Nazi Film Exam Compromised

The 112 undergraduates enrolled in a Foreign Cultures class were given the option of dropping part of their final exam after complaints that teaching fellows (TFs) had given some students information about the test beforehand.

Some students in Foreign Cultures 76, “Nazi Cinema: Fantasy Production in the Third Reich” were told which readings they should study for Part I of the exam, a short-answer section worth one-third of the exam grade.

Porter Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures Eric Rentschler, who teaches the class, wrote in an e-mail to The Crimson Saturday that the Core Office contacted him Friday after receiving a complaint from a student’s adviser. He wrote that he then confirmed that some students had received a list of readings.

“The only way to maintain the integrity of the examination and to ensure fairness would be to offer all students in the class the option to include or discount Part I,” Rentschler wrote. “Had this information come to my attention before the final, I would have certainly prepared a new set of questions.”

Head TF Megan R. Luke e-mailed students in the course Saturday morning to explain the issue and offer the option to drop the first section, with a deadline of noon yesterday. Seven students had opted to drop Part I from their grade as of late yesterday morning, she wrote in an e-mail to The Crimson.

Luke wrote that it was unclear how many students had received the list of readings before the exam.

Kim E. Gittleson ’08, a student in the course, said that she received a Jan. 16 e-mail from her TF, Tamar Abramov, that detailed which readings students should study in preparation for the exam’s first part.

Gittleson, who is also a Crimson editor, said she then attended a Jan. 17 question-and-answer session which TF Justice H. Kraus held for students in his and Abramov’s sections. During this session, Gittleson said, she showed the e-mail from Abramov to Kraus. Gittleson said that Kraus expressed concern that students had been given the list of readings, but read the list aloud to the students present and subsequently e-mailed the list to some of the students in the course.

Kathy L. Evans ’08, another member of the class, said that she did not attend Kraus’s question-and-answer session but that one of her classmates forwarded her the e-mail in which Kraus listed the readings.

Gittleson added that Abramov sent another e-mail in which she referenced the question-and-answer session and stressed that the readings she had initially listed were only some of the readings the students should review for the exam.

Abramov declined to comment for this article. Kraus did not respond to requests for comment.

Luke’s Saturday morning e-mail explained that students had been given uneven preparation for the exam, and that students who felt disadvantaged by this unequal preparation had the option of omitting Part I from their test grade.

Rather than being graded on all three parts of the exam, which are equally weighted, students who exercise this option will be graded only on Parts II and III, according to the e-mail sent to students in the course.

Rentschler told The Crimson that the TFs who gave students inappropriate preparation for the exam had made “a mistake in judgment” but added that “there was no bad will or ill intent.”

Rentschler wrote that he was not sure at this time if there would be further consequences for the teaching fellows in question.

“With so much [at] stake during the examination process, my main concern was to do everything possible to rectify the mistake,” Rentschler wrote.

Evans wrote that she thought the unevenness in preparation was clearly unfair. She wrote that she did not think the grading change option fully addressed the unfairness of the situation, but that she could not think of a better way of responding.

“At the same time, this happens all the time,” Evans wrote. “And this is why you don’t show TF’s/CA’s the exam—the temptation is too high to help your students.”

Rentschler acknowledged that the grading change option was not an “ideal” solution, but he wrote that implementing the alternative solution of throwing out the first part entirely could have penalized students who had prepared well for that section without the additional information.

“These students have, I believe, every reason to expect that the results of their preparations will be assessed and honored,” Rentschler wrote. “This consideration overweighed, in my mind at least, the alternative prospect of excluding Part I altogether.”

Last January, the exam for Government 1730, “War and Politics” was rewritten the day before the test date after a TF allegedly revealed information about the exam questions to some students.

—Staff writer Lois E. Beckett can be reached at lbeckett@fas.harvard.edu.