It’s that time of year again, no, not just the time for giving and receiving Christmas presents, but also the time for giving final grades and receiving teaching evaluations. In this post, I focus on the latter, and I offer alternative methods of evaluation, and discuss why we even do this in the first place.
For quite some time I have been toying with the idea of using some kind of online homework system in my intro-level classes. I had some experience with online homework as a teaching assistant in Texas, as many of our Calculus courses used them, but never tried doing this at Bates. For my Calculus I class this semester, I decided to try WeBWork, an open-source online homework system supported by the MAA and the NSF. In this post, I would like to share the successes, failures, and lessons learned from this experiment. Continue reading
By this point in the semester, I have given two exams in my Calculus class and one in my Real Analysis class. Grading is always a pain, but I have struggled much more recently with what to say as I hand out the exams. Giving statistics on the exam might be helpful for students so they can see how they stand with respect to the rest of the class. But is that really important? Isn’t it more important that the student only know how they did, and perhaps how they can improve? I really don’t know the answer to this question. I used to never give statistics on the exam. If my students asked, I would say that averages and medians were not a great way to summarize their performance, and that they should really only worry about their own performance. But I have recently caved, mostly because I realized I was one of the few people who did not give any stats on the overall class performance, and the students were sort of expecting it. After a couple of awkward incidents this semester, I’m considering going back to my “no stats” policy.
