When I write a multiple choice question, I like to come up with at least one of four answers that is clearly wrong. Ideally, there are two obviously wrong answers, one “maybe-it-might-be-right” answer and one correct answer. But at least one answer should be totally wrong. For instance:
Barney works at a fast-food restaurant called the Frying Dutchman. He observes what he believes to be a significant safety issue when a leak springs in the deep fat fryer and management does not fix it. Barney then reports the leak to OSHA. Barney is called a:
a) Scurvy rat.
b) Mandatory reporter.
c) Fiduciary.
d) Whistleblower.
For a graduate class in employment law, I consider the “Frying Dutchman” question both a fair question, and an easy one. (The answer, of course, is “d.”) So too did I consider this a question, the first that I posed in the 100-question test, that was fair and easy:
In the context of employment law, “discrimination” means:
a) Evidence that suggests the accusations against a defendant are correct.
b) Preferential treatment given to a member of a favored group.
c) The belief that members of a particular religion are morally inferior.
d) Taste, refinement, and discernment.
Four out of five students got this one wrong and all four gave the same answer. But not in the way I thought they would have: they chose one of the answers that I thought was obviously wrong, one of the two that I thought would be excludable immediately.
When I first started teaching a mentor told me that I could not design a test so easy that a student would not somehow screw it up. If the entire test consisted of one question and the question was: “Sign your name here: _________________” I would either get someone who wrote the words “your name here” on the blank line or someone who managed to sign their name elsewhere on the paper. So don’t worry about it if your students miss a seemingly obvious question, or even a whole bunch of them. That’s just going to happen. An assurance that I need right about now because when four out of five students give the same wrong answer that suggests to me that something I said or did stuck in their minds bizarrely, and now they’re walking around having completed a graduate-level class in employment law thinking that discrimination is a good thing.
As someone who teaches aesthetics, would that my students thought discrimination was a good thing…
A+
I assume, though you do not specify, that the majority of the students chose answer “d.”
If they did, in fact, choose answer “d,” it means they all failed to read the question with due care. Since the question reads, quite clearly, “In the context of employment law,” the failure to choose the contextually correct answer is theirs.
But on the upside of their failure to read the question, it means 80% of his law students actually understood that particular meaning for the word discrimination, which is somewhat reassuring.
‘B’ would be my guess.
Yes, b) is the correct answer.
Answer c) was the one I’d intended to be the “Hmm, could it be that” more difficult choice. It describes what could be part of a form of discrimination with additional facts, but without coupling that attitude with an adverse employment action, it’s just a personal opinion and the law does not forbid you from thinking that your religion is morally superior to someone else’s, as long as you don’t let that interfere with an employment decision.
Answers a) and d) were supposed to be the “exclude right away” options. But d) is the answer I got back from so many of them. While a correct English definition of the term in the abstract, as Doc points out, such an answer ignores the first clause of the sentence, which I thought rather clearly focused attention on the fact that we’re talking about employment law and not art.
Whenever I’m at a function with name tags that say “My name is _____” I’m very tempted to write “Iniguo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
Here you go: http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/9f70/?srp=1
Huh… I want to think that your mentor is on to something. And yet…
I still think I’d find students missing that question in that class a wee bit troubling.
Frying Dutchman?
Ba da bump….
A reference, of course, to my favorite Simpsons episode involving a lawyer.
Lionel Hutz: Now, Mrs. Simpson, tell the court in your own words what happened after you and your husband were ejected out of the restaurant.
Marge: Well, we pretty much went straight home.
Hutz: Mrs. Simpson, remember that you are under oath.
Marge: [Quickly] We drove around until three in the morning looking for another open all-you-can-eat seafood restaurant.
Hutz: And when you couldn’t find one?
Marge: [crying] We… went… fishing.
Hutz: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, do these sound like the actions of a man who had all he could eat?
[Camera cuts to jury, made up of fat, obese people]
Jury: No, no.
