<p>Unclear, badly written tests are a pet peeve of mine and my children. Obviously, classroom exams aren’t subjected to any formal testing or analysis like ETS does, in order to make sure smart kids aren’t getting wrong an easy question because there’s an error or something unintentionally misleading. My older children were academically strong and could usually wade through the confusing, poorly worded questions. They were also intuitive enough to interpret questions in light of their teacher’s quirks and biases. Furthermore, they paid attention to the details and were generally methodical and smart enough not to fall for the distractors when they actually knew their stuff. They always wondered who DID fall for those distractors.</p>
<p>Know they know. Their sister. Youngest D will be the kid who won’t have picked up on the teacher’s idiosyncrasies enough to know that when she says X she really means Y. Or D will solve the problem correctly, but pick the wrong answer. She’ll choose the first answer with the correct number part without noticing the unit is wrong. I understand that sometimes confusion over a unit, like whether it’s squared or not, is part of knowing the material. But that’s not the issue here. It’s being careful about the details. Also, D gets easily ferhoodled. She is the kid that WILL get tricked by the things designed to trick, even if they’re not that tricky and would be an obvious option to eliminate for everyone else. I think her brain can only focus on a few things at a time, so the least important detail could go out the window under stress. When there’s more time available, she can operate in more stages or increments. A test situation doesn’t allow for that. </p>
<p>This has made me more sympathetic to parents who claim their kid doesn’t test well. I used to think that was usually a rationalization, or else the kid had been pattern matching with the homework and lacked a depth of understanding. But now I see that my D actually does know the material almost as well as her siblings did, but her test grades don’t reflect that. </p>
<p>But this has also made me wonder, on a larger scale, whether classroom exams too often separate out who’s smart and knows, from who’s NOT smart but DOES know–right along with those who are indeed clueless. D is now in a situation where despite several D’s on tests, the teacher isn’t worried about her. He doesn’t think she’s really in any trouble with understanding the material. That’s nice, but what if this issue doesn’t remedy itself? She’ll still fail the class.</p>
<p>You know, I wonder about this, too. I posted about my son’s struggles in Italian and I really wonder. And by wonder, I mean that I am physically ill about this. He has every possible software or app and uses them. He has hundreds of old fashioned flash cards and he knows every one of them. He can read basic literature in Italian, he can write at the appropriate level for his grade in Italian. But the tests are just often a disaster and I can’t understand why. The answer from teachers is always “study and memorize” but he studies and absolutely has memorized. Heaven help me because this outlier grade is sucking down his GPA and his scholarship has a GPA requirement. And my company is laying off.</p>
<p>I look very forward to the CC wisdom, experience and insight you will get on this thread. And no offense, but it’s nice to know that other parents are sometimes baffled.</p>
<p>My answer is a resounding NO.
D2 (college senior) is becoming finely and deeply educated, but “doesn’t test well,” even in classes she adores, when she clearly has learned much and can research/write papers that do well. I reached a point with her where I said, “I’m proud of how educated you actually are. Just do the best you can with the tests.” </p>
<p>Sorry about the stress, Zmom. For many kids, the academic ways of learning languages and being tested on that just don’t work. (Italian children learn by doing, eh?) Best wishes to him.</p>
<p>The answer to that question is YMMV depending on teacher and the individual student(s) involved.</p>
<p>Some teachers, like some high school teachers I’ve had lived to design and give exams which confused so many people that up to 75% of the class would fail<em>…and I mean with an F while the highest grade achieved would hover somewhere in the C to -B range. I’ve known relatives and friends who encountered this with some college Profs, especially those in STEM and literature fields</em>*. </p>
<p>Best thing to do is get tutoring and/or counseling ASAP along with researching teachers/Profs who aren’t extreme about “attention to detail” and/or having a strong reputation for tricky and difficult exams. At the very worst, it may be an academic rough patch your given student may need to learn to handle as he/she may encounter it again in college and beyond in grad school, professional exams, etc. </p>
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<li>Worse case IME was coincidentally a HS foreign language class with a teacher so mean to his students that I recently found from a fellow alum he almost caused a mutual friend of ours to literally get sick and drop out freshman year. Thankfully, he had a great support system with family and high school classmates to overcome it as he’s now on the tenure track at an elite university . Unfortunately, there were no options to switch to another teacher as he was the only teacher teaching beginner level of that language at the time. </li>
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<p>** One reason why I dreaded poetry during HS & college. </p>
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<p>Actually, ETS has periodically found they had to toss some questions when they found too many people were getting it confused because of poor wording or errors in the answer choices. Either too many right/identical answers or the choices were all wrong.</p>
I’m not sure. Never thought of that. He always has an oral component and does fine with that. Also, strangely, he does fine with essay writing in Italian. It’s the fill-in type questions that wipe him out and they are the most of almost all tests.</p>
<p>Beginner foreign language classes test on both the oral and written parts…including the “fill in the blank” type questions. </p>
<p>Sounds like if he’s able to overcome the hump of the first year or two, he’ll end up excelling in the higher level foreign language courses as “fill in the blank” questions will be supplanted by more essay type assignments.</p>
