There is a place on campus that many Bruins have never heard of, yet it gets busy enough to have a line of 40 students for its services during midterms and finals weeks.
A description of this place, the test bank in the Student Activities Center, almost sounds fictional. You can access many old exams that UCLA professors have given out and sometimes they are the same questions you will be asked on a future exam.
Stephanie Lucas, the internal vice president of the Undergraduate Students Association Council, has been aiming to get this test bank online to increase accessibility for students but has not been able to, largely for political reasons.
This is a loss for students, because with the Community Programs Office not working with Lucas, we do not have access to an online test bank online, something that would otherwise be easy to accomplish.
The test bank currently works by allowing only students who contribute tests to access its database. To make copies of any of the more than 5,000 tests, quizzes and essays the bank has, all you have to do is submit one of your own exams to their database per quarter.
The test bank does not market itself, but the number of students that use the service has doubled in the last year, said Thuy Huynh, office manager for the Community Programs Office.
Because word is getting around about the service, there is often a long line during busy weeks. As a result, the test bank started digitizing its files to increase office efficiency. Essentially, it planned to install kiosks of computers from which one could access a searchable database of thousands of exams.
The test bank has been doing the legwork of scanning, categorizing and organizing the database since last winter quarter. So it came as a surprise when Lucas, a Bruins United candidate for student government at the time, suggested the digitization of the test bank as one of her platforms during elections. Still, Lucas’s proposal did differ a bit in that she wanted the test bank to be put online and to increase accessibility.
This is something that the Community Programs Office staff does not want. They want to maintain the system of contributing an exam every quarter before being able to take from the system, which is more easily enforced in person.
But it cannot be too difficult to enforce the requirement of contributing an old exam. Students could contribute exams either in person or by uploading them before they are allowed to view the entire bank via their MyUCLA accounts. Customized services on MyUCLA already exist and access could be given by the Community Programs Office staff only to those who contribute.
I’m not endorsing the academic validity or necessity of a test bank on campus, as that is a whole different issue, but if the service exists, students should be made aware of it and accessibility must be increased, since it is paid for by student fees.
Not having this service online is inappropriate in this day and age, especially when it’s already being digitized.
Lucas has started working toward this end but is running into the road block in the Community Programs Office’s reluctance to put its test bank put online.
Lucas said that the Community Programs Office staff did not want to collaborate with her staff and added she will continue trying to work with the test bank on the system.
But if the partnership does not work, she will go to the Hill and the Greek houses, which often have their own test banks, to create an online collaborative effort that benefits all students, as it would be larger than any of theirs alone.
The Community Programs Office’s digitization efforts and Lucas’s plans are both steps in the right direction.
But there are many dirty political undertones in this back-and-forth process. Lucas used digitization as a platform during her campaign, even while it was already underway, and the Community Programs Office seems to want to continue having students physically come into their offices to access the test bank.
It’s time for some collaboration to ensure that students benefit from the best bank.
Did you know such a test bank existed? E-mail Ramzanali at aramzanali@media.ucla.edu. E-mail general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.