How to approach a professor after failing exam? Professor won't let students look at old exams as a policy.
November 3, 2011 12:06 PM   Subscribe

How to approach a professor after failing an exam? Professor won't let students look at old exams as policy. So don't know what questions to focus on or why I got questions incorrect. Any insight would be appreciated.

I'm in my second year of pharmacy school and have failed an exam for a class and according to the syllabus will receive an F for my final grade. The course is structured so that there are three - three credit pathophysiology courses taught during one semester. Each pathophysiology course is taught within the span of 5 weeks. So there are a, b, c, pathophsyiology courses taught in sequence - each worth 3 credits (total of 9 credits in a semester) and where each course has 3 exams each - this amounts to about 1 exam with 11-13 lectures every 10 days for the entire semester. I failed the first unit pathophysiology course that has renal/cardio physiology. According to the syllabus if you fail 2 exams you will automatically receive an F for the course. So my fate should be done. The problem is that I have talked with the course master (instructor over the sequence) and they will not let me see the old exam enabling me to look at my mistakes. I have also talked to my advisor about the situation, but it remains up in the air on what exactly will become of me. If I receive the F, I will not be able to move on to the next sequence and have to be held back a year. Part of the problem I have is that I am not allowed to see my old exams - so the only thing I know is my score. The course master has been adamant about this. THe course master had suggested that I find out which professors questions I got wrong on the portion of the exam (we are allowed to see our scantron key and the actual key online; along with which professors wrote which questions but not the questions at all); and go to them with questions. However, students (not just myself) have argued that we are unable to know why we missed questions wrong because we cannot look at our old exam questions thus deterring many from going to professors to ask questions - since students don't know what to ask. It's been a problem not just for a student like myself who has failed but others who simply want to see their old exams. There is no justification from the course master why the old exams can not be looked at. I have now asked the professor (course master again) if I could meet to discuss studying the material and the professor seems receptive. I know my fate is sealed but I want to at least do everything I can now to show that I do care about learning the material and did try my best but due to tricky wording or just my inability to take tests (and external circumstances of sick family member) - I may have not been able to do as well as I would have hoped. I didn't honestly slack on studying the material and even cried when I received my grade because I actually studied my guts out but in the end it was not enough.

So my question is what can I ask for help exactly in? How would others approach this situation? How can I show that I do want to learn the material or learned it improperly/insufficiently and am willing to do what it takes to re-learn it correctly? RIght now the third sequence of the course is starting and while studying for that I have to go back to the previous material and figure out what questions to ask since I cannot see my old exam.

I also instilled a tutor - but they are also an upper classmen pharmacy student and basically have been tight on time and also not as insightful as I would have liked.

Can anyone give some insight on what they would do in my shoes? I have been distraught talking to my advisor and the Academic Dean who are not giving me the final answer yet on what my situation entails (and probably won't until the end of the semester when all the other courses and grades come in). I'm willing and more than willing to comply and learn; it wasn't because I didn't study but that I did not study incorrectly... and I didn't know exactly what to pick apart in the details.
posted by anonymous to Education (15 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Some of the norms around here, and the norms that you should probably respect, are going to vary from country to country and I'm inferring from your language ("course master," "instilled a tutor") that you're not in or from the US.

I wouldn't want to offer advice that, in your homeland, turned out to be so antagonistic to the powers that be in your university that you suffered as a result.

You should memail the mods to include where this is taking place.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 12:16 PM on November 3, 2011 [3 favorites]


Maybe go through the school's grade appeal process, if there is one, not because you think you actually passed, but because through that process they would be forced to justify your grade to you and that would (I think) mean showing you the questions you got wrong. Good luck!
posted by misspony at 12:17 PM on November 3, 2011


Wait, you're telling us that you're not even allowed to look at your exam once you've taken it? I can understand not being allowed to take it home, or not being allowed to be alone in a room with it (you could take pictures or something), but not being allowed to even see it? Even in the presence of a professor or TA? Not even to ask questions? Not even to check the grader's work?

That is major extreme bullshit.

Go to the dean of students and report it. I couldn't even begin to count the number of mis-graded questions I've had passed back to me on exams and homework. I had a teacher in high school who was mad at me because my boyfriend at the time called her a bitch to her face, and she took it out on me in unfairly grading my assignments. I'm not saying that you're in a situation where someone's singling you out, but it can and does happen. Getting to see tests after you take them helps to combat this.

