Nie Exam Revision

[Janyce Brits]

Abouttwo weeks before exams, I shared the directions for our independent revision with my students. I explained that, since we needed to spend our class time working on Romeo and Juliet, it would be their responsibility to carve out some time for reviewing their narratives and making changes. Below is the basic version of those directions(click this link for the super-detailed student copy):

I also carefully reviewed the rubric (see link above) with students. My rubric is modeled after the simple, succinct (yet amazingly all-encompassing) rubric that Rebekah put together for her literature-based analysis study.

I let the revision history tool and student comments guide my assessment of the revision. It was easy to tell when students had made thoughtful revisions, and when they had not, so assessing these revisions took a quarter of the time that reading paper copies (or brand new essays) might have taken. More importantly, seeing highlighted versions of the revisions allowed me to recognize and appreciate how much students had taken my advice to revise their content to heart.

Perhaps this post has just missed your exam window; perhaps you know your administration would never let this kind of final assessment fly. Here are some other suggestions for using revision, reflections, and the Google Docs revision history tool in your classroom:

In the end, my final exam had three parts: a short objective test taken in class, a scene from Romeo and Juliet performed before exams, and a revision of a past narrative with reflective comments. At last, I developed a final that assessed all the skills my students practiced during the semester. This revision assessment was a new experiment for me, one that definitely requires some perfecting, but the results were strong enough to encourage me to try it again.

Great post. I was in the middle of writing my own reflections on the alternative assessment experience this semester when I saw this pop up in my email box. I am definitely thinking more along the line of reflection and revision components for next year as well as looking for an alternative assessment option for my freshmen. Thanks!

This is about the same amount of time as you usually spend in school (750-minute lessons plus 2 hours of homework per night). You can fit 38 hours of revision comfortably into just 6 days of the week, leaving your Sundays completely free to relax and catch up on sleep. Start full-time revision several months before your big exams.

Thanks for sharing.Determine the number of hours you will have to study during the day and throughout the week. Be realistic and seek to balance your study routine with your social life and hobbies but also include time to rest.

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I ended up with a Distinction average on each of my degrees (Chinese and Accounting), then went to a world-top-100 university for my teaching diploma (TESOL). I am now a teacher at a college in China (Accounting and English plus the college has asked me to teach my students some study skills) and I intend to pass on your tips as well as my own to my new students.

Hi..how are u? i like your page so much,it helped me alot..uhmm my problem is tht i only have a week befor exams and i did not start studying yet how do I put up with this and study for all my 9subject please help thank you.

Allows me to review questions any time with feed back. This ease of accessibility is very important when preparing for post graduate studies and running a busy practice. A true one stop shop for my revision needs.

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Last year I completed an exam at University and a friend is doing the same exam/class this year. Would it be cheating if I gave her my revision notes of the semester (written before I did the exam)? They don't have any exam-related answers, just summarized lecture notes. I read that it is cheating if a student has an unfair advantage over other students. I don't want to get her or myself in trouble.

Most would say not even cheating (or facilitating) to tell them about the exam in your year.E.g. along the lines of "I focused my study too much on the topology part of the unit, but there was only 1 topology question in the exam. But I don't know how it will be this year."

Some would even argue that its not cheating to share with a past student a copy of last years exam, with fully worked solutions. On the basis that the instructor is not going to use the same exam twice. This is a bit more dubious though.

At the end of the day, the purpose of the exam is to test how well they know the content.So the context of an unfair advantage is one that lets them do well in the exam, without learning the content.No one cares how they learned the content.They might have gone to lectures, read the textbook, watched youtube lectures from other universities, read notes from a friend, or even have been working in the field for decades and just be attending the exam to get the paper to prove it.No one is assessing an unfair advantage at learning as cheating.

I don't have enough reputation here to leave comments, so I'll have to leave them as part of an answer, but I would note, from my own academic integrity research, that the answer isn't always clear cut.

As an example, there are sites that exist which reward students for uploading their lecture notes. They often breach the copyright of the original author (think of all the work the lecturer/professor went in to compile that course). Or, they breach the copyright of the university (since many universities automatically own the copyright of teaching materials produced by someone employed by that university). That would often result in an academic penalty based on breaching academic misconduct regulations. Deliberate breach of copyright could also result in a case that is taken through the legal system.

Now, in practice neither of those are likely to happen, but there have been several recent cases of cheating in universities being progressed in the real world, for instance, students getting someone else to take their exam for them who have ended up with a prison term.

What if the notes are edited before being shared? Well, the same copyright issues still apply. There is a point where the editing is sufficient that the notes could be considered a new piece of work, but that is a long way away.

What if the notes are being shared for free between students? The same issues still apply. A lecturer is unlikely to be concerned if it's a one-off event with a good reason (a student was ill and couldn't attend, so you supply them with a copy of the lecture notes), but a systematic activity, like constructed revision notes, may be considered unacceptable.

One thing you might want to do is contact the lecturer and offer the edited revision notes, to be made available to all students in the class as an additional resource. Many lecturers are very happy to supply additional material that they didn't have to compile themselves.

I agree with the other comments that you can use other existing sources to supplement your knowledge, such as textbooks, MOOCs, academic papers or YouTube videos. I'd always encourage my students to do this. If nothing else, it shows a wider interest.

Some students do hire outside support. Again, this is usually okay if it is just tutorial support, with the proviso that a lot of essay mills now operate in this space, with the intention of upselling towards their other cheating services. There are other obvious areas that aren't acceptable, but do happen, for instance hiring a teaching assistant who has privileged access to the course materials.

Reviewing previous test and examination papers also sounds perfectly acceptable. In the UK, those are all expected to be available to students. It still amazes me when I hear about universities where they're not available.

University staff themselves are expected to lead the academic integrity movement by example. That includes not allowing one student to have an unfair advantage over another student (consider the example where one group of students, such as a fraternity, has compiled a test bank which students outside that group don't have access to).

By the same token, there would be an expectation that coursework questions and exam questions were not reused. Using these could be said to be encouraging students to cheat. This would be uncommon in the UK, as the culture is to write original questions and have them externally checked, but if it did happen, I'd expect it to be a disciplinary issue.

Going back to the original question, if you do share your notes, I'd recommend checking that the content hasn't changed. I certainly update my materials every time I deliver a module, sometimes quite substantially where I think that I can improve the student experience (or when it's important to include an additional concept, which generally means trimming somewhere else). That's another good reason for running the notes past the lecturer to check that the information is still current.

When I studied for exams at school my revision or study periods in the run up to exams were fairly basic. I'd just work through the syllabus in the 6-weeks leading up to the exam and not really have very much structure. At medical school and when sitting postgraduate surgical exams I needed to update this to something that was more focused, time-efficient and just a better way to learn around a busy schedule where there was lots of information that needed to be covered.

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