This article describes a study, from a Canadian technical institute's upgrading mathematics course, where students played a role in developing the final closed-book exam that they sat. The study involved a process where students developed practice exams and solutions keys, students sat each other's practice exams, students evaluated classmates'…

Interviews are the major tools of academic counseling at Northwestern State University (NSU) in Natchitoches, Louisiana. To enhance the specific application forms and the meaningful qualities of interviews, a counseling Content-Guide-Checklist has been constructed from NSU fall 1987 academic counseling interview reports and from a review of the…

The Helping Relationship Inventory was used to see whether objective improvement in medical student (n=109) communication skills occurred in a relatively brief (nine-hour) small-group course in interviewing. The study demonstrated that even brief small-group interviewing courses can effect a positive change in communication skills. (Author/MSE)

A federally funded project was undertaken at the University of New Hampshire to: (1) determine the feasibility of incorporating specific techniques of oral proficiency evaluation in college-level foreign language courses, (2) create a network of foreign language professors in northern New England colleges and universities trained in the use of…

The oral proficiency interview, a one-to-one conversational interview structured to elicit the best performance the student can sustain, is based on a scale and test developed 30 years ago by the Foreign Service Institute. Interest in it has increased substantially in recent years, and further research and development of the measure for use in a…

Two cases are described in which alternative assessments have been successfully employed in college mathematics. Case 1 describes an alternative assessment applied in a class of 10 elementary school teachers studying Euclidean geometry as required by state teacher-certification requirements. One student asserted that he already had an adequate…

This study investigated the utility and effectiveness of a simple dictation test for placement of students in a university's summer English-as-a-Second-Language program. The dictation test was explored as an alternative to the traditional oral interview, which had shown some problems of interrater reliability and consistency, resulting in…