I try to reserve the day before a midterm for review; I show up to class without notes and work problems, made up on the fly, on the board. The kids get to call out the problems. They love it, and they get a lot out of it.
We had a snow day for the last class before the midterm. So, sitting at home with my kid, who also had a snow day, I put together a review sheet for them, similar in format to what we might have done in class on the board. I posted it on WebCT.
The next day I had several dozen messages in my inbox, each asking for the "answer key" to the review sheet. (A small proportion of those messages included some expression of gratitude for the sheet.) I explained that there was no answer key, that these were problems we might have worked out together in class, but that I would be happy to answer any specific questions they might have about the problems.
The email kept coming, even after a general announcement that there was no answer key. The later emails were more belligerent in tone, hinting at the uselessness of such a review sheet in the absence of the answers. Some students suggested that the fair thing to do would be to postpone the exam, even though all the exam material had been presented in lecture.
We had the exam at the scheduled time. Everyone hates me. Next time I will spend those three hours playing Candyland instead of casting my pearls before swine.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
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40 comments:
I'll take Candyland over preparing a review sheet any day. Especially a review sheet for lazy dumbasses.
Take this comment with a grain of salt since I have no idea what you actually teach :) But as someone who had to work super hard at many subjects and had no friends to study with in many of my classes, I would have found it hard not knowing if my answers were right or not before the exam. My dumb luck I'd think I had the practice ones all worked out and then bomb the exam :(
Maybe the review is more helpful in class than as a handout? (IN which case, I'd choose Candyland next time too!)
I agree with Psycgirl. I always found it frustrating in college (and in graduate courses, for that matter) that answers were so often withheld (often for good reasons, but still frustrating). Doing all the practice problems in the world won't help a student if s/he is doing them wrong.
However, In this case, students presumably had weeks to do other problems on their own time, and come to you with questions or looking for answers. So asking you to postpone the exam is absolutely ridiculous.
I'm sure the in class reviews are incredibly useful to the students (and therefore worth your time), but I'd choose Candyland over writing up another problem set for sure.
Reading this post, I share your frustration and feel sad as well. It's such a shame that these students were so focused on "getting it right" that they missed out on the true learning opportunity. It seems they learn this need for perfection either in grade school or at home - I'm not sure. But by the time they're in college, the innate curiosity and willingness to mess up is gone. In its place is the conviction that regurgitating whatever the teacher wants is ...all that is wanted.
I'll have to agree with Psycgirl. I find it far more helpful to have a few solutions while studying. Textbooks are wonderful and all, but the example problems tend to be fairly easy. Even if it's a problem the professor's gone over in class, I tend to learn more from the solutions manual. Just a matter of how my brain works. I'd suspect the same is true for at least some of your students.
That said, I would never send a rude email to one of my professors. Why piss off the person in charge of your grade?
For reference, I'm a third-year mechanical engineering student. Things may work differently in stat courses.
Anonymous - I have to speak up, because I feel quite strongly about this, having been both in the student and teacher roles. That excuse is the one poor excuse I've seen for perpetuating the withholding of answers to student problem sets (along with sheer laziness; perhaps the former is sometimes an excuse for the latter).
If a student does a problem incorrectly, over and over again, they may be learning, but it isn't productive or useful. And there is no way for that student to know if they've done the problems correctly if they don't know what answers they should have gotten. They may not know that they're doing it wrong; therefore, they don't even know that they should be going to the professor for help, or what questions they should ask.
I would agree that some students miss the purpose of school - they think the point is to get an A. And some of these students would use answer problems sets to cheat (or maybe just cheat themselves out of the learning process). However, I attended college because I enjoyed learning, and I remember the frustration that came when I had no idea if I was doing something correctly because professors thought I would cheat if they gave me the answers.
So been there. The frustration comes from the fact that YOU ARE DOING THEM A FAVOR, possibly a pedagogically useful one, but a favor nonetheless, and, rather than make full use of the favor, they ASK FOR MORE 'CAUSE THEY'RE MILDLY LAZY (they'd rather have you post the answers than visit your office or communicate with you in some other way to see if they're on the right track). Worse yet, THEY DON'T RECOGNIZE THIS - either the fact that a review sheet is a favor (that takes a dam lot of time and effort to put together), nor that they are ungrateful wretches. Must be some predictable psychological stuff going on, because this happens all the time, but it still SUCKS AND MAKES YOU WANT TO DROP KICK THE WEASELS. (Whew. That was freeing. Good luck with candyland!)