Your first step is getting to see your own test. Then you can worry about what questions to ask.
posted by phunniemee at 12:20 PM on November 3, 2011


I couldn't agree more with phunniemee, I'm a grad student in a biology department, and mark exams/assignments frequently. After a sufficient amount of time or with a sufficient number of papers, I'm guaranteed to make some mistakes. Now, these are rarely going to make or break a student's grade, but they happen. For that reason alone you should always be allowed to check your exams after the fact. That's all the more important with the insta-fail policies in place here.

This seems like something you need to rally some support around. Do you have a class representative? A departmental students association president? If there is someone like that who liaises with administration on matters of student importance, they're the person you probably want to see first. If not (or after you see them), then are there faculty advisors for your pharmacy program? Go to them and make your case. With these kind of individuals as support, you can make a push for a real change in the departmental policy. It probably won't be enough to change this particular grade or the outcome you're going to receive for failing the exam, but it'll give you real benefits throughout the rest of your time in the program.

Those would be my preliminary steps. Usually you're allowed some time before a deadline passes where you can no longer appeal a grade. I'd advise you try to look into these kinds of options before escalating to that step, because often lawyers and official administrators will get involved there and people will start to button up to protect themselves.

One note: be prepared for this process to take time. Inertia is the primary force in academia. You are going to be struggling against it for months probably. Stay strong and make sure you save all your correspondance.
posted by dnesan at 12:36 PM on November 3, 2011


Do the instructors have access to the exams? If you have the question numbers that you want to ask about, they may be able to give you the question content.
posted by kagredon at 12:39 PM on November 3, 2011


we are allowed to see our scantron key and the actual key online; along with which professors wrote which questions

so you know definitively if your answers were graded correctly, and the professor to ask for each question, and the question number for each question you want to know about...

students (not just myself) have argued that we are unable to know why we missed questions wrong because we cannot look at our old exam questions thus deterring many from going to professors to ask questions - since students don't know what to ask

I must be dense, why isn't your first question, "what was question #x?"? You get the answer to that question from the professor, think about it, and then ask your "why" question using the knowledge you got from the first question. Are you only allowed to talk to your professor once per semester?
posted by nomisxid at 12:55 PM on November 3, 2011 [1 favorite]


Scantrons are graded automatically using a machine. So unless the machine was miscalibrated or not working properly or someone went to the trouble of singling yours out to be graded by hand, your paper won't have been graded incorrectly. So I think phunniemee is off track with this situation.

I imagine you're not allowed to look at the questions again because they're reusing them from year to year. Making you jump through all kinds of hoops to work out who to talk to about what seems pretty rude and lazy, but reusing questions verbatim is pretty lazy too. They quite likely will not budge on this (hey, it's easier not to after all).

You could try asking to see the paper along with your answers under supervision, preferably with the professors who set the questions. They may still say no though, otherwise everyone in the class will be lining up to look.

Alternatively, you should ask for someone in the teaching staff, someone who can't steal the questions or whatever, to take a look for you and see what's going on. Maybe you always miss a certain type of question, or seem to miss the point of what's being asked, or are clearly weak in one area, or just don't know enough of the material overall. When I was marking undergrad work I could often see different weaknesses in different students just from their answers, the patterns can be pretty obvious. The staff should be able to glean some information from your answers to generate advice even if they don't tell you every detail of what you got right and wrong.

If you have any kind of interaction with your teachers besides just listening to them lecture then answering their exams then it would also be worth talking to them about how they see your work. They'll have some opinion of your weaknesses and should be able to give you at least some specific advice even without the exam paper. Even just a conversation with them about how the exam went and what you were thinking and about the coursework in general will give them a feel for what you do and don't know, so go see them and chat about it all even if you don't get any of the details that you want before hand, it will be worth at least something.

If after all the trying you still can't find out where you specifically went wrong you still have one avenue, and actually I'd suggest you do this regardless. Multi-choice questions require a specific learning and answering style. They often have quite specific details or tricks to how they are written. It's quite different from, say, writing essays where you get to show what you do know, instead you have to study to the test a lot more rather than learning all the material. So ask your professors for advice about how to do well in these specific types of tests. If your university has any kind of tutoring or student learning centre then ask them for tips too, they will give more general, unbiased advice. Even talking to students who are passing these things may give you something to work on, talk to your peers about how they approach the test itself. It could be that you're failing simply because you don't know how to take their one kind of test (and it's a lazy for them to be relying on them so don't feel bad about that) rather than any inability to do the science.
posted by shelleycat at 1:01 PM on November 3, 2011


Oh and of course check your scantron results online to make sure they were being picked up correctly by the machine. I've seen students fill in those sheets wrong. It would suck if you were failing because you didn't fill in the little bubbles correctly rather than any lack of knowledge.
posted by shelleycat at 1:05 PM on November 3, 2011


Sorry, I missed the part about it being a scantron-graded test. I still think you should be able to see the questions, though. How can you possibly learn from your mistakes if you don't know which mistakes you made?

