Why do professors make hard exams? (one explains)
As a college student, you probably expected college to be harder than high school, but you might not have been prepared for how hard the college exams were going to be.
College exams can be very difficult, and it probably makes you wonder why professors intentionally make these exams so hard in the first place.
Are they trying to make students fail or are they so out of touch with reality that they think their exams are easy?
As a former professor, I heard this a lot from my students.
A student contacted me once and told me that our university wasn’t Harvard and it shouldn’t be so hard. He was basically telling me to lower my expectations.
But I didn’t because college is college no matter where you go and students should be getting the same education regardless.
I say all of this to help you understand that some professors are going to be harder than others, and some students are going to have different perceptions about how difficult a course is.
Since I got so many comments about my exams, I am going to tell you why we make exams hard, and I will give you some advice to help you get through them.
Why are colleges exams so hard?
College exams are hard because getting a college degree isn’t easy and exams must be challenging to make sure that the degree holds value. And these exam questions are prepared by experts in the field and they may have a hard time seeing the question from the students’ perspective.
Since I am a professor, and I was a college student too, I know exactly where you are coming from as a student.
Sometimes it doesn’t make sense that professors make exams so difficult that the entire class is barely passing and the professor has to curve the grades just to get students to the finish line.
I have been there. I get it. I was you at one point. And now that I am on the other side, I understand why exams are so hard in college.
Professors are the experts in their field. And we have a lot of knowledge about our subject. When we are making our exams, they seem relatively easy for us because we know the material so well.
But when students go to take the exam, they aren’t experts and they may struggle with the test.
It is VERY hard to know what makes a hard test question for college students. So we try our best to create easy, moderate and difficult questions throughout the exam. But sometimes we forget how well we know everything and we might expect our students to know it too.
But, we always know what the average is for our exams and grades typically follow a bell curve anyway. If anything is really off, professors will know and can adjust.
This is one reason. Another reason is that professors aren’t test creators by profession.
Professors aren’t necessarily trained on how to create tests. Sure, there are some trainings here and there, but it isn’t something that most professors are throughly trained on.
This leaves many exams unchecked. And may result in hard exams. But if a professor unintentionally creates a hard exam, it will show through their results. And they will be likely to curve the grades anyway.
Overall, I am saying that MOST professors don’t intentionally create hard exams, it’s just that we have a hard time knowing how to make adequate test questions in the first place.
New or inexperienced professors are the ones who are likely giving these hard exams until they get the hang of it.
Another reason why exams are so dang challenging is because professors get their questions from test banks made by their textbook publisher. And they may not be written in easy to understand terms.
Even beyond that, the professor probably doesn’t teach the material exactly like the textbook.
Where do professors get their exam questions?
Many college professors will get their test questions from a test bank that is provided by the publisher of the book they adopted for the course while other professors will independently write their exam questions themselves.
In a perfect world, colleges would have experts create their exams. But many don’t have these resources.
So, the next best thing is to use a textbook publisher’s test bank. While these test questions are usually expertly written, it is far from perfect. They are typically written by experts in the field too.
But it can be hard for them to see the question from the students’ perspective.
Professors can also choose to create test questions by themselves. This is really labor intensive and probably isn’t that popular.
As a professor, I used to always go straight to the publisher, but then I realized that I could really tailor the question to my course if I just did it myself.
This takes a lot of time for professors to do so most university professors are going to use what is already available to them.
How to do better on difficult exams in college
Understand the material really well
Stop trying to just memorize it
Go to tutoring
Talk to your professor
Create a study group
Make a sample test
Ask your professor for a review
The biggest tip of all is to GET HELP. Do not just sit back and do bad on your college exams. There are too many ways to try and get help.
READ MORE : If you fail an exam, what should you do?
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