Arnold Kling suggests:
Teachers should not be allowed to construct and grade their own exams. Instead, examination should be done by outsiders. . . . A simple way to separate the teacher from the exam is to exchange grading responsibilities. For example, have the teacher of “algebra 2” make up and grade the final exam given to the students taking “algebra 1” from a different teacher. Chances are, the algebra 2 teacher has a good idea of what it is really important for students to master in algebra 1. . . . With the standard practice, where professors make up their own exams, the students put pressure on the professor to make the course as easy as possible. If instead the exam were made up externally, then the pressure would be on the professor to teach the course rigorously.
This seems like a good idea. I’ve felt for a long time that standardized tests would improve the teaching of introductory statistics, as well as the evaluation of the teachers. Writing the standardized test is a lot of work, so I haven’t done it yet, but I’ve been planning to do so before the next time I teach the intro course.
Here’s the full text of Kling’s article, all of which makes sense to me.
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On the same webpage as Kling’s article is an ad for a book called “The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to Darwinism and Intelligent Design.” I clicked through, and oddly enough it seemed to be serious. I guess as long as these people aren’t the ones writing the biology exams, all is ok.
While that is a nice idea, it does not completely fix the problem.
In my opinion, the problem in US universities isn't that professors can affect the difficulty of exams. It is that students believe they're entitled to pressure them to do so.
As long as students continue to act as if their paying tuition means the bar can be lowered to help them through, even in public, good universities like Berkeley, there will be pressure to adjust the grading.
In other words, even if we apply such a scheme, it wouldn't really be credible. If the grading professor's identity were known, students would just pressure them, instead of the teacher, to make things easier. Professors would actually have an incentive to do so, since teaching assignments will either rotate, or you'd expect the person whose course you're grading to grade yours eventually. In other words, there will be a tit for tat mechanism, where everyone will be better off making things slightly easier for each other.
Even if the identity of the grading professor was unknown and kept a secret from students, there would still be pressure on the faculty as a whole.
So this would only work with a standardized test, or truly external testing, as in someone from a random, different university.
Even then though, the harshness of the external examiners would have to be 'fair', but can't be too consistent – if it's consistent, people would just flock to courses that are graded easily from the outside, putting pressure on professors to pressure their outside examiners to make their exams easier; i.e. you're just outsourcing your problem. If it's not too consistent, though, then you're facing issues of 'fairness' – and we all know how fun it is to talk to a student whose worried about that.
A lurker here, but one who spent 35 years in the standardized testing business before retiring. With that background, of course I think students should take standardized final exams. But I think they should be true standardized exams. By that I mean giving all students the same test regardless of who teaches the course.
The advantage of standardization is that grades from such tests are comparable over the different teachers. Standardization also generally leads to more reliable and valid tests assuming one develops the tests according to professional standards. That generally means first creating specifications or a blueprint that identifies the content areas and the weights given to each content area (and given to students prior to the test), items written to those specifications, review of the items by others, and creating appropriate scoring methods translating test performance to grades (there is a whole technology for doing this rationally that is very easy to learn).
Mr. Kling’s approach doesn’t result in a standardized test. It just takes pressure off the student’s teacher for the grading. You can do that by simply agreeing to exchange grading among teachers. I do think simply exchanging the test creation is not a good idea. If I were a student, I might argue that the test developed by the other teacher didn’t represent the content that my teacher taught and that I shouldn’t be penalized for that mismatch.
Clearly you can’t have a standardized final for every class, but I do think it is feasible for classes taught by several different teachers.
Andrew commented:
My comment: All is not OK.
What's happening in real life is that state boards of education are intervening well before the writing of exams. In Kansas, the SBOE emasculated the curriculum so that evolutionary biology would never even appear as something that would be tested in the biology exams. This will be reversed after the recent election, but Texas is another state where such shennanigans are to rear their ugly heads in the near future
This is a political issue, and it can't be solved by getting the right people to write the exams. Everyone who lives in a state where this can appear on the ballot, directly or indirectly, ought to be concerned and take action.