@Ann - Yes! Thank you!
Hmm . . . you might lose your mind if you play 3 hours of Candyland. The girl and I recommend Qwirkle, Balloon Lagoon, Jenga and Mancala, just to shake things up a bit. Hve fun.
I show up to class without notes and work problems
So what the students see in the review session is YOU working problems THEY chose. If you just give them a review sheet of unworked problems, you're doing the opposite. Unless I completely failed to understand what your review sheet looked like....
My students are taking your class?
I had a class like that where I did them a favor of making a review sheet. They loathed me for not giving them an answer key. That was the last review sheet I made for that class.
While I understand the fear of "practicing the wrong thing", you'd think they could compare the methods they're using to the methods that were discussed at length in class, and be able to notice if something didn't match -- and then ask you a question!
I think if sufficiently provoked, I'd make them write out the reasoning behind all of their calculations in the exam, just to bring home the idea that "answers" without the reasoning skills behind them are useless.
On the other hand, like many forms of teacherly retaliation, this ends up producing more text for you to evaluate, which seems double punishment after their intransigence.
[sigh]
I'd have to agree with a number of the other comments: it's generous of you to take the time to write these sample problems and belligerence from your students is uncalled for, but the questions by themselves are of little use in a review. Presumably your students already have access to a good number of sample problems, so giving them more without reviewing the methods for solving them really doesn't improve students' preparation. Candyland is probably a better use of your time.
I believe I must be an anomaly. When given a review sheet or practice test by generous (yes generous since they didn't have to provide such things) I looked up the answers myself and reviewed them. Maybe my approach all these years has been wrong. Then again since I passed my classes (except for Physics) perhaps not.
Go for Candyland next time. Or even Apples to Apples. Let the little ingrates swim in the pools they've pissed in.
Exams are at the end of some lectures, right?
At that point the hard-working students should have learned the subject. Including, as a minimum, the ability to reflect on their own work to decide if they are on the right or wrong track.
If lazy gits at the end of the course are still in the copy/paste/imitate mode and can't have any own original thought they deserve to fail.
BTW, I would have done what some of my professors did to us when such a thing happened. The whole class got told in no uncertain term that the behavior of some was unacceptable. Therefore, there would be no repetition of the favor.
The hardest reaction came from some professor in applied semiconductor physics. He was so generous to allow this newfangled thing, the pocket calculator, in exams. Someone who failed the first exam complained his calculator malfunctioned. We all had to take our second applied semiconductor physics exam with nothing more than pencil, paper, and a leaflet with a few tables provided at the beginning of the exam.
I'm with MiniKat. The rare few times in college when I got review sheets, they never had answer keys and shouldn't have. Heck, I remember one class in which the review sheet was obviously a version of the test, and only a few of us ever figured that out. The prof did it for all four tests, and students whined every time that he didn't help them enough. Bah! They're just whiners.
The emails you received and the comments here from psycgirl, katie, joe, trystero and eplawless all indicate that there is something shockingly wrong with students. They have no idea how to study nor why they should. So many of our students suffer from a kind of learned helplessness and they completely fail to see what is going on around them.
The point of getting sample questions is to get a sense of what will be on the exam. If you cannot look at the questions out of the stressful situation of the timed exam and determine how to do them or if you even know how to do them then you should fail the exam. Being so clueless as to not even recognize what you don't know is not a good situation to be in -- ever.
The students obviously think that if they just saw how to do these problems then they would be able to pattern match their way through other problems with no need for understanding.
Bah!
I'm surprised by the notion that a review sheet without answers is not useful. It's very useful -- it's a big ol' hint about what the instructor thinks they'll put on the exam.
In a course where such a review sheet is possible (not an advanced theory course, for example), by the time of the exam the students should know the material well enough to recognize each main type of problem and realize the review sheet is a list of which of those the prof is likely to put on the exam. By that point they should also have some means of checking their solutions on their own, if need be.
No one gives you answers in the middle of an exam -- if you haven't come up with a way to check them or prove them correct, how can you be prepared? And how can you apply the knowledge on the job if you can't check your own process?
I think I would have said, "consult your classmates. Study groups can be of great use in studying for an exam."
And I think I would make it clear to your students that because of them, you will not be extending this courtesy to other classes. Make it clear that this was a favor to them, and since it was met with massive ingratitude, you see no reason to repeat the mistake.
