I'm staring at a stack of homeworks that my next-to-useless-this-quarter TA has yet to pick up for grading. I can't help but notice the answers given to one of the questions. This particular question I told them would be on their final. I said, "Here is this question. Here is the answer to this question." I paused while they all wrote down the answer verbatim in their notebooks. I asked, "Does anyone have any questions about this question?" I repeated several times alternative phrasings of the correct answer to the question.
Most of the answers are wrong, dead wrong. Like they wrote down random words spoken during my lecture and then copied them down in random order.
Monday, February 28, 2005
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
... I have just discovered your blog. I have been a professor at Tundra University for a year now, but I have been teaching at universities for a few years now, and I am nodding so emphatically in agreement with your posts that my neck is starting to crick.
This one in particular. ... Am I really that unclear? When I say "This will be on the exam. It will be crucial to you doing well in the course that you understand this." and then it shows up on the exam and they are all mystified... How? Why? How!
... So. Keep it up. Most appreciated.
I presume you no longer have access to these students' responses, but can you post the next inevitable instance of this phenomenon for study/mocking?
My "Intro to Programming in Java" professor told us that there would be an algorithm on the mid-term but that it "WOULD NOT BE A SORTING ALGORITHM!" He said that there were always people who answered "sorting algorithm" anyway. *sigh*
Post a Comment