And the Grades are In

[The Lone Ranger]

Today's the last day of classes. I handed back the results of the lab practical from last Thursday and handed out their final exams.

One girl was going on about how it was "bullshit!" that I hadn't given her credit for one of her answers on the lab practical. She had put down two answers for the question. True, one of them happened to be the correct answer, but the other was not the correct answer. If you let them get away with it, this sort of thing quickly becomes a common tactic: if the student is unsure of the answer, (s)he will put down 2 or 3 (or more!) answers and hope that one of them is the correct one.

So I've explained to the students -- repeatedly -- that this is not an acceptable practice and that they will not receive credit for multiple answers to a single question, even if one of the answers happens to be the correct one. [Otherwise, why not just let them circle every letter on the multiple choice questions? -- congratulations, everyone gets a 100!] She, of course, acted as if she'd never heard of anything so outlandish as refusing to give credit when you give multiple answers to a question, even though I've repeatedly told them of this policy.


That wasn't the best, though. I just posted the final grades. Within a remarkably short time, I received an e-mail from one of the students complaining about her grade.

She's actually an excellent student, and she received a 4.0. Her complaint? Well, let me break it down. On each assignment, a student can earn a certain number of points. So, your final average is calculated very simply: add up all the points you actually earned and divide by the number that you could have earned. And I post the scores on every assignment, so that each student can keep a running tab of his/her grades and can see exactly how the final average is calculated.

So, her complaint? She wrote to complain that when she did the math (evidently, she calculated [i]everyone's grades, so as to compare them to hers -- nice), she discovered that the final assignment had contributed a smaller percentage to her final grade than it had for anyone else.

She claimed that this was "unethical," since she'd worked hard on those assignments.



I thought for awhile about how to reply. Finally, I wrote a brief, polite reply in which I pointed out that if she earned more points than anyone else on the previous assignments (which she did), then the final assignment necessarily contributes less to her final grade, percentage-wise, than it does for anyone else. That's just basic mathematics. (This is assuming that everyone else in the class got the same score on the final assignment that she did -- which, of course, isn't the case.)

Not that I'd ever say something like that so bluntly, but I'm kind of hoping she's perceptive enough to read through the lines. "Don't call me unethical because you don't understand simple math."


Cheers,

Michael

[Nullifidian]

I thought I knew just about every grade-grubbing tactic in existence, but putting down two answers and demanding points when one of them happens to be right is a new one on me. I'm sure putting down ten or twenty answers would make the odds even better, and just think of how fun it would be to grade student tests then! :facepalm:

I'm sure your implication is going to sail over the head of your student. People who can pick up on subtle nuances like that are usually the type of people with sufficient empathy to not accuse other people of bad faith when they are the ones who don't understand the issue.

[Brimshack]

I've had students make the argument for half credit when they marked more than one, but I've never had a student that did more than shrug it off when I denied them that gambit. Whenever students overamp their rhetoric like your 4.0 girl, I usually explain to them the procedures for filing an official complaint. If they back down in my presence, then I am happy to add a comment or two about proportionality.

I am continually amazed at the non-issues students can come up with. My favorite is; "Do you make your other classes do this?" This last year my AP students took to complaining that I didn't make the regular class do this or that. I got tired of reminding the AP students that they were expected to do more than the regular students to begin with. So, I eventually took to explaining it by saying "yeah, I like them."

[ChuckF]

Congrats on the end of the semester TLR. Any complaint that ends with "because I worked hard on that!" is p. annoying, imo.
I thought I knew just about every grade-grubbing tactic in existence, but putting down two answers and demanding points when one of them happens to be right is a new one on me. I'm sure putting down ten or twenty answers would make the odds even better, and just think of how fun it would be to grade student tests then! :facepalm:

Oh wow I do this all the time on law school exams when I don't know the answer. Basically if I have no clue what I'm doing (or can't decide between two answers) I just write every damn thing I know, except I disguise it a little by answering in the alternative, with lots of hypothetical qualifiers, to make the things I actually know fit into the circumstances of the question. I guess it is easier to do that with a law exam than a science one.

