All Posts Tagged With: "tests"
In defense of the good old-fashioned exam
Take-home exams just aren’t the same
Photo by Patrik Axelsson on Flickr
I love almost everything about being a professor. Teaching, research—I even look forward to department meetings.
But I hate grading exams. And just as I become a flat-tax advocate every April when I’m trying to locate receipts and hoping I don’t owe the government money, every December I harbor fantasies of getting rid of exams altogether.
Many of my colleagues in the arts are way ahead of me on this, either giving no exams at all, or giving students an extra, essay-like assignment commonly called a “take-home” exam. But since you take it home and have an extended time to do it, it’s not really an exam in the traditional sense.
Didn’t pay the fee? No grades for you!
Sask. prof threatens to withhold grades in dispute over additional course fee
Students were informed by professor Gordon Sparks that the $30 fee was mandatory to pay to use materials made available on the course’s Blackboard homepage at the beginning of the class and in their syllabus. However, most students viewed the fee in the same way as paying for an assigned textbook, and that it was not necessarily required to complete the course.
Sparks’ view apparently differed on the fee, as he wrote to students in an email that if they didn’t cough up the $30, “you will be ‘cutoff’ access to Blackboard and therefore will not get a grade in the class!”
In the past, Sparks has simply denied access to the materials on Blackboard until students had paid the fee, which allows students to use course materials from former University of New Brunswick professor Barry Bisson.
Some students felt Sparks was not justified in threatening academic repercussions for students who don’t pay. U of S student Steve Bachiu told The Sheaf that he felt the threat “seems a lot like extortion” since he’s already paid his tuition fees for the course.
“My issue, essentially, is that it’s material that I don’t want. There are a lot of other classes that I’m taking where I haven’t bought the textbook” and have still been given a grade in the class, Bachiu said.
The materials the fee covers include review exercises, quizzes and weekly assignments. According to The Sheaf, Sparks has argued that students were obliged to pay the fee because they had made use of Bisson’s intellectual property by completing the quizzes and assignments.
However, Bachiu said that he felt that instructors shouldn’t be allowed to charge access fees for tests “and that is, essentially, what’s happening.”
Bachiu has brought his concerns to University of Saskatchewan Students Union (USSU) vice-president academic affairs Kelsey Topola, who said she is planning on bringing them before the university’s teaching and learning committee, academic support committee or copyright advisory committee.
‘Learning styles’ are bogus
Researchers say moving around while studying improves retention
Every semester I tell myself that I’ll study more. And every semester I don’t.
Somewhere between vowing to study every single day and the act of actually doing it, there’s an interruption. All the planning is in place. But study schedules, lists of course readings and practice problems, somehow aren’t leading to extra studying.
Part of the problem is how midterms always seem to come from nowhere. In that way they’re even worse than final exams, which might be worth more marks, but at least they’re always looming in the distance.
According to an article in the New York Times, cognitive scientists claim a few simple techniques can actually improve how much a student actually learns from studying. Of course, that only helps those students who actually, well, study.
One surprise from the research is the claim that in order to be the most effective, you should actually move around and study in different locations each time you hit the books. And no, the research wasn’t suggesting moving to Hawaii to study for your biochem final, and then moving back for your French final.
The other studying tips were obvious. Like making sure you space your studying apart so you aren’t forced to try and cram everything at the last second. And if all else fails, praying to the snow gods for the mother of all storms to force the school to shut down on the day of your finals.
The Times’ article pointed out that some of the theories about the best way to study are the result of “sketchy education research that doesn’t offer much clear guidance.”
Lots of studying advice has to do with emphasizing different learning styles- the whole “left brain versus right brain,” and “visual learner versus auditory learner” thing. Some people learn best by reading through their professor’s lecture slides, while others retain more information by listening to podcast lectures. But according to a review of the relevant research published in Psychological Science, that’s all pretty much bogus, stating that “there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice.”
I think the biggest improvement to my studying habits would be constant reminders. Like changing the background of my computer to a message that says “ANATOMY MIDTERM FEBRUARY 14th.” Because midterms are stealth tests- one second I’m happily unaware of their presence, wasting precious study time with things like sleeping and eating.
And the next second a bunch of tests, lab reports, and essays have materialized.
Christmas is coming
When did that happen?
There are only 27 days until Christmas. I’ve handed in my major lab report, which means there aren’t any more assignments, quizzes or tests between now and finals.
I’m not sure which is more unbelievable: that Christmas is around the corner and I’m almost finished my first semester of third year. Or that my first exam is in less than four days.
-Photo courtesy of LadyDragonflyCC – Turkey Time!!!!
Why professors hate marking
You think writing papers is tough? Try grading them
Sitting on my desk are this year’s first piles of student papers waiting to be graded. But I’m not grading them. Instead, I’m writing this blog entry about why I dislike grading papers.
