Some may argue that teachers shouldn’t be able to borrow tests at all but I have come to the realization that teachers that do share tests have a reason to do so. When a teacher is overwhelmed, new to teaching a subject, sick or just doesn’t have time to make their own, they usually turn to using tests from another teacher. I believe that using borrowed tests can be a good temporary solution but it mainly becomes a problem when teachers rely too heavily on this solution.
In my opinion, when teachers rely on tests from other teachers, this interferes with the students because some students are not taught everything in great detail about the concepts and topics that are on the test that a teacher got from another teacher. Sometimes the teacher doesn’t even know or remember everything that is on the borrowed test since they didn’t create it themselves. This can cause learning to be very difficult for students.
Students can have difficulties with this when teachers don’t look over the test beforehand and forget to cover specific topics that were on the test. This would cause students to struggle as they have no prior knowledge of what these topics are. This could also cause students to stress and become overwhelmed because the test had something that they weren’t fully prepared for. Retakes are a solution to get their grade up but since the teacher didn’t cover some topics that were on the test, students wouldn’t have any prior notes to help them study for the retake.
In my experience, I had a class where the teacher relied solely on borrowed tests for every quarter. This made learning the subject very difficult because some of the questions on the test did not align with the notes that were taken in class. As a result of this, a lot of the questions on the test were confusing to me and I didn’t end up scoring well.
In response to this, I started questioning why my teacher relied so heavily on tests that they didn’t make. But I remembered how they told the class at the beginning of the year that they had not taught this subject in many years. I knew that there wasn’t much that I could do. Even if I did study for the next test, there was a chance that I didn’t know all of the material that was on the test but I just had to hope for the best.
Yes, teachers should be able to borrow tests every once in a while but they shouldn’t use them every time their class has a summative. Teachers should not solely rely on pre-made tests or even practice questions that are found online.
A solution that I propose will help prevent a habit from forming is to work with other teachers to establish their own test together or go over the test right before it is given and clarify any topics that weren’t well known to the students. Many core-subject teachers already implement these practices by working together to create their tests together. Teachers who teach the same subject work on making tests by bouncing ideas off of one another and seeing what questions would best represent the most important topics of one or more units.
Classes like AP classes are structured differently than regular classes and usually rely on the resources that are put on the AP Classroom section of College Board. These resources include assessments, practice quizzes, videos and the material that they have to incorporate into their teaching styles. However, sometimes AP Classroom resources can be limited and can make it difficult for teachers to completely understand all of the topics that they have to cover.
Teachers taking tests from each other makes me question whether this should be considered as teacher-plagiarism. The definition of plagiarism is when a person copies or takes another person’s work and passes it on as their own work. Teachers use tests that belong to other teachers in order to add summative grades in the gradebook which can be seen as a type of plagiarism. This type of plagiarism is necessary at times because teachers have their own reasons as to why they have to borrow tests from one another.
Unlike students, teachers use the work of others mostly because they simply can’t find the time to create original work. This doesn’t interfere with their learning because they already know a lot about the subject that they teach. But like students, it is easy to fall into a recurring habit of not creating their own original work.
Teachers should be able to at least work together on creating test questions or even making notes for their classrooms. Using notes from other teachers is different from using tests because either way the teacher is still instructing the same material.