Of course I don't demand points because the grading process is so opaque, and I'm pretty sure the professors see that tactic from pretty much everybody all the time. But at least it makes me feel like I've written something.

[Clutch Munny]

In an essay or long paragraph format you're likelier to get points for the shotgun approach. I'm about the most dedicated non-awarder of grades for that approach of any of my colleagues, and I suspect even I reward it a wee bit. When written with some of Chuck's qualifiers, and if there are only two or three possible answers broached rather than five or eight or ten, it can be hard to distinguish the true shotgun approach from a fundamentally correct answer with a misguided elaboration.

[The Lone Ranger]

That's exactly why I like to give short-answer questions when I can: even if the student doesn't completely understand the question, if (s)he shows enough understanding in the essay, I'll give partial credit. But I'm not the lead faculty for this course, and so I don't get to write the tests.

Even so, when there's a pin stuck into one of the organs of the cat's thoracic cavity and the accompanying question is: "Identify this organ," you don't get credit for writing, "heart" and "liver" in the blank, even though "heart" is the correct answer.


Cheers,

Michael

[Kael]

Hmmm, organ-pin tests... I suddenly remember why I want to go into physical science rather than life science.

[ChuckF]

Hm, "Identify this organ" removes most of the wiggle room. I think if I had to do that and didn't know the answer I would (a) try what your student did and write both heart and liver; or (b) write "heart" then write "liver" directly on top of it, hoping for the benefit of the doubt and some confusion over which is my final answer; or (c) time permitting, I would state that I don't know and fill the empty space with a joke or an amusing drawing; or (d) write "I don't know" or leave the question blank.

In any case, I would abandon any hope of receiving points for my obviously wrong response.

[Clutch Munny]

Moreover, "No, you identify this organ!" is at least a better reply than "Bullshit". (Would work fine for a female student, with appropriate panache.)

[Dragar]

I know when I'm marking wordy questions, I give the usual one mark for every correct point they make in answer to the question, ignore all the irrelevent bits, and mark them down for every incorrect statement. Usually they learn quick that shotgun doesn't work unless they are sure they know their stuff!

Sometime extremely long rambles of irrelvent information will get a mark and a comment about brevity being valuable.

[Ensign Steve]

I am reminded of a friend of mine from precalculus in high school who didn't know whether to write maximum or minimum so she wrote manimum and claimed it was a spelling mistake afterward. No, she did not get credit for it, but it was a valiant attempt, IMO. I wonder if miximum would have worked better.

[The Lone Ranger]

Heh.

The two lower leg bones are the tibia (the larger one) and the fibula (the smaller one, natch). Since I've seen it so often, I specifically tell students that they will not receive even partial credit if they write "fibia" or "tibula" as the answer to any test question.

There's still usually at least one person who can't quite identify the bone in question and so writes (usually in conspicuously sloppy handwriting) either "tibula" or "fibia." Presumably, they're hoping I'll assume they gave the correct answer, but have bad handwriting.

I also tell them that legibility matters, and that if I can't read it, it's wrong, end of discussion.



Cheers,

Michael

[ChuckF]

The correct answer is "That is a leg bone. It is connected to the foot bone. It is connected to the knee bone. Dem bones dem bones dem dry bones."

[beyelzu]

To be fair to students, teachers that use ta's and retarded grading criteria make students use a shotgun approach. In polisci last year, I made a b in the first paper, I compared it to a classmate who made a mid a, and he had a factual inaccuracy in his paper and it, well, it kind of flowed like shit and was kind of stupid. Mine was obviously better written. I spoke to the ta and appealed the grade, she took it to the head ta, and ultimately It Was Decided that my grade was fair.

See, they had this grading criteria that required the use of certain terms, I hadn't explicitly mentioned the first continental congress so I lost points. I did not make such a mistake in future tests, mentioning pretty much every precedent or fact that was vaguely relevant to a question. I got a very high a in the class, only missing a total of 2 points on all later essays.

