Forgive me, but I’m going to complain about students for a bit.
So it’s my usual practise in lower-division courses to put together a sample test a couple of classes before I give an actual test. On reflection, this is perhaps not the best idea; I do it in part because of the somewhat peculiar instution of the Exam Bank at my alma mater, where students can borrow and photocopy several years’ worth of past exams. We don’t have that here, and so I wanted to give my students some idea what to expect in terms of testing style.
The problem that I’m running into is that students — at least, students here, or rather my students here — seem to be a uniquely literal-minded bunch. They don’t generalise correctly; they seem to assume that if I give a word problem involving airplanes and the Pythagorean Theorem on the sample test, then I’ll do the same on the actual test, changing only the numbers to protect the innocent. Then when the real test rolls around, it’s something about streetlamps and similar triangles and no one knows anything about similar triangles so they all write the Pythagorean formula on the page and then go off and die somewhere. Messily. With numbers scattered arbitrarily around the page.
My other concern is that… well, so the day before the test is typically a review day unless I’m horribly, horribly behind in the course material. The review generally ends up being answering questions about the sample test, and quite frequently becomes just going through the entire sample test question by question. And while that’s not ideal, I’m fine with that…
…until I start getting e-mails from students saying things like, could you please send me the answers to the sample test. Frequently, these are coming from students who were in class when we went through the sample test. So I don’t know what’s going on here. It could be just an inability to take coherent notes, but in my day people with that issue — i.e. me — would just suck it up, listen extra hard, and make sure to have a roommate or other close friend with excellent note-taking skills in the same class. So for my money, I think what I’m seeing is indolence raised to the level of high crimes.