(Education) Test banks are destroying learning at universities and colleges. Help.

They are academic fentanyl, they create high grades, happy students and absolutely no learning. But as long as tuition is paid, it's easy for profs, students get high (grades). No worries.

Some years ago, while teaching a Consumer Behaviour course at university, I went to the textbook publisher’s website to use their publisher's test bank (PTB) to help me prepare for my midterm exam.  Cut, paste, strip out answers, add some academic boilerplate and presto, a midterm exam.  But after taking the exam, I noticed curious results.  My top results were from students who seemed a bit dim and disengaged; how had they done so well, waltzing out an hour into the exam, while my top students were still clued to their desks, painfully trying to solve these questions that I had borrowed from this publisher’s site?   And the results were precise; my weaker students had scored into the 90s while my stronger students struggled in the 60s and 70s.   

When I alluded to these bizarre results, a young Indian student looked at me with teenage glee.  “They have the test bank answers; you know that don’t you?” he said.  I hadn’t known.   

For the subsequent final exam, I wrote my questions myself; curiously, many 90% + students failed.  The picture was clear.  If I used PTBs, I was rewarding cheaters, I was encouraging mindless rote memorization, and I wasn’t much of an educator.  Since then, I’ve written my texts, assignments and test banks.  But I’ve discovered that I’m in the minority and that almost nobody cares.