Exam Excitement

Yesterday I proctored the local section of the Chemistry Olympiad screening exam. Top students from local high schools show up for a 110-minute exam with 60 multiple-choice questions. This year everyone in my group came prepared with their pencils, erasers and non-programmable calculators. The classroom in which I was proctoring the exam is one that I have used often over the years when I teach first-year college-level General Chemistry and also Chemistry for non-majors. The students looked a tad younger than my college students, but not by much. So the environment felt familiar to me with one big exception.

There was an air of excitement and enthusiasm in the air. I could feel the energy of the students who were looking forward to being there to take the exam. This is not the atmosphere in my college classes on exam day. (It’s more a feeling of trepidation on the part of the students who seem less than happy that they are being tested.) Of course the circumstances are very different. For my college students, the exam impacts their grade (and many of them are grade-conscious), and feels like a burden to bear or a hoop they have to jump through. They wish they did not have to take it. The high school students that came for the Olympiad screening were there because they were recommended by their teachers. It was an honor to be chosen and they recognized it as such. They wanted to be there to show off what they learned!

I’m not sure why it hit me this time around that this was part of the excitement: to show what they had learned and how capable they were! If only that were true in my classes where students seem to think of exams as a drag. This is despite my explaining the usefulness of exams in the process of learning. My students don’t seem to feel that they are getting an opportunity to show off their knowledge – rather my impression is that they think my exams are to show up their ignorance. Maybe it’s a bit of both.

I freely admit that I actually enjoy grading exams. I start grading right after the exam is over and if possible I finish grading that same day. (Sometimes it spills over to the next day.) I’m actually curious and perhaps even excited to see how much my students have learned. I am both rewarded and disappointed given the range of students in my classes. Some are very strong academically and ace the exam. Others perform miserably. The other reason why I grade as soon as possible is because it is crucial for students to receive feedback as soon as possible. Therefore my rule is that exams should be returned to the students by the next class period.

In my first year of college teaching, an older and wiser colleague said that exams should be given back to student at the end of class (rather than at the beginning, which I had planned to do) and that students should wait at least 24 hours before stopping by to ask questions. (I provide an answer key when I return the exam.) This has worked very well. Handing back the exams at the beginning would have distracted a subset of the students in an unhelpful way and they would probably not participate as fully in the class. Having the waiting time of 24 hours allows the student to reflect on their errors in the exam, and more often than not, when they come to my office, the conversation is very productive and surrounds study skills rather than “why did I get this wrong?”

I will not be grading the Olympiad screening exam. The Scantron cards will go through a machine that will provide the student’s score. The top students will be invited back for a second, more extensive exam that involves practical lab skills and the ability to design one’s own experiment. The students in the meantime are probably eagerly waiting to hear whether they have been selected into the next round. It’s been a long time since I was their age and since I wasn’t the strongest student back then (at least from my teachers’ perspective), I didn’t have a chance to experience the excitement they did yesterday. But I did share in that buzz of excitement with the students yesterday! I was even tempted to take the exam just for fun and submit my Scantron, but instead I spent the 110 minutes watching the students like a hawk to make sure no cheating took place. I am pleased to report that they were well-behaved and everything went smoothly.

On my way home after the screening exam, I mused about whether as professors we could experience that same buzz. Maybe it comes when a journal accepts our paper, or we are invited to give a lecture, or if we receive an award. Or maybe we get our buzz in a different way. I find that I share the excitement of my students who have gotten into graduate school or medical school, or earned an honor. (This is the season when such things are happening.) There is this sense of pleasure to see their adolescent excitement as they get ready to embark on their next stage of life. I must say – I’m looking forward to graduation day!