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Title: After the Exam.... Post by: Tanya on July 13, 2007, 12:28:19 AM After the Exam....
If you've just written an exam and your performance on the MC questions is poor there are a number of things you can do to help you find out what the problem might be. Hopefully, the prof has made the MC questions, the correct answers, your responses, and the places where the questions came from (e.g., text page numbers etc.) available to you. If he/she hasn't, you can probably obtain this from him/her--especially if you pitch your request in terms of trying to find out why you didn't do as well as you could/should have so that you can improve on later exams (as opposed to implying a challenge to the given grade). Before looking at the correct answers, go through the exam and try to recall how you answered the specific questions--was #4 an elimination answer? Were you confident about #8 or was it a guess? Did the response you gave on #13 just "come out of the blue" at you? (i.e., was is an answer-search answer?) Did you change the answer to #21 after you have made your original decision? and so on. If the prof returns the actual exam booklet you used during the exam you can often get some good hints about this by examining the hen scratches beside the questions. For example, most people draw a line through a rejected alternative when they are eliminating. Many circle the correct answer when the are answer-searching. (You might even consider getting into such habits so you can readily classify your answering strategies after the exam). Do your best to classify each question in terms of how you feel you answered it. There is no magic number of categories here--although you don't want to get too many going at once. The next thing is to go through the exam key and find out which questions you got wrong and which ones you got right. Then you do a count of how many correct and incorrect questions occur as a function of the manner in which you answered the question. This can be very useful information to help you discover any problems you might be having. Here is an example based on a recent student consultation: |