Another dispatch from grading Hell (fourth circle), in which the reader gains some insight into circumstances which evoke my sympathy, and circumstances which do not.
I have this pedagogical strategy where I try to make my students think more than they have to write. One way this strategy manifests itself is in how I deal with case studies on finals exams.
Category Archives: Teaching and learning
Strategies for grading fairly.
I am in grading Hell. I expect to be here until at least Memorial Day (Monday), and possibly through Tuesday. (Does that mean I’m actually in grading Purgatory? Please advise.)
Anyway, in a private communication, PhysioProf asked,
As you get grumpier from grading, do you grade harsher?
If I did, that would be an unfortunate situation for those whose papers I get to last, wouldn’t it?
Thankfully for my students, I make serious efforts to apply a uniform level of harshness (or leniency) across the whole pool I’m grading. Here are some of my strategies:
How hot was it?
The classroom I taught in this semester was fairly hot. Even when it was chilly outside, the temperature in the classroom was uncomfortably warm.
Of course, I think it might have been worse for me (pacing in front of the whiteboard, trying to keep things lively) than for the students most of the time. But today, we had the final exam in that room. And unlike most class meetings, every single chair in the room was filled.
And we experienced record highs, temperature-wise.
So, how hot was it? I give you the testimony of one of the students taking the final today:
Why it’s so hard to get that course you need.
There’s an article in Access (the glossy magazine put out by our School of Journalism and Mass Communication) about why so few of our students manage to get their degrees in four years. Part of it has to do with the fact that most of our students work — many the equivalent of full time (or more) — and many have long commutes to get here. As well, many who start out taking courses at community colleges discover that some of those credits don’t transfer.
But a lot of the challenge, it turns out, has to do with lining up all the classes to fulfill all the major and general education requirements:
SJSU academic advisor and instructor Michael Randle, who has been working at SJSU since 1998, believes that understanding the requirements, knowing the prerequisites and organizing one’s priorities can help students graduate from SJSU in the time they desire. Randle, who teaches the lecture courses “Success and Science” and “Success as Transfers,” has seen a variety of factors that cause students to stay at SJSU longer than four years.
“Many need remediation (students do not receive credits toward graduation in remedial classes). A lot of our students work and because they work, they have very specific scheduling needs, which force them to take classes later on. Another factor is that when students devote their time to work, many don’t pass their classes and have to repeat them. Last but not least, some courses are only offered in a specific semester, forcing students to wait,” says Randle.
From a student’s point of view, that course you need which is only offered in a specific semester can be a real source of irritation. Why the heck doesn’t the school offer the courses you need more frequently?
Here’s some insight from the faculty end of course scheduling.
Passion quilt: a meme for teachers.
More than a month ago William the Coroner tagged me. It is not just that I am slow; this meme is challenging!
Not mush, methodology.
‘Stop snitching’ as part of the engineering student ethos.
Once again, I’m teaching the relatively new ethics module in “Introduction to Engineering”. Today was the discussion of what kinds of ethics might reasonably govern an engineering student’s behavior, and how these might be important on the road to becoming a competent grown-up engineer.
So of course, we talked about cheating.
Relationships in lab groups.
This post is standing in for a lecture and class discussion that would be happening today if I knew how to be in two places at once. (Welcome Phil. 133 students! Make yourselves at home in the comments, and feel free to use a pseudonym if you’d rather not comment under your real name.)
The topic at hand is the way relationships in research groups influence the kind of science that comes out of those groups, as well as the understanding the members of the group have of what it means to do good science. Our jumping off point is an article by Vivian Weil and Robert Arzbaecher titled “Relationships In Laboratories and Research Communities.” [1]
The love/hate relationship with academia.
Maria has an awesome post about her thoughts upon wrapping up her Master’s thesis. It captures the kind of shifts one can have in figuring out what to do, who to be, and how schooling fits into all of that — and how what’s at stake is as much emotional as it is intellectual. She writes:
I have found that clinging too stubbornly to long-term goals is actually bad for me. Not because the goals themselves are bad, but I tend to become emotionally overinvested in them, and then I freak! out! at the slightest threat to my success. Learning to keep things in perspective has meant, for me, appreciating that lots of things can happen between now and the completion of my Five-Year Plan.
Longtime readers know that my career trajectory underwent some pretty significant changes, so I can really relate to this. I’m going to add just a few loosely connected* thoughts of my own here:
A question for those who teach.
Do you ever get to the point where if you haven’t checked your syllabus within the last few hours, you have no confidence that you actually know what day it is?
Or is it just me?
Considering the science world’s ‘massive communication problem’.
In the aftermath of a pretty enthusiastic pile-on to a claim that Expelled! had a successful first week of release, Chris Mooney calls for “serious introspection about the massive communication crisis we’re facing in the science world”.
You know I’m always up for introspection.