Push for action on this.
posted by phunniemee at 1:09 PM on November 3, 2011


That is major extreme bullshit. ... Go to the dean of students and report it.

Alternately, the academic culture wherever this is taking place, in terms of country, university, and field of study, may simply be much more severe and hierarchical than that in standard American arts-and-sciences undergraduate programs. In which case, taking it to the dean of students might be useless or an actively counterproductive provocation.

For that matter, there might not be a dean of students, or any position that is reasonably analogous to one.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:14 PM on November 3, 2011


I don't think the OP is trying to appeal their grade. They just want to know what questions they got wrong so that can work on the material.

Anon, I would make a note of which questions you got wrong on your scantron sheet. When you meet with your professor, tell him that you aren't sure where your weaknesses are in the material. Show him a list of your wrong answers, and ask if he can look at the exam and give you some ideas for things you need to work on. A decent professor will understand that you're approaching this in good faith and will try to help you out within the departments guidelines.

Not allowing students to keep (or even see) exam questions after they've written a final isn't super common at universities I've been at, but it's not unheard of.
posted by auto-correct at 1:27 PM on November 3, 2011 [3 favorites]


By the way, I can say as a matter of fact that at at least one major US public university which is subject to quite stringent laws about students' rights of access to documentation, one document that they have absolutely no such "right" to see is exam questions after having completed the exam. That is entirely a matter left to the discretion of the instructor. I would be very surprised if this student has any "right" to see those questions no matter where his/her institution is located.

OP, I think you are probably more focused on knowing the specific details of the questions you got wrong than you really need to be. If there's a noticeable pattern to which professor's questions you did badly on then you can, I assume, infer from that what topics you need to revise. Approach the relevant professor(s) and ask them if they'd be willing to set you some practice questions and discuss your answers. If not, see if there's a TA or a classmate who did particularly well on the exam who might be willing to do that for you. In any event, focus your revision on those parts of the course materials / lecture notes etc. Mastery of the subject area is the real issue here rather than that specific list of questions.
posted by yoink at 1:28 PM on November 3, 2011 [2 favorites]


I'm with nomisxid, I'm not quite getting it. You have the answers, you know who wrote the questions, and by showing up and asking them what you did wrong and what you should work on, you're showing them that you are dedicated to improving and mastering the material. I'm wondering if this is a way to force students to utilize their professors rather than just relying on books - that it's not just about realising that you got this particular question wrong, but that there's a flaw in, say, your approach. Kind of like forcing you to "show your work," if that makes sense. (I haven't had my afternoon cup of coffee yet.) I can't/won't speculate further on why the policy is in place or whether it should be, but I hope your fellow students know that by sitting back wringing your hands over this instead of talking to the professors doesn't solve jack.
posted by sm1tten at 4:00 PM on November 3, 2011 [1 favorite]


One thing to consider is that your professors have seen this before. They know that you can't see the questions before coming to them. They know that you're going to show up with a list of question numbers and nothing else. Every other conscientious student with low marks has come to them in the same straits for the last however-many years.

While this is new and confusing to you, it's neither new nor confusing to them.

Before trying to change the system, try to work within it. Good professors will understand what you are going through (it's their system after all) and do their best to help you. Select a professor that you are relatively at ease with and start with them.
posted by oddman at 7:28 PM on November 3, 2011 [1 favorite]


The fact that it's a scantron does not in any way mean that there can't be a mistake in the test results. I used to take them all the time and there are multiple ways the results can get skewed --

1. The grader can run the test through incorrectly.
2. A changed answer that was not erased fully can make it look like there are multiple bubbles filled in.
3. The test taker can skip a question, so that he/she accidentally answers question 23 in space 22, and then 24 in space 23, and so on, messing up a bunch of answers. (This happened to a friend of mine who seemingly failed a test despite being unquestionably one of the best students in the class. The mistake wasn't caught until we were going over the test papers)

Even if cases like 2 and 3 wouldn't change the grade the OP ultimately gets, it would be important for the OP to know whether the issue is with the material or with the test process. I don't think it would be out of place for the OP to ask to have the test double-checked manually.
posted by sparrow89 at 2:11 AM on November 4, 2011


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