Midterm Question is Nullified; B-School Faculty Cite Error

Business School professors this week invalidated the first question on a November 20 midterm taken by the entire first-year class, announcing they would not grade it because it appeared on a 1978 exam available to students.

The invalidated question had counted for 30 per cent of an exam in "Control," an accounting course required of the approximately 800 first-year students.

The faculty agreed to nullify the question after students told professors that they had seen the question in the Baker Library file of old exams before taking last month's test.

The incident has created what Harbus, the B-School's student newspaper this week called a "furor around exam credibility." Vytas Kisielius, the second-year chairman of the student Education Committee, said after the invalidation that "it's extremely disappointing and disorienting for students to find that all this structure that's being imposed on them has glitches in them."

John Dearden, Krannert Professor of Business Administration who helps teach "Control," said yesterday that the faculty decided to replace a different question with the controversial one shortly before the exam. "If there had been more time to decide, the mistake might not have been made," he added.

Saying B-School exams often include problems for course use drawn up years earlier, Gregory L. Parsons, an instructor, said the case in question had appeared under a different name in a 1978 exam but was overlooked by faculty.

None of the present "Control" faculty taught the first-year section in 1978, Dearden added.

Regina E. Herzlinger, professor of Business Administration and head of the Control course, was unabailable for comment.

After the controversy, student and faculty representatives discussed options ranging from scrapping the entire test to letting the question count, before settling on the compromise this week.

But Milton Roye, a first-year Education Committee representative, said this week that section surveys indicated that students "are fairly annoyed that there was no public apology by 'Control.'"