Albert Wantanabe
This paper reports on the sixth annual College Greek Exam (CGE), administered in
March, 2014 and discusses the upcoming digital version of the exam slated for March 2015. It recaps the history of the exam and its origins, as well as speculating on how the creation of the digital exam will allow programs access to an expanded set of externally-collected data, information which in turn may provide a useful tool for program assessment both at home institutions and in concert with larger regional and national accreditation bodies.
The College Greek Exam began as a parallel to the National Greek Exam, but specifically for college-level students in their first year. Armed with a basic format, syllabus and vocabulary, a pilot exam was given in 2008 and the first regular annual exam in 2009. The report then goes on to describe developments in the 2014 exam and enumerates the high scores and averages. The results of the exam are then analyzed according to grammatical categories. Where the same or similar questions have been asked on previous exams, there is a comparison of how the students did on both exams. The report includes some general comments on how the exam and the results mesh with certain issues in teaching first-year Greek at the college level, both pedagogical (textbooks, etc.) and administrative (the need for external assessment tools, etc.).
Finally, the report provides updates on some changes to the exam’s syllabus and structure, and it ends with a discussion of the “state of play” for the debut of the digital version of the exam and of how that option should provide an enhanced set of data on Greek programs across the U.S. and Canada.