Wow. Maybe I'm a bit naive, being a new-ish professor (and also perhaps because my training is actually in education - elementary education, to be precise). This discussion, like so many others that I read and here around the blogosphere and campus, reflects what I see as a troubling "us v. them" mentality among faculty. Sure, "those kids" are probably ungrateful and perhaps even sniveling, but those who are fully qualified to throw the first stone are, I suspect, few and far between.
As for making a review sheet, it doesn't seem like a favor, per se -- it seems more like a part of this thing that we call "teaching." From my perspective, another part of teaching that needs to be considered is that as teachers, we must meet our students where they are, with high expectations and requirements, of course.
To the 8:54 PM Feb 13 Anonymous: I find your comment quite insulting. No idea how to study nor why I should? I've had a few years to figure out how I learn best, and I can tell you that having a few problem solutions helps tremendously. No, it doesn't restrict me to pattern matching. They make it far easier for me to understand the reasoning involved behind the solution.
Have you ever read any of my engineering/science textbooks? No? Then you have no idea how poorly they explain some concepts. The class lectures don't necessarily help, depending on the professor.
No idea why I should study? Ha! I'm quite self-motivated to learn the material. I have a very clear idea of what I want to get out of any class.
Oh, and I tend to be well ahead of the curve when it comes to grades. So don't accuse me of being a poor student.
Hello,
I'm a professor myself (I teach MBA students), and I respectfully agree with Psycgirl, Katie, Joe and jk. Review sheets are of little use without answers. The point of review problems is practice, and practice is little good without feedback.
If review sheets are not gone over in class, then the answers should be available so that the students can know if they did the questions right. (Yes, the reasoning helps too, and I think the review sheets would be best of all if they had both the answers and the reasoning behind those answers.)
Rethoryke, you are right in that reasoning is essential. But IMHO, it goes way too far to demand that students write out the reasoning over and above the calculations. That's what the calculations themselves are for: to show how the students arrived at the solution. Why should the students have to write it out in English if they already showed the math?
Anonymous 3:21pm, 02/13: With all due respect to your Applied Semiconductor Physics professor, who seems to be have worked hard to make sure his students learned, he also seems to have had some issues. Forcing the whole class to suffer just because one person gave a complaint (reasonable or otherwise) is out of line.
Jk is right in a broader sense, too. It's very easy for professors to feel it's "us against them". Don't get me wrong - I've had at least my share of ungrateful, lazy and entitled students. But I'm sure we can all agree that we're here to help our students.
Cheers,
Jeff Deutsch
Angry Professor: I think what you did was just fine, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. That having been said, perhaps the arguing commenters could find a middle ground between "unhelpful meanie" and "gracious teacher of ingrates". For me, I would be responsive to an email that said "I did problem 32 and I got F(1, 47) = 2.34, p < .05. Is that right or am I missing something?" That type of email I can answer with a simple yes or no. Students can still check their work with me, but they must make an effort to *do* the work before I'll help them.
Of course, I wouldn't answer such an email at 3am the night before an exam, but I *would* answer it with "yes, that's right" or "almost, but your degrees of freedom are wrong" or something like that if they asked ahead of time.
Anyway, AP, you rock! I enjoy your blog.
I, 8:54 PM Feb 13 Anonymous, stand by my previous comments. Perhaps it was my Oxford undergraduate experience but I believe that learning the limits of one's knowledge is a fundamental first step to becoming a scholar and independent thinker.
I too am unhappy about the adversarial relationship between students and profs. However, it is a societal problem much larger than me or my students. Too many students come to Uni--often for no good reason other than that they need a degree.
I am seen as a barrier to entry to med or B school rather than as a facilitator of learning. Students come to Uni from high school having got straight A's and then assume that it is my fault that they don't continue to do so in my calculus class. They should never have got A's in high school!
Jeff: I applaud your intent and dedication to your students, but I feel that you are part of the problem. You are teaching your students to be helpless and not think independently. That would be admirable if you were going to be there for the rest of their lives to help them out.
Joe: There is a non-zero chance that I wrote one of the books you don't like. I hope that I never have to drive over a bridge you design as I stand by comment that if you need the solutions to a REVIEW sheet after having had the lectures, the text homework and so on then you deserve to fail. Chances are you won't. What will do after Uni?
When I was at Uni we had two sets of exams. One after the end of first year, the other after third (final year). We were expected to be able to synthesise diverse material whilst studying different topics and be examined on our cumulative education. I am sad that I cannot teach my students the things I learned as a student that went far beyond coursework.
