If you’ve been wondering where I am today, I’m dyin’ here, man. I’ve been grading freshman essays and quizzes all day long—my eyes are fiery red orbs and my brain is liquefying, but I’ve only gotten about halfway through the massive pile. This is going to be an agonizing week, I can tell…and it doesn’t help that I’m going to have to pack up in the middle and zoom down to Madison to bring my son home for the summer break (maybe I should make him grade some of these papers…).
It also doesn’t help that I put a trick question on the last quiz, one that was trivial to answer if the students had actually done the reading, but there was no way you’d guess it if you hadn’t, and 90% of the students missed it. Hey, gang, Aldo Leopold was writing about the compass plant—how many times did I tell you to read that chapter of A Sand County Almanac? There will be more questions like that from the readings on the final exam, I guarantee you that.
Now I’m all cranky as well as bleary eyed. I think it’s time for me to tune out until tomorrow, when I’ll hit these stacks of papers again.
Just to see what the results would be, I took a short-answer question from the midterm and asked it again on the final exam. It was fair, because I talked about the concept at the start and near the end of the course.
I was surprised to see how many students didn’t get it the second time around either.
One of the better expiriments in this regard was performed by a good friend of mine while teaching an Intro Psychology class.
The extra credit question — on every test, and the final — was simply this: What is the teacher’s name? (it was multiple choice)
Given, this was a lecture class, but the number of people who missed that on the final was both astounding and deeply troubling.
So, are you going to provide the citation or just let us wonder about the relevance?
BCH
What you need to do is use a high-speed scanner to scan the papers in and then e-mail them out to your blogophants to use the power of ‘distributed grading’ so you can spend your time digesting scientific papers and presenting them in your usual lucid style for our benefit.
I’m almost certain someone of legalistic bent would find something to object to in that scheme. I might myself, but I’m a lawyer and I’m not billing you for this, so …
Is it specified in a prof’s contract that the prof can’t contract out grading?
I once gave some intro chem students a C&E News article about new processes for making synthetic diamonds as we were discussing properties of matter. We had probably a half-hour discussion on diamond and other forms of carbon in that class. On the test, I simply asked what element diamond was a form of. While more than 10% of them got it right, more than half missed it.
(And here I was thinking that *everyone* knew that diamonds were carbon…)
And here I was thinking that *everyone* knew that diamonds were carbon…
I thought every *ten-year-old* knew that diamonds were carbon – maybe they forget by the time they get to university?
(What *do* they teach in schools these days?)
Rick @ shrimp and grits: Never assume your students even know how to spell their own name.
Ha! Serves you right for asking trick questions; there’s not enough room on the forearm for all the regular answers much less trick questions.
Jeeze…
Oh yeah — I just submitted the grades for my last class, one week late. My version of the trick question . . .that was trivial to answer if the students had actually done the reading, but there was no way you’d guess it if you hadn’t is passage ID’s. They can pick and choose between 10, and identify 6 speeches by play, speaker, location in the plot and significance. If you’ve read all the plays even ONCE you should be able to get at least 4 out of 6.
They bombed: out of 52 students, 43 of them could not identify more than 2 passages correctly. Fully half of them thought “Is this a dagger I see before me, the handle towards my hand” was from Othello “just before he kills her”.
About half of them scored in the 40’s. It took me an extra week because I kept stopping to rend my hair and sob.