When I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, I took three statistics courses, even though I needed only two to fulfill my degree requirements. I certainly did not take the additional course because I liked statistics or did well in it. I took the extra course because the instructor, Dr. McEachern, was exceptional. By the time I’d become a Ph.D. student, I knew it was more important to seek out good professors than to take classes based upon their course descriptions.
Oddly, one of the things that most impressed me about McEachern was the quality of his exams. I took one midterm and one final each quarter.* Every exam followed the same format, yet I marveled each time I sat down to take one.
His exams always consisted of three or four hypothetical scenarios requiring statistical analysis. For every exam, my initial reaction was a short period of panic. I would look at the first problem and not understand it. I would go on to the second problem and not understand it. Then the third, and if there was a fourth problem, that one, too. After perusing the entire exam, I would, for a moment, wonder whether McEachern had given us the wrong exam.
Upon a second go through, I’d begin to realize that the scenarios presented in the test questions, while different from anything discussed in class, could be addressed by using the same statistical methods as those covered in class. It was not enough to understood the course material. I also needed to apply the material to new situations. McEachern’s test questions were an interesting challenge, even though I never thought of them as fun.
Students never saw their exams after turning them in. McEachern never discussed the correct answers after posting grades. I thought that this was a flaw in McEachern’s teaching methods, but I understood why he did it. He had created the perfect test questions and did not want them out in the world.
Grad school was forty years ago, but McEachern’s exams came to mind recently while I was writing an essay in which I argued that quality education enhances both a student’s knowledge base and his or her ability to think independently and creatively. As a student, I had several teachers who were able to do both in their courses, and during my years as a professor, I’d like to think that I did the same. No one other than McEachern, however, was able to effectively put both content and independent thinking into the same test question.
I never received better than a B grade for any of my stat courses, but they contained the only exams I ever took where I came away thinking I’d learned something while taking them.
* When I was a student at the U of M, it was on the quarter system. I think that it has since switched to semesters.
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