68%

I'd like to know how teachers develop and create the tests that they do.

As I mentioned earlier this week, volunteering to 'help' hubs do his homework has ultimately meant that I will be doing it for him. Men are helpless sometimes ladies, I swear.

So last night when I got home from work, I was totally prepared for the History test that was due at midnight for the first 3 chapters he (I. Whatever.) had studied so far. I had read and printed study guides, created time-lines, answered extra credit questions and from the grades I (He. Whatever.) had gotten on the previous assignments, felt like we had a decent understand of the material.

We sat down at the table to take the test together after Little Bit had went to bed fully expecting to blow the thing out of the water. It was multiple choice with 50 questions and a 90 minute time limit; it sounded easy enough.

Two questions in and I was sweatin' it.

I scrolled down and read each question and there were maybe two that I knew the answers to off of the top of my head. The rest were hard - like, really, really hard. If I thought I had a decent understanding of a topic, I would read the question, think of the answer before I even looked at the options for answers and then realize that the answer wasn't there! Not only that, but it seemed like every question could have been answered with more than one of the multiple choice options. I have never been tortured so much through a 90 minute test in my life.

We struggled through it, Jeremy and I taking turns googling things and looking through the book, notes, study-guides and time-lines that I had gathered for this very purpose. What gets me the most - we were told not to use any notes, books, etc...

How in the world?!

With 20 seconds left on our time clock, I guessed on the last two questions and submitted our test. We got a 68%. A 68%!!! I have never in my life gotten that low of a grade. (Okay, maybe a few times my senior year, but that was because I was stupid and took calculus instead of something like art as an extra class. Senioritis anyone?)

The worse part? The class average was a 60%.
(That actually made me feel a little better; I knew I was above average. Wink, wink.)

Now I know it sounds like I'm just ranting because I was somehow unprepared for a test and failed it miserablly, but I really don't feel like that's the case. We looked up almost every answer to the questions on the test and found what our text and teachings had told us what should have been the correct answer. And yet - our test score was still that low. What gets me even more is how low the average was. Clearly there was something wrong with this test!

I'm hoping that this teacher plans on curving the grade. I honestly don't see how he couldn't, I mean - there was obviously something lacking to prepare his class for this test for them all to recieve such low grades. I always hate the first tests in a class; you don't know what you're going into, how to study or prepare and it either stresses you out more when you see that second test coming up or gives you a sigh of relief.

Clearly the stressing out will just climb from here.