Student Assessment: 2017

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Bringing Notes to the Examination

A meme downloaded from "S**t Academics Say" Oct17, 2017:

There are several points to be made here.

First, good on the examiner for recognizing that was on them, not the student. I detest when an instructor makes a mistake and then tells a student, "well, that's not what I meant!" Unless mind reading is criteria in your psychic examination, it is inappropriate to hold students accountable for the instructor's intentions. If they got the literal answer to one's poorly worded question or followed one's poorly worded instructions literally, they get the mark or behaviour.

Second, you have to love this student! That is out of the box thinking! Exactly what every discipline needs more of.

Third, open book examinations are actually harder. Okay, if it's closed book for everyone else and open book for you, that does give one a slight advantage, but not as much as most people assume. There is relatively little knowledge that we need to memorize, as opposed to understanding and having available to us on our computers or google or etc. In most disciplines, one ends up memorize the important facts because that's easier than looking them up every time. If the fact is one you have to look up, it is by definition one that did not come up enough to be worth memorizing. Exams should be testing understanding, not just rote memorization. If the exam is testing higher orders of cognition (analysis, synthesis, evaluation and so on) then making information available to students makes for a better test of skills than the usual rote memorization that many exams seem to be geared towards.

Thursday, April 13, 2017

Science Fairs

My brother-in-law, who is an excellent physics teacher, spent a lot of years founding, running and judging science fairs. Science fairs, done correctly, are an excellent learning tool.

But um...

I feel the need to provide an alternative, student-eye view of science fairs:

I think my brother-in-law's science fairs worked better because, in part, they were not compulsory, but intended for those who were actually interested in science and in participating. (The other part is that my brother-in-law is kind of an outstanding teacher, so, you know, don't necessarily try this at home, or your school, unless you actually care as much as my brother-in-law.)

Monday, April 10, 2017

Group Work

Pretty much my experience of group work: good students who want a good mark have to carry the unmotivated because they do not want to take the hit on their grades, while there are essentially no consequences for one or two students doing nothing.

There is a lot of lip service given to using group work to teach collaborative skills, but the cartoon reflects what students actually learn; i.e., that group work is a fraud. As I have stated before in this blog, group work can only contribute to learning if relevant theory on group dynamics and instruction in practical collaborative skills have been explicitly taught and assessed, either in the current course or a prerequisite. Even then, successful group work requires considerable preparation by the instructor to carefully structure tasks, distribute the workload equitably, and have clear and thoughtful assessment. I have seen this used appropriately in a few rare programs, but the true purpose of the vast majority of group work assigned is merely to reduce the instructor's marking load. Bah humbug!

Given motivated students and topics students care about, small group (in-class, ungraded) discussion can work well, provided students are given structured activities (e.g., a series of questions to discuss) and a clear time limit (to stay focused).

Any other group work that requires students to get together outside of class discriminates against students with long commutes, single moms, students working their way through college, mature students with elder care issues, minority students whose family or cultural expectations prohibit their participation outside of school hours, or etc.

Group work for marks where the group processes are not directly observed and assessed by the instructor make it almost impossible to assign grades fairly.

Where groups are allowed to chose themselves, 'A' students will strive to join together, excluding not just 'B' and 'C' students, but also anyone with a visible disability, member of a lower social class, any member of a cultural minority, and so on. Group work where group members are not assigned by the instructor are therefore inevitably sexist, racist, classist, abilist, and so on. Instructors who do not assign students to groups must recognize that the primary purpose of group work in their class is to ensure the reproduction of the current social order rather than to certify achievement based on talent and effort.

Assigning students to work together in groups ensures that A students will be frustrated by having to do a greater share of the work to ensure a minimally acceptable grade and/or accept a significant 'hit' to their grade point average. Assigning students to work groups without adequate training in group collaboration skills and appropriate checks and balances on workload distribution and task assignment ensures group conflict, and an end product that is greater mess than the sum of the flaws introduced by each individual.

I'm not a fan.

Friday, March 24, 2017

Detecting Plagiarism Tip 2

A recent post by a colleague on an editing site made the point that

if text is copied and pasted into Word from e.g. Wikipedia, it can include non-breaking spaces (small raised circles instead of the usual dot seen with show/hide is turned on). These are practically impossible to type by mistake! Similarly, when text is copied and pasted from PDFs, odd line breaks/returns are imported—another give-away.

Thought I'd pass that along.

Monday, January 16, 2017

Plagiarism: Two Unsuccessful Examples

In a recent discussion of plagiarism with some editors, I was reminded of an example from my own teaching experience that I now relate here for your amusement.

As a new prof I had the singular experience of an undergraduate handing in a paper to the course I was teaching on the sociology of education that, as it turned out, I had written when I had taken the same course a decade or so before. Unbeknownst to me, the paper must have been photocopied by a classmate of mine years before and entered into the frat files. The original title page must have long since been discarded by the frat boys as who knows how many times the paper had been recycled, so my student merrily retrieved it from the files, typed up a new cover page with his name, and handed it in to it's author. It took me a minute to recognize after all those years, but there was something about it that was strangely familiar. And as it occurred to me that it was in fact, my paper, I recognized that the typing had the cracked line through the 'e' that I had had on my typewriter that year. I actually went through the effort of digging through the garage to find the original paper, and yup, it was identical. So that was an 'F' for the student, and an anecdote for me.

The other example that I recall from roughly the same period was a colleague of mine telling of the case of a seminary student in his PhD defense. The originally scheduled external examiner had called in sick, so the supervisor had located a replacement. "You're in luck," he had told the student, "Dr X from the University of Y in Germany is in Calgary for a conference and has agreed to fly up to sit in as your external. It's a great honor because he is apparently quite an expert on your topic." But of course, turns out he really was an expert because when he opened the student's dissertation, he discovered at once it was his dissertation translated from the German. Since one does not get a PhD in theology for translating someone else's doctoral thesis, that was another FAIL. But I have to say, great example of the direct intervention of God against someone unworthy of the doctor of theology, because how else to explain the coincidence? The poor bastard must have thought himself completely safe from discover (this being decades before the internet).

Moral of the story: don't plagiarize or god will get you. .