In my last class of the day, I had the same standard lesson as always. We read our books, wrote down our definitions, did some "free talking" conversations, then waited for the bell to ring. Today I had prepared a quiz for the students over the last three units of the book. It had multiple choice answers and had been stuff we had covered recently. The students were given ten minutes to complete the quiz.
I hate giving multiple choice tests unless I have a strict punishment system in place before I give out the test. The problem with multiple choice tests is that if students guess, you don’t know how close they are to knowing the actual answer. Since they students are awful and hate to study now, they simply circled questions at random and failed the test.
When I made them correct the test, they simply chose another answer. Their odds dramatically increased each time they got an answer wrong. This means that they had a better chance of getting the right answer even if they didn’t know. Some of the students started coordinating their answers to eliminate the choices faster. If they simply studied and worked a little bit harder for the effort it took to organize such a cheating ring would look like a waste. When you see students cheer because they got the last "wrong" answer possible, you know that a test format is simply broken. The next time, I’ll punish students severely for every wrong answer and won’t return tests after I grade them. I’ll probably require a written answer as well, since circling things takes less time and effort than trying to correct sentences by hand.
I told my head teacher about students cheering for wrong answers. She apologized to me and said, "You know, they were fine when they started this class, but now, I think they are actually…getting…dumber." She shares the class with me, so it’s not an attack on my teaching or the lack of progress I’ve had with all students using the same books. It’s a souring of attitude and hormones mostly to blame.
