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)





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)