[beyelzu]

The guy who made an A read my paper and said that I should appeal it, he didn't understand how the fuck he got an A after reading my B+ paper.

[Sock Puppet]

Moreover, "No, you identify this organ!" is at least a better reply than "Bullshit". (Would work fine for a female student, with appropriate panache.)And by the way, TLR, if you ever have a male student use that answer, the appropriate comment is "I would, but I left the microscope in the lab."

[Brimshack]

I remember when I was a TA, the consensus in the department was that the best you could hope for in grading essays was about a 1 letter grade variance between teachers. More than that and people figured there was something wrong. Less than that and it would have been difficult to convince anyone that anything was wrong. And yes, this does mean any grade from a B up was essentially unchallengeable. Not as a matter of principle, but in practice, it just wasn't possible to make a case on that.

I also remember one of my teachers pointed out that use of a +/- system effectively empowered teachers to punish A students who disagreed with a quick minus. A teacher would give his favorite student an A and dock those that didn't fall in line on academic disputes with an A-. In such cases, the same teacher would have been loathe to reduce a grade further, but since the difference was small enough there, it was easy to say it's worth this much, and put it down. I can think of several cases where my own papers were flagged with minuses and the only ding was on a point of disagreement. In at least one case I know damn well I understood the subject better than my instructor.

Since beginning teaching, I've run into a lot of scoring rubrics. Folks in academic assessment especially want to see some "objective" measure by which you are going to grade the students. So, they chart out a series of gradable sub-points.

- Thesis is clear (grade on a scale of 1 to 4).
- Student's knowledge of relevant facts is sound (grade on a scale of 1-4).

etc.

This can be a good exercise, but people get funny ideas about what they are accomplishing with this. By "funny ideas" I mean "a grossly exaggerated sense of accomplishment." Of course these just subdivide the great big judgment call into a bunch of small ones. The total of all the small judgment calls looks more objective, and so people lean on that and forget how much wiggle room there is in each of the particulars. And the total effect is more paperwork and better ideological framing (at least from a positivist outlook).

Every once in awhile someone will try to sneak really objective info into the individual points of a rubric. And that's where it can literally become a yes/no with respect to whether or not a given word is used. Then it's more objective, sure, but it's arbitrary as hell. Assessing whether or not a given student understands Bacon's Rebellion, for example, will always take some judgment call, but I can always just ask whether or not they mentioned it. The judgment call may appear in the choice of a multiple choice question and the creation of answer-options. It may appear in the way I interpret the students written essay. Even my selection of that topic as something that deserves to be on the test at all reflects a judgment call. At times the effort to document the basis for such a judgment can become little other than a smoke and mirrors game in which I and the administration seek to hide that moment of judgment from ourselves.

[Dragar]

The way we deal with it is to just make sure the tutors mark different classes each time. It should end up evened out.

[It's Me!]

You could have told your student that you did GIVE her points for her correct answer, but that you also did REMOVE points for her incorrect one. As a natural consequence, they canceled each other out, giving her a zero sum score for that question.

[Sauron]

In an essay or long paragraph format you're likelier to get points for the shotgun approach. I'm about the most dedicated non-awarder of grades for that approach of any of my colleagues, and I suspect even I reward it a wee bit. When written with some of Chuck's qualifiers, and if there are only two or three possible answers broached rather than five or eight or ten, it can be hard to distinguish the true shotgun approach from a fundamentally correct answer with a misguided elaboration.

Great point.

There is also the question format that I'm used to receiving - for whatever reason, perhaps due to subjects studied. Anyhow, that format is the famous "Compare / contrast and give strengths/weaknesses of each". In that framework, your answer is obviously going to meander all over the subject matter.

[Shake]

For those keeping score at home, I got an 82 on my Intro to Communications Systems class. Pretty pleased with that result.

Now just 5 classes to go til I is an electrical engineering grad.

[Ensign Steve]

Nobody's keeping score, and that's not even the topic of this thread.

[Shake]

:doh:

Oops! Wrong thread. My bad.

[Shake]

:dddp: