Aftershocks

I'm in a true blue funk about the exam results, so I will be writing about it for a while as I try to sort it out and come to grips with what I consider failure on my part. I will likely be posting a lot of shorties as I work through one issue after another, and if time permits I will link them all together.

First Up: The Exam

I've gone through the exam now and I could really only identify a few specific questions that I thought were unrealistic as individual questions. The one I alluded to in the comments of a previous post asked students to explain the role of antigens in an immune response. I still believe this question was designed to confuse and should have been worded differently - a student may well have thought she knew what antigens were, but was convinced by the wording that she must have gotten it backwards, and then screwed up on that question. Now, mind you, that's only one point out of 85, and not a reason to throw out the test. Another question asks students to find analogous structures between some cell organelles and some organs of the human body. The correct answer is the cell membrane and the kidneys. I think that a pretty sophisticated level of understanding is required to answer that one, and I'm not sure it's reasonable.

The difficulty in this test is that almost every question requires a high level of thinking and a lot of distractors - irrelevant information that causes confusion. I know that sounds silly, that I seem to be complaining about a test that requires a lot of thinking, but remember this is a three hour exam for an introductory level biology course for 9th or 10th graders - it's not supposed to be an IQ test. The questions are grammatically and logically complex even for students with strong language skills, and we certainly have our share of students who struggle with reading and writing. They ask about biology concepts in a round-about way. Some have complained, rightly I believe, that the exams have too many items that are designed to show how clever the item writers are. The exam reminds me of the content specialty test (NY State) for biology. That was a grueling 4 hour exam for biology teachers with a pretty high degree of difficulty. I left that exam without a clue whether I had passed or not (I did), and I took the full 4 hours to complete it. Most of my students are far more easily frustrated and prone to giving up under these circumstances.

Still, with proper preparation and LOTS of practice on these kinds of questions, students can do well on the exam. I'm just not sure the state's instructional objectives are aligned with the requirements of the exam.

Update

Test Items by Topic

Ecology - 31 points

Experimental Design - 11 points

Genetics - 10 points

Evolution - 10 points

Reproduction & Development - 9 points

Biochemistry - 8 points

Cell Bio - 8 points

Human Bio - 8 points

Obviously there's a lot of overlap in many of the questions among the topics (numbers do not equal 85 points), and some are open to interpretation, but this is a rough, quick analysis of the breakdown of questions.