Answers that make you go, hmmm.
In previous semesters I've asked a question about my cats on the first midterm that involved correlation. This semester I left the correlation question off, and asked a question about my cats involving regression to the mean.
Lots of people are giving ANSWERS involving correlation.
Granted, this is a mistake I can easily see them making normally... I haven't had a lot of correlation-related answers in previous (non-cat) regression-to-the-mean questions, but that could be because those exams ALSO had correlation questions and they figured I wouldn't ask two correlation questions on the same exam.
However, this also leads me to wonder if there are finally enough copies of my old exams floating around for people to start studying from them.
Phooey. I give some new questions every time, but I don't want to make ALL new questions every time for a variety of reasons (one being that there are really only so many really good questions to ask.) My plan for dealing with this so far has been to try to get a big enough pool of old questions floating around that in order to cover them all, people would have to understand all the material, in which case mission accomplished, however they went about it.
That said, I think I may also have just learned a way of trapping people who just tried to memorize answers to previous exams without really understanding what was going on...
Lots of people are giving ANSWERS involving correlation.
Granted, this is a mistake I can easily see them making normally... I haven't had a lot of correlation-related answers in previous (non-cat) regression-to-the-mean questions, but that could be because those exams ALSO had correlation questions and they figured I wouldn't ask two correlation questions on the same exam.
However, this also leads me to wonder if there are finally enough copies of my old exams floating around for people to start studying from them.
Phooey. I give some new questions every time, but I don't want to make ALL new questions every time for a variety of reasons (one being that there are really only so many really good questions to ask.) My plan for dealing with this so far has been to try to get a big enough pool of old questions floating around that in order to cover them all, people would have to understand all the material, in which case mission accomplished, however they went about it.
That said, I think I may also have just learned a way of trapping people who just tried to memorize answers to previous exams without really understanding what was going on...