I didn’t want to waste any time nickel and diming my students on their final exam this year. So I took a four page embedded reading from a recent story, with approximately 50% new material in it, and, during the first fifty minutes of the 70 minute final exam, we talked around the twenty true/false questions that would then constitute the last twenty minutes of the exam.
Note that I started teaching the text (reading and spinning language) during the three or four classes leading up to the exam. It was a wise move, as those final class days of school can lack focus. But, knowing that this reading was the content of the final exam brought the kids into focus in to those last few classes before finals week.
Needless to say, when the exams came, I had their attention. I promised them that the fifty minutes of CI preceding the actual exam would include the exact exam questions hidden in the middle of all the discussion, and it was their task to listen well enough to be able to take advantage of that fact. I held the exam in my hand and kept referring to it during the CI so that they knew that we were actually doing a massive camouflaged review in the target language of the questions.
In addition, I gave out optional copies of the text in advance for them to study at home. I should have put those on my school webpage at classjump.com but forgot, but I will next year. Those kids that need something concrete to study at home poured over the text for the three or four days before the exam and got in some great reading CI practice to add to the listening CI during the exam period. See, I like CI.
The twenty true/false questions – five points each – took about 15 minutes to ask, including the time needed to distribute the scantrons, etc. I made it open text. It just seemed so right – in terms of best use of instructional time for CI – to be able to rivet their attention on the discussion after many of them just riveted their attention on the reading, and then do both on the exam.
The exam didn’t feel fake like so many exams I have given in the past. Those cumulative exams don’t measure anything. I wonder why people don’t talk more about how many world language exam formats, especially the fill in the blank with the correct form of the possessive adjective or verb kind, are really kind of a joke. I mean, really!
And yet people still give those kinds of exams as if nothing in our profession has changed in the last twenty years, in spite of the fact that most of the kids don’t even take those kinds of exams seriously, except enough to memorize stuff that they will forget over the summer. Such exams do little good except to shame kids into believing that they aren’t any good at what we teach them.
The CI kind of final exam described above is much better for the kids on so many levels, not the least of which is that time is spent in the actual acquiring of the language. The results told me what I already knew – those who processed CI at high levels all year cruised to near perfect results. There were lots of A’s and good will.