<p>^Interesting that was the only part of the tests I was any good at! It sounds like he has a good ear (not surprising for a musician, and it might be more a question of test anxiety). FWIW, perhaps instead of studying vocabulary he could work specifically on samples of those kinds of tests. I also suggest reaching out to the teachers. If a teacher knows you are going the extra mile with tutoring, attending their extra help sessions etc. they are much more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt when it comes to grading. They might be able to recommend workbooks, or give you past tests so he can practice this type of question. Worth a try.</p>
<p>My older son famously was marked wrong by a teacher for saying Roanoke was the first US colony. It turned out she wanted the first successful colony. Since she refused to give him credit (he already had an A on the test), she immediately went on his #&%( list and she could do no right the rest of the year. I had to request my younger son not have her, as by the time the year was over we all hated her. (Luckily not a problem since she was a very popular teacher with the parents.)</p>
<p>My younger son had an amazing ability when he was younger to get the wrong answer for the right reason - mostly because of poorly designed tests. An example:</p>
<p>cow, deer, moose, snake, giraffe - which doesn’t belong?</p>
<p>The correct answer was giraffe - not found naturally in the US, but my son said cow because it’s the only domesticated animal.</p>
<p>Luckily he outgrew the problem and did very well on the SATs.</p>
<p>Funniest story - when my kids were in APUSH they mostly practiced for the APs, but then they had a month of sitting around before the easier NYS Regents test. The teacher used to give them what he considered bad questions from past Regents tests so they would be used to dealing with bad test questions. Talk about preparing for the test!</p>
<p>Just to clarify, I meant test orally on the parts that are now written questions. It’s one thing to know, eg, correct grammar/be able to use it properly- and another to be able to make the mental jig that allows you to read a question, dig up the answer and get it down on paper. </p>
<p>Many of us learn languages by ear.</p>
<p>ps. Interesting comment about music, mathmom.</p>
<p>And, I thought snake, because it is the only one without legs.</p>
<p>I have noticed everything theGFG outlined with my older kids - firstborn D was the type to get tripped up by badly worded and incoherent tests (mostly in science). She struggled a bit and her best solution was asking for help from the teacher after school once or twice a week. Getting to know the teacher helped her understand some of the nuance in her communication. S1 is a test taking machine, so this sort of thing affected him less. Both kids had the same flaky chemistry teacher - S’s solution was “blinding her with science,” and adding on more complex information (if numbers worked, he usually added a function or formula), figuring that she would be too embarrassed to admit that she didn’t understand what he was doing and just mark it correct (garbage in/garbage out). It worked! </p>
<p>S2 just started HS and we see more of the same, this time in bio. One thing we’ve told him to do is RAISE YOUR HAND during the test and ask a question if something is unclear (even if it is a TINY bit unclear). I also purchased the study guide for his textbook on Amazon, which has been helpful. It has various exercises for each chapter which helps him look at the material a different way. </p>
<p>Another suggestion, I’ve noticed that some teachers use different terms for the same thing (again, mostly in science). Perhaps they themselves learned it one way, but the text uses a slightly different term or explanation. This really confuses students who are trying to grasp new concepts…I’ve suggested to S2 that he use Khan Academy and other online resources so that he’s exposed to different terms and different explanations of the same ideas.</p>
<p>I hate those questions because the answer could literally be any of the choices. There will exist some categorization that could separate one of those from all the others. For instance, snake is the only non-mammal. Moose is the only one found in Arctic climates. </p>
<p>Either way, I can see how someone could have a bad day and do poorly on a single test, but I don’t believe that someone is innately better at test taking than anyone else.</p>
<p>No, they don’t reflect what we know. And honestly, it never gets any better. I just had a test last week in grad school- a top ranked program- where the entire class bombed. Not because we didn’t know the stuff, but because the questions were very poorly written. We argued back many, many, MANY points and it was honestly just a cluster-you-know-what. </p>
<p>I’ve been trying to figure out how to take poor tests for years. One thing that’s been helpful, and some teachers are receptive and some aren’t, is to ask for old tests or practice problems. That way you can get a feel for what the teacher is looking for.</p>
<p>This question falls into the category of “amazing facts” that showed up on QMP’s high school tests from time to time. For example, not many people are aware that Thomas Jefferson was the <em>second</em> President of the United States, nor that the <em>First</em> Continental Congress declared our independence from Britain. The fact that T. S. Eliot was a woman was mentioned in class, though that one didn’t appear on an exam. (Incidentally, it’s interested to read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, while imagining that Eliot really was female while Prufrock stays male.)</p>
<p>Cows would have come over with the European colonists, wouldn’t they? In which case, the domesticated cattle are not found naturally in the US. Which leaves the snake as the correct answer, as the non-mammal.</p>
<p>Although the giraffe’s the only word on the list with two syllables.</p>
<p>Snake could be a correct answer, because it is not a mammal, or because it refers to a large numbers of species, genuses, and families of living things.</p>
<p>Cow could be a correct answer, because it is domesticated by humans in large quantities. (Your son’s answer.)</p>
<p>My first instinct would have been giraffe, not for the reason given, but because it has two syllables. Different filter, different answer. I remember that in his freshman year of HS, my son politely argued with a teacher once about his answer to a poorly worded question. The teacher told him to sit down as he had an A in the class and it didn’t matter. He didn’t do much arguing after that. He told me that teachers generally don’t appreciate it when you argue/discuss the validity of a question on a test. :)</p>