Man in Jury: [mutters] No, that could’ve been me.
‘Tis no man, ’tis a remorseless eating machine!
No sir! Don’t take the steam tray!
When being interviewed for a job in HR, I was asked to define “discrimination”, and I quickly wondered if I could give the proper definition and have it be considered “right”.
So, I just gave the proper definition and then went on, “however, in terms of employment it can mean…”. I decided it would be better to look the pompous ass than to give the obvious dumbed-down answer.
That’s interesting. “Discriminating” might give me pause… But “discrimination” always makes me think of the bad one.
It’s possible they said “discriminate” or “discriminating”, I can’t be sure now.
So did they display discriminating judgment and hire you or did they discriminate against pompous-ass hood?
They hired me, regardless.
Tell us the name of the law school to help us vet attorneys when necessary.
Perhaps it is a sign of my cynicism, but I can’t help but think that if 4/5 people get a question like that wrong, the fault lies more with the system than anything else. Not your question – which was fine in and of itself (and I wish you were writing the multiple choice exam *I* have to take this week) – but the whole fucked up summative-rather-than-formative evaluation process people start with in kindergarten these days. I’ve had professors (otherwise GOOD professors) who would have set d as the right answer and then insisted “the word means what it REALLY means, I don’t care what context it was in! we have to make these tests tricky or anyone could ace them!!”
I remember realizing in 11th grade that the guy I was studying biology with knew the material 4X better than I did, even though I regularly got 95 or higher on the tests and he peaked at 78. No matter how hard we tried together, we couldn’t overcome his 11 years of test-stress… no matter how much I slacked in the bitter and distracted year following my realization, I couldn’t overcome my natural aptitude for test-taking. (I did manage to graduate 7th in my class instead of first or second.)
The system is broken, your students come to you already broken, and the best you can do for ’em is to be honest about it. Which, in this particular case, probably means leaving the question as is, taking the point off of all of them, and explaining (perhaps yet again) that your tests are not designed as booby-traps? No need to blame them or you, but if they change themselves, despite the system they’re immersed in, they will be exceptions.
(I of course meant FISHED up, and just got carried away. Editing welcome.)
Oh! You’re burning my virgin eyes, previously unfouled by any form of contamination with any form of profanity!
(As if one of my favorite cases in law school wasn’t Cohen v. California.)
A very very qualified defense of the students:
You did specify “in the context of employment law.” And there’s no question they should have gotten it right. But. They are expecting to be tricked in some way. There are obvious definitions of “discrimination,” that everyone knows, and less obvious ones, that only supposedly “smart” people know. When taking a test, one tends to assume that the prof is looking for more obscure knowledge, or at least knowledge that is restricted to a more privileged few. So I can understand the urge, when taking a test, to go for the answer that offers a definition that fewer people know. Even if that answer was excluded by the given context, and they should have recognized it. I understand it.
This is sort of the insight I was hoping to find. I’m sure that they tied themselves in intellectual knots wrestling with the question before they got there, “expecting to be tricked in some way.” From my perspective the question is perfectly straightforward but from theirs, maybe not so much.
I tend to discount this. Maybe it’s me, but this seems to be most likely lack of reading the question not over interpretation.
I think some of we commenters are being overly generous in explaining how 4 of 5 graduate students could choose the same ridiculous wrong answer. This sort of coddling over the last 40 years has been the evolutionary reason for today’s students having so much difficulty with straightforward, easy test questions. Same reason for why so many teachers/instructors/professors actually doubt the reasonable-ness and fairness of their test questions.
Well, I have learned from experience. I make it a point to check and double-check every question and every answer before presenting a test to my students. And my tests now include this instruction:
Sometimes, students wish to argue that the incorrect answer they gave is actually correct. I now let it be known that such arguments are unwelcome with me. They are free to do argue the correctness of their wrong answers to one another over beers after the test is done, where they can bitch about their professor all they like. They are free to do so to the school’s administration, which is free to override me if it chooses to do so.