One-Styled Exams: a fair or unfair experiment

The KSU makes a new tryout; it makes one-styled exams for some courses given to both female and male students. The questions are not made by one professor, rather by many, and only one professor picks up proper questions.

Probing the opinions of faculty members, Resalah asked Mrs. Raedah Abu Neyan, a lecturer of accounting, who said the objective behind one-styled exams was to have one criterion to gauge student performance.   

Showing the way the questions were made, Abu Neyan said, "A professor for each course is assigned to be a coordinator; he or she receives questions and selects the proper. You find no change in questions made, if selected. A standard answer is attached with each question proposed."

Psychologically speaking, Mrs. Asmaa Al-Faris, a lecturer of accounting, says students scare at sitting to same exams worked out by off-campus professors. I remember that she and students knew that the same exams were targeted in monthly exams, and not in the final ones. Yet, a day before the final exam, I was told that I had misunderstood things and the final exams were also the same Saudi-wide. I was hesitated to tell students about that, and I didn't do. I found out that the results were very good; the least result was 30 out of 40. This proved that it stemmed from psychological fears.

It sounds to be feministic tendencies, Mrs. Reem Salahy, a demonstrator, said, "Exams are made by MALE committee, and proposals by female faculty members are usually put aside. However, the one-exam course for all exhorts students to exert more efforts and pay more efforts to study hard out of fearing to fail." She denied that the exams might be leaked out since exams were given out on same day, at fixed time. She proposed that exams should be made by female faculties for females and males for male students.

The students' views might be different; student Haifaa supports the idea since it is a fair measure to gauge difficulty of a course. The same exam comprises general questions made by professors who do not guarantee whether the professor has explained all details or not.     

Proving that same-questioned exams are in favor of students, Haifaa said if the professor did not explain question topics in the exam, the students would get full mark.

"The only difference between a professor-made exam and group-based ones is that the former is made by a professor who focuses on certain points which we might guess to be in exams, the former requires more concentration from our part," said student Abrar Husain.