Quiz

Had to take a "Communication Styles" survey at work, that will be used in some way at the Skills day coming up. Poor instructions, badly organized, at least one question with inadequate grammar, and my assessment flatlined. Two styles predominated equally, and flatly contradicted each other. The third highest only a few points behind, out of five possible styles. Useless and worse than useless. We all felt the same way.

One of the most demeaning aspects of my profession is the yearly "training." Far worse than cleaning up shit, or being treated slightingly by doctors or other medical folks on the 'team.' No, what really gets up my nose are the mandatory skills. Instructions to read followed by quizzes that must be completed. Not the mere doing of this, I have no essential complaint with tests or keeping up with current thought. The steaming contempt I feel thrown at me comes in how badly these quizzes are written. I've never seen a year's worth that didn't have multiple typos, grammatical errors, grossly incorrect answers as the correct answer, or best of all, the ones that clearly show the question writer to be lacking in a real understanding of the concept they are testing for.

The only redeeming feature is that we all cheat at them, share answers. Not being graded, we can just change the answers. The sheer futility of the exercise I can deal with.

Mock codes, inservices on new equipment, refreshers on theory or practice are not included in this litany. Gets old after so many years, but often I do learn a new detail or a better understanding.

Which gets me thinking of a Communication 101 class I took decades ago when I first attended college. The instructor in his first year teaching wrote the most confusing, contradictory questions for his tests. We were able to argue our grades, pointing out the poverty of the questions, since we pretty much all got the majority of the answers "wrong." Horrible class, and I've never met a communication major who didn't have an equally abysmal grasp of how to actually convey meaning.

While I recognize writing a clear, cogent question isn't as easy as it seems, if it is your job, that you are being paid for, it should be done properly, consistently. Hell, the people over at Mental Floss do consistently better than the "nurse educators."

Ah, well, ABCD, True/False, fill in the damn blanks. The bullshit comes but once a year, or so.