What makes a bad test?:

Susan over at Gnostical Turpitude has posted about bad test questions, and I started thinking about bad exams as a whole.

I've taken a bunch of bad exams. Susan mentioned one, which featured the scintillating prompt "Describe the trajectory of western civilization from 1789," which was definitely vague and probably outside the scope of the class. It did, however, lead to interesting questions of "can you graph this?" "Western civ would have to be a function, right?" "What would you plot versus time, awesomeness?" "Maybe you can do a whole bunch of graphs." "One of which would have to be awesomeness versus time, right?" I originally believed that western civ would have to follow a geodesic but was convinced that there were outside forces acting on it (including, but not limited to, space aliens). I was taking general relativity at the same time I was taking western civ, so I really wanted to write down Einstein's equations and go home.

Of course, I am nowhere near cool enough to actually draw a graph on my exam, so I instead talked about something boring. That question isn't bad because it leads to the geeky speculation above, but rather because it's ridiculously vague for a prompt in a two-hour long final, which probably featured some other questions. I mean, it would be ridiculously vague for a series of books, and I thought about referring my professor to Will and Ariel Durant.

This is, however, the only writing essay prompt that I can remember. I've probably taken about 4 in-class finals that featured some essays and two takehomes. The takehomes I remember far better, but all of them were pretty good questions, even if I was annoyed by them because I hadn't done much of the reading.

I've taken a handful of bad math exams, too. One year, the man teaching our class used a set of notes available from the person who'd taught the class last year's website. Also available on the website, though not immediately obvious from the link, was the final from the year before. Either two or three questions from this final were on the final for our year.

Another math exam featured 60%(?) of the points available from T/F questions. which meant that there was little to no partial credit available on the majority of the test. Another had only problems that required some sort of little trick to solve, rather than just understanding the material (and one or two problems like this is fine, but I believe that the whole test shouldn't be that way).

A bio final wasn't exactly bad so much as the TA had done all of the problems in discussion and ultimately we decided that there wasn't anything else they could ask, so we didn't have to study. An analysis midterm which was entirely on material from the previous class which had been taught by a different professor and had been six months before was kind of bad. Oh and a music final where we had to tell the difference between Scarlatti and Corelli based on about ten bars made me really sad.

I can't remember any other finals that I've taken that were terrible because of the questions or the format rather than terrible because I didn't know the material (algebraic topology, one quarter in particular of Byzantine history) or because they were just really hard (GR, group theory). Anybody have any other funny exam stories?