And so it begins …

In one of my classes, we will have exam one next week. So this week, I gave my students a preview of what the exam would be like in the form of a quiz.

I’ll give you a little bit of background about what some of my constraints are and how I run my courses.

My Constraints

These constraints are mostly department policy and there is good reason for them. A good reason is that with low-level courses, colleges and universities have to balance uniqueness of instructional methodology with consistency in assessment and material delivered. It’s one thing if it were one course, one section, per semester / per year. It’s another thing if there are 20+ sections each semester for the same course. There is a reasonable expectation that a student should be able to get a similar course regardless of section. There will, of course, be natural variations in how the instructor teaches it, but at the very least, the syllabus needs to be standard.

• must give four exams, each subsequent exam builds on the previous exam and has an increasing weight towards the course grade (for my opinion on a possibly better way to evaluate students, please see here)
• must give regular quizzes throughout the semester
• must give grades in accordance with course policy, but I get wiggle room for how much homework and quizzes are worth
• class meets once a week for four hours in one session

How I Run My Courses

I teach college. So, I don’t think of my students as “kids”. The majority of them are all 18 years or older. They are legally adults, and I treat them as such. Plus, we are in college. One step closer to the “real world”, right?

I’m not as cold as I may sound in even my own writing. But what I want out of students is for them to wake up and use their time. I want them to learn the math that they’ve signed up to take. I’ve been teaching long enough and have been a student long enough (and even now I’m a student (of piano)) to know how school / schooling / education really is treated by many.

In a nutshell, there is a faux seriousness about going to school. It’s touted as the ticket to success. Thus, we ought to take it seriously. On the other hand it’s about point calculus. How many points will I lose if I don’t do this and is that worth it? I’ve always wanted to teach a course / unit on risk management of a student’s GPA. What does losing that one point on that one quiz mean to one’s GPA? What about ten points? What about bombing a quiz?

Oh wait! That’s what this article is about. Right, so back to the story.

So, in my courses, I try to get away as much as I can from this crazy point distribution madness of points for attendance, points for quizzes, points for exams, points for projects, points for points, etc. I don’t really care about the micrograding. In my ideal world, I would have one final exam that students can retake up to four times. Once they stop retaking the exam, their last exam score is the course grade. The final exam would be cumulative of all the material covered in the course. That’s it. To me, that’s actually the most representative of a student’s grade in a course. An 80 on exam 1, a 60 on exam 2, etc. all glommed together by an average tells me zilch about a student’s exit knowledge. All it tells me is how well the student can keep pace.

But it’s not my ideal world. So, i try to find a happy balance. I can’t fight the exam grade weighting — that’s a longer conversation involving many parties and that policy isn’t going to change for me. So, where I get room is how much to weight homework, how much to weight attendance, how much to weight quizzes.

Here’s my typical breakdown of the three topics (thus, the percentages will add to 100%, however, they are in aggregate only part of a student’s grade as the remainder is made up of exam scores / weights).

• Homework — 0%
• Attendance — 5% (I have to, unfortunately, have this here, for other overarching reasons. Having said that, 5% is the smallest I can make it.)
• Quizzes — 95%

And so it begins. I put homework at 0% not because it’s unimportant, but because I don’t think I should be “incentivizing” via points for students to do what students are supposed to do. They’re supposed to personalize their education. And this means, exploring on their own time, in their own capacity, and to their own desired depth. I’m not interested in chasing them down to do their work. They’re adults.

Also, I just don’t think that I should be exerting control over their lives outside of the classroom. And I don’t exert control over their lives in the classroom either, but in class we all interact and I am in a position of subject matter authority. So there is an implicit power hierarchy.

But if you’re a teacher or a student or have been either one at any time in your life, then you know what happens with a 0% weight on homework. Nobody, but the most focused, does it! In fact, in the course syllabus, I give this paragraph when the 0% homework weight shows itself in the grading policy:

Ye be warned: while homework is worth 0%, this does not mean that it is unimportant. There is a very high likelihood that if you do not do your homework, you will not succeed in this class. Homework exists for you, the student, to self-assess your knowledge. If you are having difficulty doing the homework, it means that you need to reach out for help. Help comes in many ways: a) speak to me, b) work with your classmates, c) go to the math help center, d) look online, e) read the book, etc. Homework should be done daily as it is a form of practice. It is inadvisable to do the homework “the night before the exam”. Despite the 0% weight on the homework, it is strongly encouraged and recommended that you submit homework for feedback.

