Things that can go wrong with a quiz

All part of the learning process:

• You start grading and realize that one task — choose the correct sentence — doesn’t work because, grammatically, all of them are correct.
• You have to throw out another question because it refers to an activity that was done in a different class.
• You agree to give two late students a chance to take it around lunchtime, and moments after handing them the quizzes, a shaken bottle of Pepsi blows up all over you.

What’s the point of giving a written quiz in an oral English class? My semester plan for all classes had to include at least one quiz, and time would not permit individual oral tests. Instead, I concocted questions from what we had covered, and also from a couple of persistent pronunciation issues, such as the inappropriate use of “s” at the end of a singular noun.

A fill-in-the-blank task proved most difficult in all classes: My friend really loves basketball. He’s a _______ of Kobe Bryant.

a. fen
b. fans
c. phan
d. fan

Most of those who had the wrong answer chose b. (Kobe Bryant is huge in China, by the way.)

Oh, and a note for fellow ESL teaching rookies: You might not think this would be required at the college level, but it’s a good idea to remind students not to use their cell phones to look up the answers, to check a friend’s answers before changing theirs, or to discuss possible answers with other students. After writing these rules on the blackboard, I saw two students talking and checking each other’s quizzes, put a stop to it, saw them doing it again. And then one more time. After seeing me make a little mark on their sheets to remind myself, they begged me to forgive them.