Quizzes

What is the purpose of a quiz?

I say quizzes are an attempt to assess whether a student has learned the material. After a quiz, a grade is given which reflects how well a student did on the quiz, and how well the student learned.

Yeah yeah, we all know grading can be subjective etc. But I've just about had it with professors preaching that grades don't matter, because we all know that they do matter for several reasons.

I took a quiz this week (a take home quiz) and I was astounded when I got it back and saw that I had gotten only 7/10 right. Upon further examination, I saw that the questions that were marked wrong were something like this:

1. Instead of "fewer," I wrote "less."
2. Instead of "upper halves of the letters," I wrote "the tops of the letters."
3. Instead of "increase the leading so there is more space between lines," I wrote "adjust the leading so there is mores pace between the lines."

At first I thought "I wonder what dork in here graded my paper . . . how could you possibly not understand that I answered the questions correctly?"

I took it to the teacher and the teacher said "Um, yeah . . . I actually graded yours. You know, since it was a take home quiz, I kind of wanted it to be exactly what was in the book, so . . . yeah."

So apparently I was to fill in the blanks, not read and retain information so that I could explain it to someone if they asked me.

And so I ask, what, my friends, was the purpose of this quiz? It doesn't seem like it was to learn . . . because I did in fact learn, but anyone who saw my grade would think that i had learned poorly, and that's not the truth at all.

Poor teachers. You have difficult jobs and I think we all get frustrated with the grading system and having to kind of conform to it in the way that we teach, but I exhort you, please ask yourself from time to time "what is the purpose of this quiz, assignment, or project?" If the purpose is one other than to learn, to gain experience, etc . . . you know, a valuable use of time . . . then reconsider what you are doing.

I don't have hard feeling against said professor, said professor is great and I enjoy said professor's class. I'm sure it is difficult to always have that passion for teaching and learning burning all of the time. But maybe with a little effort we can really improve the quality of the time that is spent in the classroom.

Thank you.