For what it is worth, I am not whining as an overworked sessional at a low end teaching institution -- I feel the same about the students I taught while a PhD student at U of Toronto, a PDF at Brown (those students were the worst!) and now at the U of BC where I am an associate prof. in mathematics.
pseudo-anonymous
8:54 PM Feb 13 Anonymous - If you truly believe your path to learning is the one and only way, you are allowing yourself to become part of one of the biggest problems facing education today. Just because it worked for you does not mean it will work for every one of your students.
"I believe that learning the limits of one's knowledge is a fundamental first step to becoming a scholar and independent thinker"
As do I. My path (and many others' as it seems from previous comments) to learning the limits of my knowledge was to compare my answers with the key. Considering the fact that I will soon hold a PhD in my chosen field, as well as a recommendation letter from a well-known scientist stating what an independent thinker I am, I'm confident that that the approach I used in college is successful in producing the type of scholar you hold in such esteem.
pseudo-anonymous: I do apologize for being rather abrasive in my previous post.
I'm not saying that I *need* the solutions. I've done just fine in plenty of courses where they aren't provided. What I am saying is that they make studying significantly easier. Why make things harder than they need to be? If the teacher provides solutions, you can bet I'm going to use them. If they aren't provided, I won't annoy the teacher for them. I should clarify that I'm talking more about homework solutions than review sheet solutions. Comments on graded homework are generally quite a bit less than helpful.
University is most definitely a place for learning. That's why I've involved myself in numerous extracurriculars and took courses outside my major. Now, those courses wound up turning into a second major, but that goes to demonstrate my point. There's learning to be had inside the classroom, of course, but that's not the only benefit of college.
I certainly don't see professors as adversaries, nor as barriers to entry into grad school. There are individual professors I'm not fond of, certainly, but for the most part I'm quite happy with the ones I've had.
We already do synthesis in the form of project-based courses. I'm taking two of them this semester. I have a couple more to take, plus my senior project.
Much of the minutiae of what we learn in class isn't the most applicable to real-world stuff, anyways. I had an engineering internship with the government this summer, and didn't once touch an equation. As far as I saw, neither did any of my colleagues. It would've been a complete waste of time for the sort of calculations we did. That also goes for the design projects I've done. Equations? Give me Solidworks and FEA. Better for accuracy, better for visualization.
Everything uses computer models now. Sure, good to get an intuitive feel for things. Sure, good to know if you're designing those models. But not the be-all and end-all of engineering. More important is, as you mention, synthesis.
After university? Master's degree, then a government career.
I think a lot of the "in *my* day" stuff is just nostalgia. Are things different? Of course. Teaching methods have evolved, along with the world as a whole. Students 30 years ago didn't have nice things like desktop CAD and TI-89s. Does that mean I shouldn't take advantage of those tools? Absolutely not. 30 years ago, professors were cursing their batch of students for being lazy and unmotivated. People favor the good memories.
Oh, and you don't need to worry about driving over my bridges. Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets. ;-)
Disclaimer/clarification:
Angry Prof, I think your students (some of them, at least) are asses. There is never (well, rarely, but that's a story for another day) any excuse to be anything but grateful and polite to a professor, especially after s/he has gone above and beyond. I like one of the previous commenter's suggestions that you point exactly that out to the class - that lesson is as necessary to a college education as the course material.
Why wouldn't the students use the various web tools available that would allow them the ability to share and discuss their answers independent of the professor. Why would they not utilize this and check each other's work rather than depend on the teacher/professor? As a pre-exam review, I'd have to agree there's no need for answers; they should know it all by now and should be progressing towards finessing the finer points, not dealing with issues of basics.
I fully understand why students think that having the answers to a review sheet would help.
The issue is whether they're using the review sheet to review, or using it to learn the material in the first place.
If they're just getting around to learning the material in the first place with the review, then they're not doing too great a job of keeping up with the material.
I agree that many of the books don't have enough problems, or enough challenging problems, or in some cases enough problems with solutions in the back. I used to teach logic, and I ran up against that difficulty with all 4 of the books I used. (On the other hand, when I provided problem sets for a class of 103 students, with extremely detailed solutions -- including all the likely errors, why they were attractive, why they were wrong, and what to do instead -- on reserve in the library, 2 students checked out the solutions ever.) But you can go find other books with similar problem sets (often in the library, or available for very little money because they are several editions out of date) and you can make up your own. You can go to office hours and ask for problems. You can get them in discussion sections. There are all sorts of ways that you can and should be practicing ... so that by the time you get the review sheet, all you really need to do is review.