Many people assume that grading papers is the worst thing about being a professor. They are right, but for the wrong reason. People think it’s onerous because, as they often say to me, “some of them must be so bad.” And some of them are bad, but those aren’t the ones that make marking such a chore; in fact, really bad papers are almost a pleasure to grade because at least they get me excited — if only by rage.
No, the worst papers are the papers that populate the vast, bland wasteland of mediocrity. They are not good, mind you, and they are not bad. They are, to adapt Wolfgan Pauli’s famous quip, not even bad. They make no huge blunders, but they don’t say anything either. They are not off-track exactly; they just don’t know there is a track to be on. It’s hard to know where to even start with such essays. And they’re waiting in those piles to torment me with their insipidity.
Part of the difficulty comes from the fact that most essay grading involves a fictional bargain between student and professor. In theory, the student has worked hard on the paper: she’s thought through the topic, done relevant research, made notes and outlines, completed several drafts, and finally, at long last, handed it in. The professor evaluates the work, notes its strengths and weakness, and provides thoughtful advice for how to do even better next time. The student takes that advice gratefully and can’t wait ’til the next paper comes due to show off what she’s learned.
In reality, though, most students do only about as much as they think they need to pass the course, or stay in their program, or get into their next program. Similarly, professors know that their comments will go largely or entirely unread, and those that are read will not likely be taken to heart. They pretend to work hard; we pretend they want to get better.
This enduring game of academic make-believe was brought into focus for me the other day when I overheard a student amusedly complaining to her friend that her professor was suggesting ways to improve a paper that had already received a good grade. “I’m fine with an 80!” she laughed. Of course. Why settle for better when you can do good?
Every once in a while, there is a genuinely good paper to help break the monotony. I once had an excellent student whose name put her papers at the top of the pile (I grade in alphabetical order), but I always used to move her essay to the middle because I knew by then I would need an excellent paper to help keep me going. Maybe such a student is waiting patiently in one of those piles right now.
I guess it’s time to find out…
What your test scores don’t say about you
A new study finds negative stereotypes can mask people’s academic abilities
Consider the following scenario: university admissions officers have narrowed applications for the final place in an engineering program down to two. The candidates have similar credentials and identical test scores; the only difference is that one is a woman and the other is a man. Who should they choose?
The answer may come as a surprise. According to a paper slated for publication in Psychological Science, the fear of confirming negative stereotypes about the intellectual capacity of women in math and sciences likely led the female applicant to underperform. Though her test scores may be the same as those of her male counterpart, the woman has a “significant untapped potential,” says University of Waterloo professor Steven Spencer, who co-authored the study with Stanford University’s Greg Walton. Put simply, she’s the better choice.
Test scores and grades have long shown an academic achievement gap between genders and ethnicities. In the past, this discrepancy has been explained by factors like poverty and poor schooling, which, it has been believed, lead to real differences in ability. Latent Ability: Grades and Tests Systematically Underestimate the Intellectual Ability of Negatively Stereotyped Students makes a new and very different case for affirmative action.
While Spencer and Walton don’t deny that socio-economic factors play a role in academic performance, their research, gleaned from a compendium of studies that include 19,000 students in Canada, France, Germany, Sweden and the U.S., has identified stereotype threat as another cause.
According to Spencer, stereotype threat comes into play whenever “you feel you can be judged based on a negative stereotype about your group.” As he explains, for non-Asian minorities and women (in quantitative fields), the belief that they don’t belong, or that the odds are stacked against their success, causes these students to “become excessively careful” when answering questions, a strategy that’s particularly ill advised on standardized tests. At the same time, he says efforts to “tamp down thinking about a stereotype … actually eats up a lot of their cognitive resources,” reducing the capacity of short-term memory. The feeling of belonging may be an abstract concept, but the implications are very real.
On the SAT, for example, the professors say black and Hispanic students score about 40 points below their true ability, and on the math portion, women score about 20 points under where they should. And it’s not just on college entrance exams. Spencer says that stereotype threat in high schools and even junior highs mean grades and test scores could underestimate the ability of these students for the majority of their academic careers.
But there is hope. Compared to factors like poverty and poor schooling, says Spencer, reducing stereotype threat is relatively easy. Simple interventions, such as telling college students that there is no group differences on a particular test or getting junior high kids to write about values that are important to them can “make a big difference in performance,” he says. To eliminate it completely, he says academic institutions must work to identify at-risk groups and develop long-term strategies to make them feel accepted.
“That feeling of belonging is really the antidote to this [belief] that you’re going to be judged based on stereotypes about your group,” says Spencer. In the meantime however, he says admissions officers should take stereotype threat into account when making decisions-not because women and minorities need a boost to succeed, but because tests hide the fact that they already have.
