I just finished grading my classes first exam of the semester. And to be honest, it is the first exam I have ever written completely ON MY OWN. And let's just say, the grades are not too stellar.
The highest grades were a pair of 85s. The lowest? A 20. Yes, you read that right. A 20.
Now some of my thoughts:
- there was not a single question that everyone in the class got wrong. If that was the case, I would have deemed it either a) a really badly phrased question or b) a topic that I did not teach well, and promptly discarded that question.
- I admit that I took some questions from the text bank provided with the book. I looked through all the provided test questions, and found a couple that I thought were good. So I used those. Turns out the students did worse on the "book" questions than on questions I personally made up. So either my questions are WAY too easy or the book's questions are way too hard.
- The student that scored a 20 has only attended one class of the 7 we have had so far (our class meets once a week for 3 hours each session). This particular individual has also never contacted me via e-mail or during my office hours to ask for help. Does that mean I think the 20 is warranted? Not sure.
- I posted a study guide for the exam on the classes website. On the website, I can track how many people, and importantly which people, downloaded the study guide. Of my class of 32 students, only 8 students downloaded the study guide. Now, I know that that does not imply the rest did not get the study guide from one of the 8 that actually downloaded it, but I find it a tad unlikely that ALL remaining 24 students got a copy of the study guide from a classmate.
- The 2 students that scored the 85s did not download the study guide.
So now the questions in my head are:
1) Do I let them correct their exam and offer them some points for the correction? Say 1/4 point for each correction?
2) Do I change my style of teaching?
or
3) Do I just hang up the "professor"hood and pick a new profession?
(Note- 3 is probably the least likely)
Hey Welcome!
ReplyDeleteSome students fail, some students do not work and if they did not bother reading the study guide, did not attend, did not do their part of the work, well they are partly responsible for their own failure. There might be things you need to improve... but they have to respect a contract too. Good luck!
Hi I just popped over from Unbalanced's blog and I am a graduate student but I have taught for three summers and was a TA for another 6 semesters so I thought I would add my 2 cents (feel free to disregard). I don't think you should worry too much about bad grades on the very first exam. It is the first chance the students are exposed to your style of question and test. If you provided a study guide (how kind!) and they did not use it then I would not reward them for not using the tools provided. I would maybe highlight how the study guide could of been helpful so that for the next exam more students use it. Try to make the next exam slightly easier to see if they do better. You can always curve at the end of the class so that your distribution follows the 'college' rules if there are any. Good luck w/ the rest of the semester!
ReplyDeleteI just tried to post a comment but I don't know if it posted. Also the wrong user name showed up, I didn't know that person was logged in; sorry about that.
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