Psychology exams aren’t too easy at TiU
The recent drama concerning exams for Economic Psychology turned out not to be such a drama after all. Earlier this month we looked into exams that were being recycled for some classes in the Psychology department.
It turned out that there was one exam that was the cause for all the commotion: Economic Psychology. A second year Psychology course, taught by Marcel Zeelenberg. The exam for September was almost an exact copy of the previous (December) exam of 2012. Standard practice, unfortunately this particular exam was used by some students as a practice-exam.
Student association Complex contacted Univers to get to the bottom of the problem. Chairman Jip Schuivens mailed: “Exams for psychology aren’t easy, but the problem is that the database for exam questions is very limited. Most students think the quality of the questions is up to par, but agree that they often recognize the answers instead of the theories. We were already aware of this problem and started looking into it last year. This year’s problems did not spark the investigation, as many students seem to think.”
One particular student thought it would be funny to increase the drama by spoofing an e-mail from Zeelenberg, stating that the grades would be nullified because of fraud. That gave Univers reason to think there might be truth in the accusations, particularly because Zeelenberg failed to nip these things in the bud.
Univers talked things over with Zeelenberg to find out what really happend with the Economic Psychology exams. It turned out that the exams from 2012 had indeed been (partly) recycled, as Zeelenberg was not aware of the public availability of that version. “It was a real eye-opener for us. We did not realize how opportunistic students had become. Students aren’t allowed to take any materials home with them at an exam, except for their answers to the multiple choice questions that is. However, apparently some students did not adhere to these rules. Sadly this means that I’ll have to spend a lot more time on making new questions, time that has to come out of other things. We extensively test exams on validity and quality, and it would be nice if we could use the questions we worked hard for more than once. However, I’ve now learned that I’ll have to be more careful with recycling questions.”
Zeelenberg emphasizes that there was never an actual e-mail about nullifying the grades. There was a slight delay in posting the answer key and results because of an error in the key that meant that all grades had to be recalculated. And because of Zeelenberg’s stay abroad it took longer than usual before updates were posted to Blackboard.
The results do not show any reason to suspect fraud on a larger scale according to Zeelenberg. “There’s still a fail rate of 30%, which is pretty much the same as past years. And even though the average is a little bit higher than before, with a 7.5, we have no reason to believe that students committed fraud. It is possible that some students may have profitedby using the previous exam to study, but the grades don’t really reflect anything serious.
“Teachers here work with textbooks a lot. And each textbook usually has a very large database (up to 1500 practice questions) that allow them to easily put together an exam. We don’t have that luxury at Economic Psychology as we’re working with scientific articles, and no textbooks. ” However, the problems have now been taken very seriously. New questions will be used on following exams, and recycling questions will be done with much more care from now on.
