Expectations

[mothwentbad]

So, has anyone had a stack of papers to grade, and then you grade it all, and you think, "wow, they totally don't know anything. They bombed totally," and then when you add it all up, they average something high like a 77 in spite of all that? Partial credit is such sneaky, tricky business.

Comments

[mothwentbad]

Oh, by the way, I friended you, because I figured maybe you'd want to see this.

[jazzchic23]

I know my Dynamics teacher never has that happen. This past exam the average was 44.1 (out of 100, in case you were hoping it was out of 50.)

I guess my trucks blocking the motion in the problems (problem modification for the win) and dirty jokes in the margins didn't really boost my test score.

[mothwentbad]

...or for the loss.

[jazzchic23]

touche'

[ellisbell]

no, but I have had little experience teaching classes that had tests. I do grade papers, but it is mainly for content and not for form. sigh. If I tried to grade on form I'd be at it all week and none of them would do very well. I don't think good writing skills are really the point in an intro to acting course, so I don't worry about it much. I'm more concerned with what they saw in the play they are writing about, and how well they are able to synthesize what they are learning in class with what they see the actors doing onstage.

This answer doesn't help you at all; sorry!

[mothwentbad]

Whatever. I'm all like, "how can you even get out of the bed in the morning without being able to do Riemann sums and the chain rule?" So I think I'm just weird. H. Sapiens isn't uniformly about all that.

[ellisbell]

Well, I think each generation of teachers feels like their students don't take their studies as seriously as they did.

[mothwentbad]

I think it's a little different because these aren't supposed to be mathematicians. So my cutoff for what I can't fathom might be a bit harsh. I often am struck by a staggering disregard for whether they could possibly believe what they're writing down. I'm an old crank already.

[alias_sqbr]

What's "partial credit"? The term has always confused me. ("Extra credit" I understand, but it's not something we really do)

[mothwentbad]

Partial credit means that you can be way totally wrong, but have a couple pieces that are right, and so you get 4 points out of 8 or something.

[alias_sqbr]

Ahhh. As someone who ALWAYS got the working (mostly) right but the final answer wrong I couldn't get too narky about that as a marker :) I always got 7/10 for my physics pracs even though they were pretty much all "Here is what we expected. Here is what we got. Some possible reasons for this 2000% error are.." :D

[tinag]

Been there done that got the tshirt blablabla.

What used to floor me is when I'd hand back those papers and people seemed really satisfied with their 77s. Then a student told me that
"Cs get degrees" (why the crap would you tell your GA that?!),
and I got it.

[mothwentbad]

I haven't gotten that one yet. Maybe they're not as comfortable with me.

[jerseydevil77]

i had one hellish class my senior year, which neither my roommate or i cared about, but it was required. our motto was D is for Diploma.