorly performing questions and throwing out or giving bonus points for poorly performing ones? If so, at my school, yes.

Our reasoning is that if, say 40% of the class gets the question right, it's a bad question. The question is either badly written; one or more answers are confusing or badly written, there are no truly correct answers; there is more than one correct answer; or the topic wasn't taught properly.

It's OK for questions to be hard, but it's on the Faculty to teach the students well on the concepts being assessed.

This is different from curving, which in my view is artificially and arbitrarily changing or setting the grading lines to match some theoretical bell shaped curve of grade distribution. It has no purpose in post-graduate education.

We have this system. Individual questions can be dropped due to the above reasons, but there is no “curve”. The number of dropped questions varies from 0-5 per exam. Usually around 2-3.

 

[Isoval]

Ahhh, pedagogy.

Do you mean like going through the poorly performing questions and throwing out or giving bonus points for poorly performing ones? If so, at my school, yes.

Our reasoning is that if, say 40% of the class gets the question right, it's a bad question. The question is either badly written; one or more answers are confusing or badly written, there are no truly correct answers; there is more than one correct answer; or the topic wasn't taught properly.

It's OK for questions to be hard, but it's on the Faculty to teach the students well on the concepts being assessed.

This is different from curving, which in my view is artificially and arbitrarily changing or setting the grading lines to match some theoretical bell shaped curve of grade distribution. It has no purpose in post-graduate education.

Yeah, this is the same system that we have set up at our school.

It was explained to us at the beginning of the year that the criteria for a rescore are:
1) the question had multiple correct answers (dropped)
2) “a monkey could do better than the class” (dropped)
3) there was a miskey (not dropped - they will update the answer key and reassign points)

When a question is dropped, it becomes possible for your grade to decrease; you could go from 130/140 -> 128/138 if you got that question correct. Conversely, you could go 130 -> 138 if you missed that question. During a miskey, the total points would be kept at 140 and you could potential increase two points or decrease two points depending on the new key (individual test questions are worth 2 points).

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an exam where more than three questions were thrown out, and roughly half are never rescored.

 

[Isoval]

No

Does your school ever account for “bad questions” with extra course points or additional assignments or do they kinda just tell you to suck it up?

 

[Raney Schauer]

When a question is dropped, it becomes possible for your grade to decrease; you could go from 130/140 -> 128/138 if you got that question correct. Conversely, you could go 130 -> 138 if you missed that question. During a miskey, the total points would be kept at 140 and you could potential increase two points or decrease two points depending on the new key (individual test questions are worth 2 points).

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an exam where more than three questions were thrown out, and roughly half are never rescored.

At my institution, if the question ends up being thrown out the question number stays the same and the assessment is “credit all” meaning everyone gets the credit for that question. So, if you’re the one who got it right in the first place, you get a few people maybe moving ahead if you in percentile/rank order for that exam.

 

[fldoctorgirl]

Ahhh, pedagogy.

Do you mean like going through the poorly performing questions and throwing out or giving bonus points for poorly performing ones? If so, at my school, yes.

Our reasoning is that if, say 40% of the class gets the question right, it's a bad question. The question is either badly written; one or more answers are confusing or badly written, there are no truly correct answers; there is more than one correct answer; or the topic wasn't taught properly.

It's OK for questions to be hard, but it's on the Faculty to teach the students well on the concepts being assessed.

This is different from curving, which in my view is artificially and arbitrarily changing or setting the grading lines to match some theoretical bell shaped curve of grade distribution. It has no purpose in post-graduate education.

We have this, + our average is curved to an 85.

 

[Ho0v-man]

Ahhh, pedagogy.

Do you mean like going through the poorly performing questions and throwing out or giving bonus points for poorly performing ones? If so, at my school, yes.

Our reasoning is that if, say 40% of the class gets the question right, it's a bad question. The question is either badly written; one or more answers are confusing or badly written, there are no truly correct answers; there is more than one correct answer; or the topic wasn't taught properly.

It's OK for questions to be hard, but it's on the Faculty to teach the students well on the concepts being assessed.

This is different from curving, which in my view is artificially and arbitrarily changing or setting the grading lines to match some theoretical bell shaped curve of grade distribution. It has no purpose in post-graduate education.

We have two departments that throw out questions. I personally hate this system. If a concept is difficult, most people don’t learn it assuming it will be thrown out. This is such a kick in the teeth to students who put the time in to learn the material only the to find out the effort was wasted. Glad to know I spent hours trying to make sense of a concept only to have it thrown out because most of the class didn’t bother.

 

[venacava.]

similar to what was said above, we get questions thrown out that have holes in the answer choices or a majority of people missed, with the idea that it was not taught well enough. if a lot of students miss a question that was clearly emphasized however, these do not get thrown out. i used to think this was unfair and gave students too much cushion but poorly written questions have been thrown out of Step exams each year as well. its just a part of med school exams