Category Archives: Personal

How do you know they aren’t cheating?

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In comments on and earlier post, I mentioned that I no longer take extraordinary measures in anticipation of students taking an exam in an earlier sitting passing on information or answers to students taking the same exam in a later sitting. Commenter Martin wondered if I wasn’t being naïve:

there has been no evidence of such answers-from-the-earlier-sitting cheating in the whole time I’ve been at this university.
Janet,
how do you know this, what do you do to look for this? I’m sceptical, because we’ve had incidents where students doing the same exam in different countries on the same day but in different time zones have passed on details of the exam, even though there is no formal contact between the students during the semester, so the idea that students at the same campus don’t know that they are getting the same exam seems unlikely

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Speaking of fairness.

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An open letter to the handful of students during today’s exam asking whether I could “explain” the fourth short-answer test item to them:
Dear students,
The question you are pointing to is unambiguously phrased.
The wording of the item is quite clear in asking you to explain what that particular author is arguing about that particular scientific explanation. Indeed, the question you are asking me in anxious whispers indicates that you understand what this test item is asking for, and that what you are asking from me is a hint about the right answer.
That’s not how it works on the final exam.

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Fair exam administration to multiple sections.

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If my congested head is upright today, I must be administering final exams.
This puts me in mind of a question that has not come up this semester (and, with luck, will not), but that has come up on occasion in the past.
I frequently teach multiple sections of the same course in a given semester. On the one hand, this simplifies things, because it means that I have fewer exams to write. (A single final exam works for both section of Philosophy of Science.) But, since our final exams are scheduled based on the regular meeting days and times for the courses, there are then necessarily multiple sittings of an exam for courses I teach in multiple sections.
In practice, what this means is that the first group of students taking the exam can end up being your beta testers.

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Getting neti with it.

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One of the sprogs gave me a cold. There is nothing like being knocked on your butt by a cold to take all of the fun out of a weekend spent not-grading research projects.

Also, it seems to have filled my head with phlegm that then got … phlegmatic. Not quite congealed, but on its way in that direction. Desperate for relief, this led me to try something new.

NetiPot.jpg

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Changing professorial horses midstream.

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In comments on my earlier post about what happens to a college course in progress when the professor teaching it dies, a lot of folks raised interesting questions about what would be the fair policy to adopt with respect to student grades. I think actually implementing whatever we might agree was a fair grading policy could be complicated by practical considerations, like whether the professor had left behind updated grade records that were accessible to his or her department, whether he or she had already written a final exam (and a guide to grading that final exam), etc.
It’s an interesting set of questions, but that’s not the subject of this post.
Something else that came up in those comments was that a goodly number of commenters had actually been in a course where the professor died, or fell ill, or had to withdraw from teaching the course to deal with a pressing emergency of some sort. In such situations, someone either has to jump in to take over teaching the course — sometimes without much information from the original professor about how to teach it, or with very different views than the original professor about how the material ought to be covered — or the course ends up being concluded prematurely. I think this, as much as the issue of how to calculate grades at the end of the term raises some big questions, many of them connected to what the students enrolled in a course are owed.

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