Well, that didn't turn out quite like I imagined it would

I marked a mixed bag of final exams on Saturday, and honestly, I thought they would have been more uniformly good.

In that poetry class I was teaching, I decided that the final exam would be open book and that the students would have one task: create an anthology, selected from poems we studied, accompanied by an introduction that demonstrates what they learned during the class.

Frankly, I thought it sounded like a fun assignment. They would get to look over everything they'd done, think about it, and come up with an explanation of why we studied some of the things we did (i.e. why they are important things to learn).

I told them ahead of time it was open book and warned them that it would require them to think creatively. I even told them it would be to their advantage to insert tabs or use some other means of being able to quickly identify what we did in class. I also warned them that planning their response would be important and that they should give themselves enough time to plan rather than just diving into writing the exam when they got it.

Then they walked into the exam room (on a Saturday morning - how cruel!)

Some of them got it. They realized that the task was designed to test their knowledge and that they would need to demonstrate it by specific reference to the poems they chose to include in their anthology. They did a great job of selecting poems that served them well in highlighting several important features. Actually, many of them got it. Some ran out of time because they got caught up minor details, but most got it.

But some of them really missed the boat on this one. They tried to write about just about every poem we studied (and we studied more than 40 of them). Consequently, they did a horrible job of it. Some of them really got hung up on obscure forms like the villanelle and sestina, when we spent ten times as much time talking about figures of speech or sound structures, or even the use (and abuse) of poet biography when talking about poetry. No one failed the exam because they all were able to talk about some of what was important in the course. But some of them did a poor job of connecting what they'd learned to actual example. That was disappointing.

I get that the kind of meta-commentary on the course inherent in the task is difficult to undertake and that students often aren't asked to produce it. But they were English majors taking an elective poetry course - I guess I expected a bit more because they obviously very consciously choose to take the course. I would think that would have produced some more conscious learning on their parts. Their other assignments seemed to indicate they were thinking critically about the material.

Another weird thing that happened is that a couple of students wrote the introduction to the anthology as if they were planning syllabi, saying things like "Students should read this poem to..." I was so confused by this I went back to see if I'd inadvertently said something in the instructions that would lead them to think I wanted them to plan a mini-version of the course. But no, there's nothing there. Then I found myself wondering if those students didn't know what an anthology was? Perhaps. Then again, maybe they were just so focused on their own experience in the class, they steered toward course planning rather than anthology planning without really being aware of what they were doing.

What was probably even more surprising though was that some of them seemed to not understand the possibilities and perils of open book exams, leading me to think my colleagues are not offering them very often. I had one write a note in the margins that he/she wasn't sure of a spelling for a term when the glossary of terms in the back of the book was right there on the desk. Look it up! It's there for you to use. We'd even talked about this and I'd suggested that any annotations, sample scansions etc. they'd done in the text did not need to be erased before the exam.

What disappoints me the most in the poor showing is that I decided to make the exam this way because I thought such a task would not only assess their learning, but also be a final opportunity for learning. I wanted it to be not just evaluative but also a chance for the students to reflect critically on what they learned and how they learned it (i.e. which poems were most demonstrative of the skills they've developed). That didn't happen to the extent I thought it would. So I'm disappointed.

Looks like it's not just the students who learned a lesson here!