I spend a lot of time re-educating my students, assuring them that my job as a college professor is not to give them a checklist, and then award points for each item they ticked off correctly; nor is my job to teach to a test.

Shortly after I started teaching in my current job, a student in a literature class nearly had a meltdown when she learned the final exam would ask students to read and analyze a short poem we had never discussed in class.

It had never occurred to me that a student would feel it was unfair that I was interested in testing her critical thinking skills rather than her memory skills.

I have, since then, adjusted my teaching, and spend much more time directly addressing differences between high school and college.