Freaks of nature

I have a major frustration that I want to vent about s'more. For one of my classes this semester, we have to take an online quiz every week over the chapters from the textbook that we have read. Now I have had to do something similar in another class, and it was not a very pleasant experience, mostly for the same reasons that I am going to vent about this class.

The quizes are open-book, so you'd think it would be easy to get all of the answers right. Well, you'd be wrong. On my first quiz, I missed one question, the second quiz- two, and the third quiz- three. THREE. Out of 20 questions. There is something wrong here. First of all, one of the questions that I "missed" actually was 100% correct. I found the answer verbatim in the text, which brings me to my first point. It seems silly to even have online quizes, because they are much more likely to have mechanical errors. When I miss a question on a quiz that was RIGHT (and this has happened on 2 of the 3 quizes thus far), I begin to question the accuracy of any of the quizes. It's pretty frustrating to even come into a quiz knowing that there is likely going to be an answer that I got right that is actually marked incorrectly.

My second problem revolves around a second question that I got wrong on the most recent quiz. Because the quizes are open-book, it is assumed that you will get many of the answers verbatim from the text. Wouldn't you think, however, that the point of a quiz is to test your knowledge? So, if I read a question and am sure I know the answer, even though I have not found it verbatim in the 50 pages of reading I was required, wouldn't you think that my answer would be correct? Well, again, you'd be wrong. There was a question that had 3 different answers that were all basically the same thing, and then there was a "none of the above" answer. As I thought through it, I decided that it wasn't worth looking more than the 8ish minutes I had already looked for the verbatim answer since they all were basically the same thing. Since I couldn't find any of them, I decided to go with D- "None of the above." Wrong. Too bad I didn't waste about 15 more minutes looking for the verbatim answer, maybe I could have found the right answer, even though it would not have at all proved my learning.  Instead, it would have proved that I wasted 15 minutes of my life to find an answer.  That's not really the goal of taking a class in my mind.

My final complaint: You can't argue a point about a quiz when it was proctored by a computer.   All of a sudden my learning has become machine-based instead of relationship-based.  Pity the person who actually wants to learn in the context of relationships.  I might as well take an online class.  But don't get me started on that... My final thought: Online quizes are freaks of nature.