Using the Concept of Benchmarking to Improve Student Exam Performance

Benchmarking is defined by Robert Camp, in his book Business Process Benchmarking: Finding and Implementing Best Practices, as the search for and implementation of best practices. Countless businesses have used benchmarking to determine how excellent companies achieve their performance levels and then use that information to improve their own performance. I used to use this quality management tool in the context of my organization and management class to not only teach students the concept of benchmarking but also learn how to apply it for the purpose of improving their exam scores so thought it might be of interest to those reading the FELC blog.

The process by which I taught students to apply the concept of benchmarking involved four multiple-choice exams they took during the semester. Once the students learned the grade they received on the first sixty-question multiple-choice exam I had them take out a sheet of paper. They were instructed to write down the procedures they used to prepare for the exam on the paper. They were not to put their name on the paper; they only needed to put either LT 10 (representing they missed less than 10 questions on the exam) or MT 10 (representing they missed more than 10 questions on the exam) in the upper right-hand corner. I then collected all of the papers from the students and separated those that had LT 10 from those that had MT 10 written at the top. Some of the best exam-taking procedures employed by those who missed less than 10 questions included such things as: making flash cards, listening carefully in class when answers were given to study quiz questions, studying with teammates the night before the exam, making detailed outlines of the chapters and studying them until fully memorized, and/or putting terms into own words.

At the beginning of the following class, I informed the students that they were going to apply the concept of benchmarking (which had been on the first exam itself) to help them improve their scores on the next exam. I informed them that I was about to read aloud the papers that had LT 10 at the top because students who possess what I call “best exam-taking practices” wrote them. I then requested that those students who missed more than 10 questions on the exam pay especially close attention to the procedures used by those students with the best exam-taking practices and compare (benchmark) them to their own. Naturally, I encouraged those who had missed more than 10 questions to heed the advice from those who missed less than 10 questions and use it to prepare for the next exam to score better and miss fewer than 10 questions themselves. Of course, those students who chose to employ the study habits of those who scored well on exams tended to score better on subsequent exams.

In sum, there are a wide variety of quality management tools that are being used by businesses to improve their performance – one of the more effective ones is benchmarking. I have found that the application of benchmarking in the context of my teaching has provided students with insights on “best-exam-taking practices” to help them to continuously improve their exam scores and may be helpful to your students, too. I am confident that culinary arts and hospitality educators will cook up numerous ways to apply it in their kitchens, laboratories, and classrooms to facilitate greater student learning too.