I always find it interesting to see the same error repeated in multiple students’ exams. Sometimes this is a cause for dismay, as the fault is my own. Without fail, misstatements made in class are echoed back on students’ exams. Certain errors are also evidence that a given concept or idea was never communicated particularly well, either by me or the assigned materials, and students were left with mistaken conclusions. It’s one thing if some students just have difficulty grasping a particular idea – though I hope they all “get it” by exam time – quite another if what they grasp is simply wrong. Although it has not (yet) happened to me, repeated errors on exams can also be a sign of cheating, particularly in closed-book exams.
This year, once again, I found a mistake repeated in my students’ exams, but thankfully I am not to blame. This year’s repeated mistake concerned a portion of a note case that is not in the casebook and that we never discussed in class. Fair enough, as I hardly penalize students for reading and referencing material not contained in the casebook. (Indeed, I like to see students read the assigned cases in their entirety, though not too many do of their own accord).
The problem was not that several students cited a four-part test from the uncovered portion of the case. Rather, the problem was that the majority of them misstated the factors in precisely the same way. Oops.
Thankfully I don’t suspect cheating. Instead I am willing to bet that multiple students were referring to the same external source, such as a treatise or commercial outline, or (more likely given the mistake) an outline prepared by a student who had taken my class in a previous year when we did cover the material in question. Then in the crush of preparing for the exam – or in the exam itself (which is completely open-book) – each of the students in this group referred to this source rather than the own notes and repeated the mistake. Needless to say, this didn’t much help them on their exams. They would all have been better off to rely upon their own work, or at least to have confirmed that their source accurately reflected the assigned material.
UPDATE: Apparently I’m not the only one to have this sort of experience. One VC reader writes:
I was grading exams for a large Classical Mythology course when, to my dismay, a large number of students gave the same inaccurate name for the sidekick of Hercules (it should be Iolaus, as I’m sure you know.) I had the same reaction: Did I teach it wrong, or did they cheat? But fortunately there turned out to be a simple answer. All the students had gotten their information from the low-budget WB TV show, “Hercules,” which apparently was not the gold standard for mythological accuracy.
Wherever my students got their four-part test, I’m sure it wasn’t from the WB!
SECOND UPDATE: Several more readers e-mail to say that Iolaus was Hercules’ sidekick on the syndicated TV show. Hmmm.
Comments are closed.