Study guides & student entitlement

This editorial from the U. Minn. Daily student newspaper really shows the state of student entitlement.  Do professors "owe" students a study guide for exams?  This was pretty much a pet peeve when TPP was teaching large lecture, introductory courses. You announce an exam already scheduled on the syllabus, and one of the questions you always got was, "Will you give us a study guide?" Sure.  Then the syllabus' lecture outline was copied, an outline TPP was always followed unless noted otherwise, added in the major topics covered in each heading, and sometimes added reminders of illustrative examples provided. Then one astute fellow notices the similarity to the syllabus, and says, "This study guide just copies the syllabus."  Right!  That's the material that's covered on this exam.  Now any competent student should have been able to do the same with their lecture notes, but the problem is that this was not the "study guide" they wanted. Read the editorial yourself. Maddie actually wants her professors to specifically note the material that will NOT be covered on the exam. Now TPP understands that exams cannot be fully comprehensive, but he tried to make his exams representative of the material covered, in depth and breadth, and never, ever, once has he ever said after covering some topic, "But you won't have to know this." WTF? Why would any teacher ever say that? Out of a universe of material on the subject of biology, your knowledgeable professor has winnowed out a minute amount of material that is both essential and necessary to the content of the course at this level, and now students want that professor to winnow out that subset and provide them with the sub-subset that they don't have to learn!  Amazing. This is what happens when education becomes primarily about about grades & credits, and not about learning. TPP doesn't think very many professors are going to be very sympathetic, but obviously Maddie has gotten study guides from some of us somewhere or she wouldn't be so entitled. Isn't it obvious that if a professor spends 30 mins explaining something it'll be on the exam. If it was 2 mins. maybe not so much. We can only hope life will provide Maddie with a study guide so she can put her valuable time to good use making sure she doesn't learn too much. HT to Angry by Choice.

Monday morning matters?

Monday is off to a slow start.  TPP has a mid-morning appointment right across the street, so going for coffee or going to the office would just be a waste of time.  Better to waste time blogging.
Item 1: Graded exams.  Quite a bit of time was spent this weekend reading the first exam in my economic botany class.  These are upper class students who obviously find botany interesting, and economic botany does a good job of convincing people of that.  The results were pretty good in fact the best class TPP has had in years (10 of 24 aced the exam).  Had to work hard, almost to the point of quibbling, to deduct 1 point from one exam, in two half-point increments to demonstrate that a perfect paper is a theoretical construct.  You should know that TPP grades one question at a time and has no idea who wrote what and no idea how a particular student or exam is doing.  Two other students will be surprised to find they did not get the highest grade.
Item 2: International Blasphemy Rights Day - Sept. 30.  TPP has never had the urge to hurt anyone's feeling about their particular religious beliefs, but in places with blasphemy laws and a state-supported religion, sometimes just being an evolution-teaching biologist is enough to break such a law because science causes some religious people discomfort.  Boo-hoo.  Glad the people who want the USA to be a Christian nation remain a minority, although it would be a grand fight over which flavor would get top billing.
Item 3: Barely some rain event.  TPP was completely correct. The recent rain totaled a scant 1/4 inch.  Some bulbs needed planting and beneath the mulch is was just dry.  Terrible. 
Item 4: Garden work.  Planted some yellow-flowered trout lily in the woodland garden.  Transplanted some Japanese peony 2-year old plants from a seed bed to the woodland garden.  Decided where to plant the Persian ironwood (look back a blog - too lazy to link it).  Did some weeding. How do they grow so well when it's so dry?  Removed tropical floating fern from the lily pond to transport to the university glasshouse for the winter.  Harvested some very fine oak-leafed lettuce and had a dynamite BLT. 
Item 5:  Mrs. Phactor tried a new recipe, a tian.  A baked casserole of slices of tomato, zucchini, salami (rustic Italian), and mozzarella cheese, drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with mixed herbs.  Wonderful.
Item 6: Shopping.  TPP needed some clothes so he went shopping which he does religiously, about twice a year. A more interesting sale was at the local garden shop, which  had an end of season, "under construction" sale, but there wasn't much that we needed.  Mrs. Phactor bought decorative gourds and a couple of colorful mums.  TPP was called on to be the resident expert.  They like me at this establishment.
Item 7: Summer continues.  Highs in the low 80s for the next few days!  It's the end of September and it's still summer.  Tropical plants get to extend their summer outdoor sojourn another few days. 

