EXAM CORRECTIONS: HELPING STUDENTS LEARN FROM THEIR MISTAKES

Typically, exams serve only the purpose of summative assessment. At the end of a unit or course, the instructor administers an exam to assess what students know, assigns a grade, and moves on. Although instructors correct and return exams with an expectation that students learn from their errors, there is rarely a formalized opportunity facilitating this process. Research in the area of formative assessment, however, suggests that correcting errors can have a powerful impact both on student learning and on developing metacognitive skills.

Exam corrections, a technique adapted from physics education, provides students with a structured opportunity to learn from incorrect answers on exams. I have used this technique for two semesters of an undergraduate Earth Materials course. My exams include a combination of multiple-choice, short paragraph, and quantitative open-ended problems. When first grading the exams, I indicate which multiple-choice answers are incorrect, but do not provide the correct answer. I assign partial points to any incomplete or incorrect open-ended responses, and give brief feedback as to what is missing – again without explicitly noting the correct answer. Students have one week to revise and resubmit the exam, and may use any resources for the corrections (other than asking the instructor). To earn points, students must indicate why their original answer was incorrect or incomplete, answer the problem correctly, and explain why the new answer is better. Students earn half of the maximum number of remaining points back toward their total exam score for each successfully revised response.

Exam corrections are optional, but 80-90% of the students each semester took advantage of the opportunity. Students perceived that doing the corrections helped them to better learn and understand the course material. They recognized that the correction process forced them to think more deeply about the material they had not learned. They also perceived that the corrections reduced performance pressure during exams (and they liked earning back points). Because each student exam has to be graded twice, using exam corrections increases time spent grading. As a result, I recommend using this technique in small classes.