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General philosophy
The level of education at the Word of Life Hungary Bible Institute is designed to be equivalent to the first one or two years at the undergraduate level. However, one of the distinctive characteristics of a Word of Life Bible institute is the careful balance we try to maintain between various aspects of the Christian life - including academics, ministry, work, fellowship, discipleship, personal devotion time and worship.

The most obvious result of this philosophy is that even though the level of teaching students receive in the classroom may actually be at the seminary-level, the course requirements may sometimes be less than other schools at our level.
We see quizzing and testing as a part of the learning process. Our goal is not to focus on how much the students do not know, but to allow them to demonstrate that they do know the main principles we want them to learn. If we are successful as educators in this environment, then most of our students should be able to do well academically.

Course requirements
As a general rule one might consider the following as a basic guideline for the course requirements would be the following:
Reading: 15-20%
Quizzes: 15-20%
Homework: 15-20%
Final Exams: 40-50%

Reading assignments
The above grade percentages gives the teacher a fairly broad latitude in determining the final grade breakdown of the course in general. Shorter books, such as 1John can be assigned for reading several times, perhaps 3-4 times, while a longer book, like Genesis should probably be assigned to be read through once (or twice at the most, since that is a two-week course).

Extra-biblical reading, though incorporated into resident teacher courses, usually does not work as well for guest teacher courses for two reasons. One reason is that sufficient books on a given subject are still somewhat limited in our library, or not available in Hungarian at all. The second reason is that more than half of our students speak English as their second language, and reading in English can be a very laborious task for them.

It is generally easiest to incorporate reporting the reading assignments on the final exam.

Quizzes
Years of experience have provided much insight into how we should generally try to bring quizzes into the grading structure of the course.
1. Quizzes should require no more than 10 minutes to take. This limits them to 5-10 questions in length.
2. Quizzes should be objective (rather than subjective) in nature, meaning they should generally be true/false and multiple choice.
3. We suggest not using fill-in-the-blank questions (although they are fairly objective) because the grammatical differences between English and Hungarian can make it difficult to translate a sentence with a single key word missing. Another problem can arise because of synonyms or lack of one-to-one correspondence between meanings of words in two languages.
4. In general, we have found that unannounced “pop-quizzes” can create unnecessarily difficult situations, especially for those students who are studying in English, but whose first language is not English. Our students are highly motivated and simply need time to study the material to do well and demonstrate their knowledge of the material.
5. Please provide the Academic Secretary with a key for the quizzes and do not try to grade them in class unless you plan on using it specifically for reinforcing what you have taught. In general, trying to grade quizzes in class will cost you much more teaching time than you would expect because of translation and cultural differences.

Final Exams
The final exam for the previous week’s guest teacher class is generally given on Tuesday morning at 8:00. If it is a two-week class, then two tests are generally given, one after the first week of class and one after the second week.

The students have 40-45 minutes to take the final exam. This means that generally a 25-40 question exam is sufficient.

As with the quizzes, questions on final exams should be objective, meaning true/false, multiple choice, matching, etc. We realize that subjective testing can be preferable in some situations and for some teachers in particular. Yet, a well-written objective test can often provide a better measure of a student’s knowledge of a subject. It must also be remembered that the tests need to be graded in two languages and by someone other than the teacher - so this makes short answer and essay questions almost impossible to grade effectively. Sometimes the resident teachers are able to incorporate subjective questions into their tests, but that is because they are also able to grade them in both English and Hungarian.

Please make sure you leave an answer key with the Academic Department before your departure.

If you have specific questions about this area please feel free to contact the Academic Dean, Andy Mater, (amater@eletszava.org) at any time.

Sample Quizzes & Final Exams
Joshua quiz
Joshua Final Exam
Colossians Quiz
Colossians Final Exam