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One student wrote to me after the midterm with several concerns. Here are his comments and my responses.
Dear , Thank you for your thoughtful comments. These are important matters, so I thought I would respond to them individually: | |*The setting I feel was not a place for a math test. I say this |because the desks in the Kane lecture hall are no larger than 6 inches |across, and given that we have to draw lines with rulers, and our |calculators, notes, and writing utensils, there isnt much room for much |else, let alone sitting (being that the desks are so close to one |another-your practically sitting on the person's lap next to you). Given |this, it got very warm and this seemed to add to the stress to get the |midterm completed in a hurried manner. I feel a more appropriate place to |have the test would be in our quiz sections, where we are less cramped and |are with our TA. You are right about Kane 130 not being a place for a math test. For that matter it is not a place for a math class. I have been working for the last couple of years to convince the powers-that-be that math 120 needs to be taught in sections meeting 5 days per week with no more than 40 students per section. I did consider the possibility of having the midterms in the quiz sections. Unfortunately, this leaves open a greater possibility for cheating: students in the 8:30 sections can tell students in the 9:30 sections about what is on the midterm. When I write vastly different versions, there are always complaints that the two tests are not precisely equal in difficulty. The TAs would also be alone in the room and would not be looking at the students when they had to answer questions. With all of us in one room we were able to guarantee that at all times at least one or two of us were looking at the students. On this midterm, we caught 2 students cheating on the exam and we caught one ringer. Each of them will be referred to the administration to deal with punishment. Since it is unfortunately usually the case that some students will attempt to cheat, we felt it was best to have the exam all at once in the same room. For the final exam I was able to get three rooms. Students will be able to sit in alternate seats. With three rooms we will be able to have 2 TAs in each room, and I will be able to go from room to room to answer questions that might occur. Hopefully this will eliminate some of the problems mentioned above. We could not get these rooms for the midterm. | |*I feel the last problemon the test, while it can be found using the |methods taught, was never discussed in class or in quiz sections on how |to go about finding such a relationship. | You are supposed to be learning how to do problems that you have never discussed before. Almost all of the homework problems are of this nature. The homework is practice for these exams. You discuss the homework in quiz section so that you can learn how to approach new problems by analyzing your mistakes. The problems are not supposed to be routine imitations of problems you have done before. Each is supposed to require thinking and to be a multistep word problem. Each piece of the last exam problem you had done before: how to find the angle as a function of time, given its angular speed; how to find the x and y coordinates given the angle and radius, etc...On Monday I will scan the solutions to the exam problems and you can see online how to do each problem. |*Given that we are required to turn in homeworks in groups, I feel this |promotes an interdependent relationship with those members of your group. |I know it has in ours. Collectively we can figure out almost all our |homework problems and have missed only .5 points so far on all our |homework assignments. Given this I feel that if we are required to at |least turn in our assignments in a group fashion that we be allowed to |work in groups on the tests. If you will recall my description at the beginning of the quarter of how to run the groups, each of you should first attempt to do each problem on your own. The group setting is supposed to help you go further: to learn from others how to do problems you could not do on your own. In other words the effect of eliminating the groups should be that you would learn less, not more. Unfortunately some of the groups are relying on one or two members to do all the work, according to two complaints we have received. If such a group were allowed to work together on the midterm, it would be unfair to the rest of the class: some students who knew nothing at all about the material would get great grades. Such exams might only tell you something about the best student in each group. The homework is worth such a small percentage of the grade that I thought that these concerns were not as important as the potential benefits of more students learning the material. | |*On a similar note, by working together in our group, collectively we know |the material very well, as different people pick up different things. We |have all done well on all our quizes and given the understanding of our |homework assignments and scores, we feel that this reflects an |understanding of the material. The problem is that given the fact that we |excel in homework and on quizes, then one would expect to do good on a |test, but after having taking it, we have come to a consensus that the |test doesn't reflect our knowledge of the material covered in class. | From your description, it sounds like your group is working well. Just be careful of unconscious reliance on the others in your group. Do you feel you would have done better on the exam if you did not have the group? Learning how to take tests is not easy, but it is an integral part of the university experience. If you will look at the math 120 homepage, you will see how to estimate your class grade based on the proficiency tests, quizzes and midterm (I do not have the data on the homework scores yet). It is probably not as bad as you think. |*Given the fact that we were required to pass the proficiency test, I |would have thought that there might be something about functions and their |relationship and workings with other functions, but to my surprise there |was nothing of the sort. If it was such an important concept to grasp, |then why wouldn't we be asked something of such great importance on the |test? The last problem on the exam involved composition. The purpose of the proficiency tests was to be sure you could do those mechanical operations. You were allowed to take it repeatedly until you got it right. It seems to have been a success, since virtually everyone in the class got full credit eventually. In past quarters without the proficiency tests, only about half of the class could do these problems on the final exam. About that many got the proficiency test right on the first try. I'd bet that this class would have a very high success rate on such problems on a final exam now. Their effort will be rewarded in calculus when this material is used heavily. Under these circumstances I did not feel that it was also necessary to have a similar question on the midterm: the midterm cannot have a problem on everything you learned in the class; there is not enough time during the hour to do that many problems. Consequently I had to make a selection of problems. | |*Lastly, and I don't want to come across as a whiner for the mistakes that |I made, but given the information provided above, I feel that I should |point this out. As mentioned above, the classes response after taking the |test was one that, from my observations, the majority of the |class did extremely poor on this midterm. Given that kind of response I |would expect the test scores to be very low. From my years of school |experience, if a class as a whole, averages a very low test score, that |means that the material covered is not being taught very well. | There are many ways of designing a test. One way is to make the test easy. Many times such a test gives false sense of how well the students know the material. Small discrepancies are then used to distinquish between the performances. Another way is to make the test challenging enough so that you can really tell how much the student knows. The latter method is widely used here at this university. With this method, it is not expected that the average student will be able to do all of the problems. The grading scale on the exam is adjusted accordingly. |I understand that this is a challenging class that pushes a person to |think and make connections of different types of mathematical |relationships, but these issues I thought were important and should be |brought to your attention. Like I said before, I don't want to come |across as a whiner for the mistakes I made, as they were my fault. Thank |you for your time. Thank you very much for your comments. I hope I have adequately addressed at least some of them. I don't think you are whining. I have spent a lot of time thinking about how this course is designed. Input from the students is very valuable. I realize that this course is very stressful for the students. It has been designed with one goal in mind: to prepare the students for calculus. When we started redesigning this course in 1990, it was an easy course. Almost none of the students, however, were successful in calculus. Now the group with the highest expected grade in math 124 is the group of students who take math 120 here at the UW. Sincerely, DonReturn to Math 120 Homepage