Grade exams or plant bulbs

This is not really much of a choice, but actually both have to be done.  The end of daylight savings time has provided the false sense of having some time to think about this.  The main problem with exams is that after all these years, how they are going to come out is pretty obvious.  The inattentive, the frequently absent, the crammers, the poorly disciplined, often all combined in a single person, don't really have a chance of doing well, but it still saddens TPP to be right so often although this is never known until the exams are graded.  Self-fulfilling prophecies are not allowed, so grading is done in the blind.  Yesterday was a damp cold day, and the reaction is almost always the same; cook something satisfyingly spicy, in this instance mulligatawny soup.  My version is a bit spicier than most because a home made garam masala is used in place of curry powder, and to cook the chicken and make the broth, a nice hot pimento pepper is used along with a clove studded onion.  Oh yes, quite yum, and then later to Hyde Park.  No actually later to see Argo, a quite tense, quite good movie actually, and then cocktails with friends.  Today promises to be a bit warmer, so finishing the bulb planting is almost a must do chore, as is the bloody exam grading.  What's the solution, why cook something else satisfyingly spicy for Sunday supper rather than deal with dirty exams, or dirt and exams.

My dog ate my homework

It's midterm and TPP gave an exam today.  These events are deadly to the grandparents of students; two of them died.  And another fellow showed up appropriately winded to declare that he'd just gotten back from the police station.  "Released on your own recognizance?"  What?  "You made bail?"  Oh?  Oh!  Ha, ha, no; I was reporting a break in and theft.  And my homework was on my laptop that got stolen.  "But of course you have a backup."  Uh, no.  "Good thing you don't have a dog that could have eaten your stick memory."  Oh, no, another was delayed arriving back from home by a flight cancellation.  So many calamities, and just because of an exam.  And this is out of just 24 students.  It was the big lecture classes that gave me gray hair.   

Exams

Please understand this.  Nobody, nobody dislikes exams more than faculty.  The reason is simple.  Exams are a huge pain to evaluate fairly, and the results can be so discouraging.  You have to be quite careful to evaluate student work in a non-biased way.  You don't want who the person is to matter.  And you want the evaluation of each item to be independent of all the rest of the items.  TPP does this by folding the name out of sight and evaluating each question as a class set.  First, based upon the material covered in lecture, lab, and their textbook, a decision is made about what a good answer should include, so, for example, you might decide that the correct species name is worth 4 of the 10 points.  Then several responses are read to see if any of them approach the ideal response, and if at least one does, then the rest are evaluated coming back to the first ones read last.  Then on to the next question.  You do understand that this is not a multiple guess exam where the student simply tries to recognize or guess (1 out of 4 or 5) the correct response.  It's blank paper.  This way TPP has no idea how someone is doing until the very end when the points are totalled up.  Sometimes it seems things are going badly, like this 1st exam just recently graded, but the average grade was 75.5, one-half point above the B-C border line.  However as always it's the extremes that make you very happy or very sad. People who score more than 20 points above or below this average are either doing great or very poorly.  Sometimes the reasons are clear.  One student with an attendance record of almost exactly 50% got exactly 50% on the exam, which seems a very symmetrical result.  No you can't have any extra credit until you take advantage of all the opportunities offered already.  Scheesh!  What fun.  Not.

Unneeded Exam

The semester is progressing, and the Phactor is pretty much on schedule in one of his favorite classes, which makes me wonder what I inadvertently left out , and the third exam is coming up. Now it takes a couple of hours to write a good exam; no multiple guess questions, just queries, explanations, and hypotheses to evaluate on blank paper. But evaluating these exams, carefully and fairly, even for a class of just 24, takes hours and hours. And after the first two exams it's mostly it's a waste of time.

This assertion is based upon a couple of decades of data. After two exams grades can be assigned with about 85% accuracy. The senior sliders have identified themselves, as have those students who do not miss a trick. There is little chance either group will change. However a couple of those in the middle will continue to improve, and every now and then the wheels completely fall off for someone, usually the result of something in their personal lives that affects their academics, and the results are a real tragedy. But the assessment for most is accurate after just two samples.

However the sampling will continue, and presumably the assessment will asymptotically improve its accuracy.