"Please stop confusing me!"

I've spent the last three hours of this afternoon teaching in my online technical writing course: a big assignment is due Monday at 11:59 p.m., so the usual hectic flurry of draft swapping, instructor paging, and discussion posting is happening.

This post's title is a quote from one of those students: s/he wrote it this afternoon in the Subject line of a public posting to the course website, under the "Q&A About Quizzes and Exams" section. This student has not been scoring well on the quizzes.

Now, these quizzes are completely open-book. Students can take them twice with no penalty: the highest score counts. The only constraint is that students only get 15 minutes each time to take the 10-point quizzes. Correct answers are not provided between attempts -- and I haven't been able to figure out how to provide them after the second attempt (our college's D2L CMS is woefully difficult to work).

To my mind, it's almost impossible not to get 100% on such a quiz when 1) you have all the questions after you take the quiz once and 2) you can use your textbooks. My idea in creating the quizzes this way is to get students to read the material so that they will do well with the *real* assignments for the course, which are the writing assignments. I have even given a small talk to colleagues about this quizzing philosophy/practice, calling it "Quiz to Learn," opposing it to Quiz to Test.

Anyway, this unhappy student posted the following (yes, this big block of text is exactly how it appeared):

"After reading our sections the quiz was on 3 times, i still got 6 out of ten. I Felt completely sure that two of those were correct. You become too repetitive in some instances and give us too many options. I do appreciate being given more than one chance. But how are we supposed to learn what the right answer is if it does not tell us. Would you not rather have your students get them all right, and know that they have in fact at some point learned what is correct and what is not correct. I cant say from experience, but i would prefer my students know the right answer, and possibly make the quizzes less confusing, or give less answers to certain questions, in hopes of them actually learning the material correctly. I have never taken a mutliple choice test that offers so many answers to one questionthat all sound so much alike. Especially when given a time constraint it puts us under pressure. I just want to know the correct and proper way to do things, and hopefully still get an A or B in this course. I hope the next quiz is not so confusing. Probably more so if you are giving us 3 chances! Not trying to be ude or judge your teaching styles. I just wanted to state my take on the situation. Thanks for reading. Is it not our job as students to question things?"

Don't you love the last line, with its archaic syntactic inversion to begin the question? :-) Such a wonderful rhetorical tactic.