Well, this was weird. Here at my company (I do all of my teaching adjunctly and spend the daytime in Big Industry), we just had a largely useless three-hour training session on the importance of quality. Yep. It was the usual meaningless babble (Slide one: Quality is important! Slide two: Who is quality important for? Slide three: Quality is important for everyone!).
But at the end, they gave a quiz. And I found myself doing everything we hate when the flakes do.
First I pored back through my notes, which we were allowed to do, looking for the keywords that would lead to the answers. This question is looking for a single term, so where can I find that term in the printout of the PowerPoint slides?
Then I got a little mad that the quiz wasn't that straightforward. They actually want me to think about these questions, not just be a human search engine? They want answers that aren't obvious and require contemplation? What the hell is wrong with them?
Then the guy in front of me made his quiz pretty easily visible, and some of his answers sounded pretty good. I've spent hours and hours chasing cheaters, but...well...it's such a stupid quiz, and we're all adults who just want to get back to work, and the questions aren't even written well, and we're all here so that we can just get a check mark in our personnel training files. So what the hell. I wrote down an answer or two. (I think one of the answers was "compliance." Big shock.)
Finally, as I stood up to turn in my quiz, I realized that one of the questions was poorly worded. There were a number of correct but mutually exclusive answers, and I thought about writing a whole paragraph explaining this. But I knew I'd be called into someone's office for being a smartass and not taking the quiz seriously (when in reality I'd be taking it more seriously than the moron who wrote it).
So I asked one of the folks who administered the quiz, "What kind of answer are you looking for in question 7?" And I indicated the guess I had already written down, and she said, "That's fine." And I felt a bit relieved. (I also saw, when I turned in my exam, that the woman sitting to my left had been cheating off of me.)
This quiz was a pointless corporate exercise. I actually did learn a few things from their presentation, but the quiz clearly just existed so that someone could say we all passed a quiz. But...is this how our snowflakes see exams as well? As pointless obstacles to navigate past? Is this why they cheat and ask for answers and get annoyed when we make them learn?
And if so, then how, oh how, do we make them realize that what we're teaching is a lot less pointless than a three-hour seminar on quality?
Forget the students. I think that your work environment needs to be analyzed here.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, how do you like working at Initech? How are the Bobs? Is Lumbergh still asking you to come in on Saturdays to catch up on the TPS reports?
I'm confused. Pat, are you "outing" Ruby's identity/workplace? Cuz that is not cool, and Fab Sun should delete the comment if so.
ReplyDeleteNo worries. Initech is the workplace from the movie "Office Space." But my company isn't too dissimilar.
ReplyDeleteApparently, my weak attempt at humor failed miserably. I promise to try harder next time. Do I still have a chance to pass this class?
ReplyDelete"But...is this how our snowflakes see exams as well? As pointless obstacles to navigate past? Is this why they cheat and ask for answers and get annoyed when we make them learn?
ReplyDeleteAnd if so, then how, oh how, do we make them realize that what we're teaching is a lot less pointless than a three-hour seminar on quality?"
To your first question, I would say "yes," at least in that this is how students justify cheating. I have not cheated in college. But sometimes classes do feel like obstacles to navigate past, and that has less to do with the content of the course of the professor as it has to do with resenting the college for having so many non-major requirements that it seems like we hardly get to do any in-depth study of our own subject!