Flies have pretty eyes » « Coulda been “Starlords”

Oh joy, first exam

This week, I gave my first exam of the semester — a take-home, with ten multi-part questions requiring lots of calculations and and statistical tests, and I required that all answers by typed and in a specific format. It was due last night at midnight.

Nobody took the hint. I got 100% on-time submissions, so this morning I’m looking at a big stack of pages of numbers and formulas and explanations and hard work that I have to get evaluated this weekend.

Why didn’t you guys tell me to make it all multiple choice and true/false? I’m blaming you all. You need to come to my house and grade them for me.

Flies have pretty eyes » « Coulda been “Starlords”

Comments

  1. says

    Also, these are all electronic submissions, so the good ol’ “throw ’em down the stairs and grade them by how far they fall” trick doesn’t work.

    Maybe I could spend the whole weekend coding up something that sums up the numeric codes for all the alphanumerics in the paper into a single 32-bit hash, and then translates that into a letter grade. That would be fun.

  2. dean56 says

    The classic joke in our stat classes is that if you give a test that is completely T/F there will be some student who, at the end, is repeatedly flipping a coin to check their work.

  4. chris61 says

    Maybe I could spend the whole weekend coding up something that sums up the numeric codes for all the alphanumerics in the paper into a single 32-bit hash, and then translates that into a letter grade.

    Isn’t that what Excel spreadsheets are for?

  5. robert79 says

    @2 “The classic joke in our stat classes is that if you give a test that is completely T/F there will be some student who, at the end, is repeatedly flipping a coin to check their work.”

    Ahhhhh stats….

    If you were to randomly choose one of the following four answers, what is the probability that your answer would be correct?
    A) 0%
    B) 25%
    C) 25%
    D) 50%

  8. nathanieltagg says

    I’m surprised we haven’t had a massive organized protest by our present-selves-as-graders against our past-selves-as-overenthusiastic-syllabus-writers.

  10. magistramarla says

    Before I stopped teaching, the administration in my high school was requiring that all tests be in a multiple choice or true/false format. An essay question was only allowed as extra credit. Why? Because the administration decided that we should have a 100% graduation rate, of course! It was forbidden to ask the little darlings to actually think for themselves.