Shmoop Contemporary Lit: Don't bother, even if you are a literature master

[AJ_Atlanta]

I really like the concept of Shmoop- low-ish price, unproctored, multiple subject areas- but they do have a lot to work out. I find their material extremely tedious to slog through and rather jaded/ sarcastic/ odd in its presentation.

At the same time, if one has $90 and wants to devote a month to earning up to 65 credits, the price is hard to beat.

Are we talking Saylor level of slog or worse?

My husband works for a tech company that has their own certs, and the area he works in was coming out with their own cert, and he was on the committee to write the questions. It was a weeklong process, with him and a bunch of other people writing questions, then going over them with a fine-toothed comb to find the problems, then rewriting someone else's questions to try to make them better, over and over again. Although interesting, it was quite a slog. He hasn't offered to do that again...

Sounds like Shmoop needs a better process.

I worked for Microsoft back in the day and was part of the team that did their certification tests, it was a long process to create one test. We then gave it Internally and re-evaluated it, it could take several months and IMO we still had some bad tests. You need testing/teaching experts as well as subject matter experts.

[High_Order1]

This is a problem I had with Ed4Credit.

They would have a question, I'd fail it. So, I'd go back and search for key phrasing, and not find it. Then I'd reread for context, and not find it contextually. The test itself would only say 'incorrect. Chapter nn. Well, I'm TAKING the chapter nn test, that's not useful, clearly I didn't get it... lol

Maybe it's intellectually lazy, but I certainly do appreciate questions with a single clear-cut, correct answer. Or the old 'two are completely wrong, one could be right, but one definitely is right- I remember it from the discussion' type testing.