Yesterday after grading an exam, I wrote the blog post at the bottom of the page. I was frustrated, not necessary by the students, but by myself. I wrote a poor exam I. Then I wrote a poor exam II. And the students beat me.
If you get to know me, you know that my teaching philosophy is that I don’t want to ever have the situation where its me vs. them. This is where faculty often find themselves in a traditional classroom. I imagine an SAT, MCAT, or GRE exam writer asking the question, how can we ask this straightforward question in the trickiest way possible. I hate that crap. I want to come straight at you. Then I want to walk with you on the journey of learning.
After I sent this note to the students last night, I got a number of replies. I felt bad. I love it when students stand up for themselves!! YES!! Here is one of them:
I saw your post about our tests and I just wanted to say one of the reasons I am passing this class is the amount of time we are given to work on the tests, the last test took me almost the whole day to complete. I find this class difficult. I’ve had to get a tutor over the weekends and being allowed to work with other kids has been very helpful. Bouncing ideas off of each other has allowed us to figure out hard problems. I’ve never taken a physics class before …. I know that you want us to be challenged, but for a non-calculus physics class I believe that this class is already challenging considering how long it has taken some of us to finish the tests. So far I’ve spent pretty much everyday working on Physics and haven’t been able to do much else besides go to work. I don’t think many kids will be able to pass the tests if the difficulty is upped and if we have less time. If the tests are upped in difficulty I am also worried about failing…
Holy Shit! Was I wrong? This is exactly what I want from the students. Did my tests reach the desired outcome? Students understanding the physics better? But, what does an A mean in an online class like this? This is very difficult to put my head around.
Generally, I like to give difficult exams and then curve like crazy. So a 60 is usually a good grade. Its the problem solving part that matters. The student’s point about passing the class if the exams were harder isn’t true, because I do give the students reasonable grades for reasonable effort. Check out this tweet by one of my students.
My big problem here is how do I give the students a grade when most of the students score over 90%. Does everyone get an A? What does that A mean? Yes the students would be happy with their A but am I doing a disservice. Even if you have an A- average there are students who don’t get As. My class average tends to be a B or B+.
Grades Suck!
ARGH! I have been out-smarted! Out-smarted by pre-meds nonetheless! HeHe! BTW, I love pre-meds!
Here’s the thing, they have bested me not once but twice this summer. For both my exams so far, I followed my usual procedure for generating physics exam problems. As a class, they destroyed these exams. The class average was an 87%!! I my typical class exam averages are around 55-65%. (I, like many physicists, believe an exam has to be really challenging.)
Of course the first impulse might be to say, “wait a minute, isn’t this a good thing?” I mean who doesn’t want to have a class that understands the material and gets As. That’s a professor’s dream. Here are two data points that strike against this. In one problem, about 50% of the class made the same (simple, 7.4/16 = 0.46) mathematical error in a four step physics problem. The chances of that are astronomically low if they did the math themselves. Also the understanding the physics behind some of the labs and homeworks leading up to the test was significantly incorrect.
To be clear, I do not think that any one violated any academic honesty issue. I had very flexible exam rules. It was my hope that students will talk with one another, think through their answers, and do the work themselves. hmph! I also gave them a lot of time so they could do all of the file posting at their leisure and work on it when they can. I also know that a number of students did do the full test in the spirit intended.
I do feel bad for the poor souls. The final two exams are going to be difficult. No more Mr. Nice Guy. I am going write individualized exams. And really up my difficulty gauge. I will ask multiple choice questions that use different formats, such as asking students whether it would be easier to solve the problem with Energy or Force principals. I think the only way you can do this to generate a unique test bank with 1000s of questions in it that randomly generates a unique test for each student, with language that is unique and cannot be googled – or students can’t look it up on chegg.
Also the exam needs to be timed.
This is going to be taxing and push my creativity. I can’t wait! Game on Pre-Meds!
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