Test banks are destroying learning at universities and colleges. Help.

They are academic fentanyl, they create high grades, happy students and absolutely no learning. But as long as tuition is paid, it's easy for profs, students get high (grades). No worries.

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Some years ago, while teaching a Consumer Behaviour course at university, I went to the textbook publisher’s website to use their publisher's test bank (PTB) to help me prepare for my midterm exam.  Cut, paste, strip out answers, add some academic boilerplate and presto, a midterm exam.  But after taking the exam, I noticed curious results.  My top results were from students who seemed a bit dim and disengaged; how had they done so well, waltzing out an hour into the exam, while my top students were still clued to their desks, painfully trying to solve these questions that I had borrowed from this publisher’s site?   The results were precise; my weaker students scored in the 90s, while my stronger students struggled in the 60s and 70s.   

When I alluded to these bizarre results, a young Indian student looked at me with teenage glee.  “They have the test bank answers; you know that don’t you?” he said.  I hadn’t known.   

For the subsequent final exam, I wrote my questions myself; curiously, many 90% + students failed.  The picture was clear.  If I used PTBs, I was rewarding cheaters, I was encouraging mindless rote memorisation, and I wasn’t much of an educator.  Since then, I’ve written my texts, assignments and test banks.  But I’ve discovered that I’m in the minority and that almost nobody cares. 

When students go to university or college, they have implicit faith that they will receive an "education,” a construct that should mean increased knowledge, critical thinking abilities, maturity, skills, and moral growth.  Unfortunately, studies have indicated limited long-term retained learning happening in our “bastions of higher learning.”   According to a US study, 45% of students showed no significant gains in learning after two years in college, and it was further found that students today spend 50% less time studying than students a few decades ago.   Moreover, in a recent study commissioned by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, only forty per cent of fourth-year university students could complete basic literacy and numeracy tasks. I recently asked a student what six times nine was and followed up with a query on what province is next to the Pacific Ocean.  0/2. But ask for details about a Kardashian romantic entanglement …

I'm no academic, just a university lecturer, but to quote Dylan - not the Welsh Dylan - you don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows - allowing students to write multiple choice or true/false tests when the answer keys are readily available online or in student circulation is not education, it is the abandonment of education to the educational process. This isn’t the only thing hurting university education, but I’d call it low-hanging fruit. And it needs to be picked. 

A 2018 study written by Christine Cheng and Larry Crumbley in the Journal of Accounting Education determined that 48% of students used PTBs and, doing so, achieved a performance advantage of 30%.  

The popularity of PTBs represents a cynical and unspoken agreement between academic publishers, university administrators, students and faculty whereby the academic gears turn and make a lot of noise. We all keep silent because the wheels don’t touch the ground much.   But it’s a healthy symbiotic relationship - the publishers get their revenue, the administrators get their bums in seats (hopefully the lucrative international bums in seats) so that they can hire more administrators and diversity analysts; instructors get to save time writing exams so they can focus on research, teach one of their eight contract courses or watch more Netflix.   

What do students get?  They get a passing grade and one more step up the academic staircase toward the parchment at the top.  

But how did this happen?  

Academic publishers create multiple choice exams, appealing additions to the core subject textbook.   Unscrupulous individuals, perhaps instructors looking for a few extra dollars or professorial impersonators, take these files and attach them to an e-commerce store. ‘

Domicile the site in a country with questionable copyright laws, and they are off to the races!  Or apps that charge memberships advertise their compiling services, comprising student-pilfered questions as “study aids.” 

Students worldwide can purchase or find the PTBs with answers included.    

The real issue is that the educational incentives need to be aligned.   

The publisher realises that instructors won’t assign their textbooks if there aren’t test bank resources along with them.  They don’t want to make it too difficult for technically challenged instructors to find the test banks.   If you think only Generation Z can be lazy or try to do the absolute minimum, I think Generation X is very competitive. 

Administrators and department heads might be disinclined to tell faculty how to write their exams (but if you think everyone hired to teach has experience or education in the field, it’s wishful; I’ve seen a few friends and family hiring programs and the occasional Ph.D. in “fill in random unrelated discipline” be brought on.)

Still, the admin should be able to ban questions the students have already seen when accompanied by a matching answer key. 

With domestic high school student numbers declining, with the fight for the lucrative international student raging, it may not be in their best interests to start pushing “write your damn exam” initiatives. But the bottom line for administrators is bums in seats, and bums in seats that, after four years, rise to put on a polyester gown, hear their name mispronounced, and walk across a stage to get a degree and a handshake from a stranger.  

Faculty may be under relentless pressure to publish, or they may be contract instructors under extraordinary time constraints, dashing from class to class, campus to campus, trying to patch enough contract teaching gigs to earn a living.  There is little natural incentive for them to write their exams; if your exams lower scores, it just means getting savaged on Rate My Professor.com or whatever internal variant of student evaluation the university uses.   

And lastly, students.  Not all of them have bought into the idea that education is at the core of our Western civilisation and should help them build a career while still allowing them to gain richer insights into our place in this frenetic world.  Indeed, many students celebrate when a snow day cancels classes. Strange that view. Do we celebrate when Canadian Tire calls and says they will charge us for the brake job, but they won’t be doing the work?  If they could pass without more than a few Red Bull-fueled test bank memorisation sessions, they'd be happy to call that credential pursuit “education.” 

 

There are, though, some students with nobler mindsets who will have nothing to do with shady undergrads in the library who try to sell them a $50 PTB answer key.   

Sadly, those students with aspirations to pursue nobler learning goals often feel forced to compromise their ideals for the more practical motive of finding the shortest path to high grades.  Students know that telling their parents or future employers that they didn’t make magna cum laude because they didn’t use PTB keys will be taken as sour grapes.   

Thus, we should not be surprised why students who have graduated from university sometimes seem clueless and under-educated.   

Between PTBs, grade inflation, coat tail riding in group work, private tutors doing student work, online courses that offer no guarantee that the enrolled student is doing the class work and the ability to binge memorise (and forget quickly) exam material, it's not difficult for a student to survive the rigours of a four-year degree and emerge under-educated.

So, let's stop acting surprised when our university graduates seem clueless.   

Most think this isn't a big deal; a student intern at the Toronto Star told me this is a "non-story" as she seemed to think memorising PTBs is a natural part of the university experience.  She has such a distorted view of the purpose of education that she does not see the issue.  I beg to differ. Using publisher’s test banks hurts post-secondary education and leads to more under-educated university graduates.  And now there is Chat GBT 4/AI.  Wonderful. 

If you believe in the importance of free speech, subscribe to support uncensored, fearless writing—the more people who pay, the more time I can devote to this. Free speech matters. I am a university professor suspended because of a free speech issue, so I am not speaking from the bleachers. The button below takes you to that story if you like.

Please subscribe and get at least three pieces /essays per week with open comments. It’s $5 per month and less than $USD 4. I know everyone says hey, it’s just a cup of coffee (with me, not per day but just one per month), but if you’re like me, you go, “Hey, I only want so many cups of coffee!” I get it. I don’t subscribe to many here because I can’t afford it.

But I only ask that when you choose your coffee, please choose mine. Cheers.

_______________________________________________