Karla and friends: I struggled for 7 years as my application exercises engendered frustrations for my medical students and me. If I made them sufficiently challenging such that reasonable and well-prepared teams of students disagreed on the best answers, we had spirited discussions but endless (and sometimes mindless) wrangling about "will I get credit for my answer or not?" I was spending hours post-application weighing evidence for alternate answers, trying to decide if they were clearly supported from the literature and the quality of students' arguments. If I avoided this conundrum by writing questions with only one clearly best answer, all the teams usually agreed on that single answer and the passion/engagement was diminished.
Solution (others figured this out years ago): I now do NOT grade the application exercise. I am free to make them very difficult, intentionally putting more than one "correct" answer in the question, such that reasonable and well-informed people will disagree about the BEST answer. As discussions unfold with evidence offered to support an opinion and critiques of that opinion by other teams, we have a rich, non-boring discussion and learning occurs WITHOUT the wrangling and despair over how many points each team will get. I feel my applications have become more challenging and interesting as a result, and I spend fewer hours wading through post-TBL appeals.
Of course, I still grade the IRAT and GRAT.
Best, Paul
Paul G. Koles, MD
Associate Professor, Pathology and Surgery
Wright State University Boonshoft SOM
937-775-2625 (phone)
937-775-2633 (fax)
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On Sep 23, 2011, at 8:53 AM, Kubitz, Karla wrote:
> Hi all,
> I’m looking for suggestions for activities/ etc that might help my students ‘buy into’ the idea that there can be more than one possible correct answer for my MCQ team application exercises. Thanks. Karla
>
> Karla Kubitz, Ph.D., FACSM
> Program Coordinator, Exercise Science
> Department of Kinesiology
> Towson University
> 8000 York Rd
> Towson, MD 21252
> 410-704-3168 (ph)
> 410-704-3912 (fax)
>
>
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