And I call attention to this. I emphasize this, etc. But talk is cheap. Students have to learn this through their own hubris and laziness. I did!

So every week, I start class with “any questions on last week’s material?”. Crickets. “I didn’t get any emails from any of you. I assume we’re all doing our work and everything makes sense, then. Is that right?” Crickets.

I know this non-engagement. Get on with it, Teach. If you’re gonna lecture us, lecture us on the material. Whatevs.

And so I go along with it. Ok, no questions, everything is ok. No one’s confused about anything.

And I know that’s far from the truth because I also don’t just “lecture”. My teaching style would be considered by many to be “direct instruction”, but it’s far from the stand-and-deliver type. We talk in class. Not just me. There are questions students ask, there are questions I ask. There are answers students give. There are answers I give. We explore the suggestions that are made. It is an interactive lecture. But I know the confusion. I hear it when I receive six different answers. But that’s great. That’s the whole point. I want to address those misunderstandings immediately.

So we had our first quiz. A preview of the exam coming up.

Do you know what kind of quiz this is? It’s open note, open book. It’s even open talking! They can choose a partner to work with! The quiz they turn in has to represent what they know, so I disallow copying from the “smart kid” — in fact, there is a strong threat that if I see this from anyone, then as a class we will move to closed note, closed book, no talking, old school filtering. I designed the quiz to take about an hour if the student knew what he/she is doing. It was straightforward. No tricks. No weapons. Skill against skill alone. (What movie am I quoting? There’s a shiny retweet in it for you if you can name the movie (and if you’ve actually gotten this far into this ramble).) Did I mention that I also help them, too?

So we had our first quiz. I gave them two hours. Three hours into it, ten of thirty students remain.

“But I actually placed out of this class, I’m just taking it for review, I don’t get why I don’t get it!”

“I’m so lost. I understand when you do it on the board. I can’t do it by myself.”

“But wait! I forgot to turn in my form that allows me to have infinite time.”

“My cat ate my notes, and my dog killed my cat.”

“I have a lot of personal issues going on and I work full-time.”

“I don’t know how to use my calculator.”

“Can you help me to read my notes?”

“I don’t have a good long-term memory.”

“I’m not a good test-taker.”

Sometimes I wish I played the violin. I could bust it out at times like these.

My response to every one of these questions is, “Have you been practicing regularly?”. To which I receive the sheepish, “Uh … I’ve done a few problems.”

I’m not an evil professor. I enjoy this to no degree or radian.

But my point’s been made. And the students understand. They screwed up. They didn’t hold up their end of the bargain. No plea for help over the weeks. No questions.

They’re playing the game. How many points can they collect? And today’s quiz was their warning that it’s not going to work. I have to do it this way. I don’t want to go down the path of grade this and grade that so that they’ll do it. I want them to recognize that the points are irrelevant. The knowledge is the only thing that matters. If the knowledge is there, the points will come — in spades. But they think it works the other way.

And because I want them to actually learn this material, they’re getting a redo on this blasted quiz. They can turn it in before the start of exam 1 and they can work on it from home.

On day one, we talked about their career aspirations. Their goals are lofty, ambitious, inspiring. They want to pursue a technical field — Marine Biology, Computer Engineering, Mathematics, Business Management, Finance, Chemistry, etc. All of these disciplines require mathematics that goes a bit beyond arithmetic! We’re in Intermediate Algebra! (Actually I have no idea what the heck “Intermediate Algebra” means, but that’s the course name. I guess some places may call it Algebra II or pre-pre-Calculus). I don’t want my students to muddle through course after course hunting points.

I take some solace in the fact that I have already received several emails from students asking for help, where else they can get help, what they should do, etc. Maybe it’s a fear of failure. Maybe it’s a genuine recognition that perhaps, just perhaps, however brilliant they may be, they still have to hone their talent into a craft by putting in a little bit of “sweat equity”. But whatever it is, they’re at least mobilizing themselves and that’s at least a step in the right direction.

And so another Fall semester begins. My hope is that by the end of the semester, at least one student will have had a moment of clarity about playing school versus learning. I hope they choose learning.