What Do College Examinations Accomplish
New instructors and students frequently are unfamiliar with Examination types and rationales. This article surveys exam types And the motives for employing each of these testing methods. ********** Some of college's most anxiety producing events are examinations. Students sometimes wonder: what purpose is served by an examination? Students attend classes to receive information, to have questions answered, and to have assigned material interpreted, framed, prioritized, and shared with classmates; do exercises practicing what they learn [homework]; perform laboratory experiments to test the validity of and to gain practical experience in the theory of what they learn; write assays to demonstrate their organized original thoughts on specific portions of what is being learned; and give oral presentations that require clear, verbal articulation of what they have learned. With all these educational vehicles available to demonstrate learning, why are tests needed? Not all examinations are equal. Different professors prefer to use varying examination formats such as true-false questions, multiple choice questions, matching questions, supplying definition items, short answer questions, fill-in-the-blank questions, and essay questions. Each question format is designed primarily to achieve a different measure of learning. Examination frequency, size, motives, styles, and proportional course grade weight varies from professor to professor. Among the recognized and established pedagogical ends achieved by examinations are: (1) measures of material memory or recall--there are valid reasons why some material needs to be remembered; (2) Not all learned material needs to be at instant recall; some material is appropriately learned if it can be recognized when presented; (3) Some material is best defined as learned when it can be contrasted/compared with other learned material; (4) Other learning can be measured by one's ability to see relationships between variables, called synthesis; (5) Still other learning is best demonstrated when students can take a vast body of material and wisely choose portions from various sub parts of knowledge to accomplish a given goal, called integration; (6) Another index of learning comes through an ability to handle nuances, subtleties, and delicate varieties called differentiation; (7) Of paramount importance in measuring learning is being able to competently use what is learned, called application; (8) Yet another vital determination of learning is rendering sound judgments about what is learned, called evaluation. Recall, recognition, comparison/contrast, synthesis, integration, differentiation, application, and evaluation can be measured, in part, through class attendance, homework, experiments, paper writing, and oral presentations; however, examinations offer experiences and evaluation features not commonly found in other educational vehicles that offer useful evidence of learning. …