{"id":645,"date":"2008-08-14T03:55:21","date_gmt":"2008-08-14T08:55:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/?p=645"},"modified":"2008-08-14T03:55:21","modified_gmt":"2008-08-14T08:55:21","slug":"deadmans-curve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/645","title":{"rendered":"Deadman's Curve"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matt discusses the disaster of grades in The Final Countdown<\/a><\/p>\n

I just finished grading three problems worth of the final exam (the other two TAs are taking care of the rest), and I think the exam can be safely described as a debacle. It was a disaster<\/em>. The scores haven’t been tallied up yet, but I think there’s a good chance the mean score will be within one standard deviation of zero<\/em>. And, I dunno, about 4 or 5 standard deviations away from 100.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One mitigation technique I’ve mentioned before<\/a> is to have a database of questions, so that you know the expected results, but this doesn’t necessarily work well in a university environment, and doesn’t apply here as it was already noted that the exam was made from scratch.<\/p>\n

But there’s another option. I’ve taken and TA’d several classes where grades were neither curved, strictly speaking, nor were graded on a standard “90 and above is an A” basis. The professor who taught the class for which I TA’d pointed out that the students had a hard time adjusting to the concept that the average score was going to be about 50, since they had never encountered that system before. When it first happened to me as an undergraduate, the professor put it rather succinctly \u2014 why bother asking a lot of questions that everybody can answer?<\/em> If 65 is the lowest passing score, then you’re asking a whole bunch of points worth of questions that don’t demonstrate adequate knowledge of the material. The idea was to cut out 50 points of that and add in questions that do require “passing” knowledge to answer and adjust the grading accordingly. The exams were much more complete in testing comprehension, since you could ask more questions about a particular topic. It’s not unlike the strategy taken during oral exams \u2014 asking questions until the target can’t answer them anymore. That’s when you’ve tested the depth of knowledge and comprehension. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matt discusses the disaster of grades in The Final Countdown I just finished grading three problems worth of the final exam (the other two TAs are taking care of the rest), and I think the exam can be safely described … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}