Old exams

STUDENT QUESTION: Why don't you provide us with copies of old exams for us to use as study guides?

Reasons: There are lots of reasons why we don't provide old exams to current students in this course. Here are some of those reasons, in no particular order:

• Old exam questions can be misleading. We often change our studio manual and objectives as we try to make information easier to understand or after identifying errors or places where students have difficulties with concepts. Thus an old exam might have a question that is not covered by current objectives. Students can waste a lot of study time trying to understand a question that will not be related to anything on their exam.
• Old exam questions can also be misleading in that if a question is reused, it is most often altered slightly or the possible answers changed. You may think you recognize the question and choose the old answer that you studied, but in reality, it is a different question altogether.
• Many students will study old exams in lieu of actual studying. That is not a good way to study, and is a misuse of those old exams. But if pressed for time, it is a typical response for many students. We don’t want to encourage this behavior by making old exam copies available.
• We provide excellent and current study guides that we think are better indicators of what information you need to know than are the old exams. These are available on the K-State Online website for this course and, like the studio manual, are frequently updated.

We do provide a some sample exam questions (link at left) to help you understand the types of questions and degree of understanding needed for the BIOL 198 exams.