Well, exam week is over! It surprisingly flew by quickly. I'm somewhat notorious for giving difficult and lengthy exams, but I don't mind being known as this because exams are important to me and my curriculum. Exams demonstrate the knowledge my students have gained over the year and show me how they apply that knowledge.
My exams are comprised of four parts: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. It felt very different this time around giving exams as I was able to see how I make a connection between the four areas from what I have been studying in this class. I learned that I may emphasize the writing aspect of the test too much in comparison to the other three areas. Perhaps I need to rethink my exams and focus my energies equally amongst the four areas as we know all of them work in conjunction with one another.
Unfortunately, my students did not do as well as I would have hoped. I realize that I expect a lot from them on the exams, but I truly look at it as an exercise to prove to me what they have learned all year long. I don't believe in exams on the last chapter, etc., but exams that are a comprehensive representation of what was taught all year -- especially in the language classroom as the content material continually builds off of prior material. On another note, maybe I should have prepared them better with a better review, but they did not take it seriously so it was hard to put a lot of energy into it -- especially as I'm running on about 5% power right now.
Well, I suppose I just had to vent a little. Hope you all don't mind.
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I can relate to how you feel about exams. This is our exam week. All the exams are county exams. They basically consist of 5 passages with 30 questions overall. I have had only a handful of A's so far. The average is C's. I feel that I worked to hard this year with them. The state scores have not come in yet and they took the exam in March. Supposedly a computer glitch. The good thing is that there are not many F's.
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