Common final exams

[Nathan Crowder]

Does anyone here work at a 2-year school where at least some math courses use a common final exam?  

A little background:

At my school, we have a guideline that 70% of the course grade comes from proctored work.  The further assumption is that it's closed book/note and individual (non-group) work.  For assessment purposes, we have a series of common final exam questions that are distributed about 4 weeks before finals that are to be included on instructor final exams and scored using a standard rubric where a student scores either 0,3,7 or 10 points (out of 10) based on the level of accuracy and completeness.  These questions are very similar to questions appearing on departmental review sheets that all instructors have from the beginning of the semester.  Results are submitted at the end of the semester and we get the results the following semester (we see how we compared to others teaching the class).  The final exam score is also reported.  But the final exam itself is not standardized.  There is a fairly wide range of average scores (across instructors) reported each semester with a few outliers.  

My chair and I the other day were talking and wondering if there was a way to more closely compare apples to apples without going to multiple-choice assessment (this would not be used for punitive reasons but more as a means to see if someone is really doing something outstanding or someone needs some extra help).  We both agreed that we would be fine without seeing the final ahead of time, and further having someone else give our final exams and score them for us, as long as there was some way to assure that the scoring was done in a somewhat consistent manner.  I understand the push back.  But I feel like the instructor has all the freedom in the world to teach and test through the entire semester using all their little curiosities or ways of explanation for standard topics or inclusion of "pet-topics" that they want.  When push comes to shove, in classes such as College Algebra, the students need to be able to perform certain skills and understand certain topics in standard language. 

So, again: 

Does anyone use common finals? 

Does anyone have their final exams scored by a third party?  

What measures do you have in place to promote consistency?

[Nathan Crowder]

My apologies for stating the obvious (2-year school) qualifier.  I post in several math groups, and many have faculty from both 2 and 4 year schools.

[Nancy J. Rivers]

Nathan,

In the Math & Physics Department at Wake Tech CC (Raleigh, NC) all courses give common finals. In fact, we give common unit tests, with some latitude to alter or replace questions (unit tests ONLY) to better suit the instructor's style. But we require that all altered tests be shared with the entire test team so everyone knows what others are doing. We teach to a common course calendar and have set testing windows in which a test must be given (testing outside of the window is almost never allowed).

All tests, including the final exam, are reviewed by every instructor teaching the course - well, they each have the opportunity - and can provide feedback that may or may not result in changes to the assessment. These assessments are made available well in advance of each testing window and the final version of an assessment must be ready at least a week before the testing window opens to facilitate printing of the assessment.

In North Carolina, math classes taught in the community college system have a set course description and required Course Learning Outcomes (CLO). Each course team establishes a set of problems/assessments (possibly from various assessments, but most course teams simply choose problems from the final exam) from which Student Learning Outcome Data is collected. This data is reported in spreadsheets in such a way that we can see how each instructor's students performed on each CLO. We also look at overall grade distributions.

We grade our own assessments and each instructor utilizes their own grading rubric.

Success data is NOT used in a punitive way. We will look at instructors whose students perform well above the average and have them help other instructors to improve their instruction, particularly those with lower success data. In addition, we are well aware that success data can vary widely from one section to another with the same instructor. We have also noted that, because we have many sections of a course (particularly Precalculus Algebra) that the later sections to fill (the last on the list meeting at a particular time, usually) typically perform poorer than the first class listed at a particular meeting time.

Hope this helps,

Nancy

Nancy J Rivers

Administrative Department Head

Mathematics and Physics 

Wake Technical Community College

9101 Fayetteville Rd

Raleigh, NC 27603
(919)866-5968 (o)   |   SC 101G / ND 447 / RTP1 326D

njri...@waketech.edu

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From: amaty...@googlegroups.com <amaty...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Nathan Crowder <ncro...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, November 25, 2019 5:57 PM
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Subject: [amatyc-itlc] Re: Common final exams

 

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[Nathan Crowder]

Very helpful.  Thank you for taking the time to reply.

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