I had a logic professor in grad school who gave us review sheets -- and then solved all the problems on the board -- that were versions of the exam. I hated it. It turned out that I was the only student who was aware that he was doing it (it was a required course, and I was the only logic geek in my year), and it was more fun to work the problems out myself. Meanwhile, everyone else was upset because they couldn't see how the problems we did in review had anything to do with the problems on the exam.
Professors really can't win on this one, can they?
Katie, I do not believe that the way I was taught is the one true way. Having your degree determined by your performance on two exams (written while wearing a gown!!!!) is not a good idea. I do however believe that there have to be times that students stand up on their own. If I had a dollar for each time I heard "But I could do the homework/review/example questions" then, well, it would be awesome.
Why stop at the review sheet? Why not just give you the answers to the exam? By the time I give out review sheets students have had lectures, homework, homework answer keys, tutorials, the textbook, their colleagues, office hours and the TA. If that isn't sufficient, then students deserve to fail. It is great that you will soon get your PhD -- congratulations, I know it is hard work! -- but I don't really believe that you always needed answers to review sheets. (I also doubt that we would seriously disagree about these things in person -- comments are worse than email.)
Anyhoo, AP -- I do hope this week doesn't take too much out of you. Feel free to direct students to me -- I clearly have some crank to work out.
I agree with the earlier comment about feedback. The review sheet is useful but would have been more useful with at least some answers so the students could have checked to make sure they were doing the problems correctly. You noted these were the problems you would have gone over in class. Wouldn't they have seen the correct answers then in class??
Out of fairness to AP...
She teaches statistics to social science majors. Having taught that class, at the undergraduate level it's nothing more than plug and chug.
The day before the exam her students should: (a) already have all of the formulas they need to work the problems; (b) know enough about how to read and interpret a word problem well enough to know which formula solves which kind of problem; (c) know enough about what the final answer should look like for each specific problem (***more on this later) to know if their answer is so far off that they should just start over; and (d) know how to read the Z, t, and F tables in the back of the book to determine significance. If on the day before the exam those numbnuts can't do these four things, an answer key will not help them.
***Students like these idiots are the same kinds of idiots who yell at me because I won't give partial credit when someone calculates r-square and comes up with a negative number--something that is a mathematical impossibility!
Joe wrote:
"That said, I would never send a rude email to one of my professors. Why piss off the person in charge of your grade?"
In other words, the reason not to send a rude e-mail is because one's grade might suffer?
What about the reason for not sending a rude e-mail...because a live human being is going to read it?
Oh, good grief, I am sorry that many of my former students apparently take your class.
I actually post questions FROM THE TEST on my classroom blog. After they griped, and then one kid just kept posting the answers, I shut off commenting and warned that one more word would leave them in the cold dank darkness of ignorance re: possible test questions. They saw reason.
I've still got one kid who doesn't understand how a blog works-- if it' not at the top of the page, he doesn't "see" it. Gosh, that is just TOO bad.
Terminal Degree: Well, yes, certainly. I like to think of myself as a nice person. That said, the grade aspect of it better applies to the... less nice students sending these emails.
8:54 PM Feb 13 Anonymous -
Clearly I didn't always need answers to review sheets. In fact, I don't recall often having review sheets. But I always avoided wasting my time with doing problems for which I had no access to answers. In my discipline, especially in the upper level classes, there are lots and lots of wrong answers, and only one way to get the right one.
I do think you're correct about some things, though. I appreciate that lots of the students out there can't handle independent learning, and handing them all of the answers is just aiding their ineptitude. And I've actually been forced to teach many of the pre-(insert your professional school of choice here) students, who care first and foremost about their grades. I just felt the need to point out that not all students, even the ones looking for an answers sheet, have these less-than-respectable motives in mind.
And really, now, we're just arguing about minute details. Honestly, what I initially took offense to was the comment that you thought that my post indicated that I was a lousy excuse for a student/scientist/whatever. I do appreciate the congratulations. Clearly, we both had pretty successful learning strategies (you especially, seeing as you landed a professorship). Good luck!
Just post the answer sheet and spare yourself the emails, duh!
Of course the point of the review sheet is to work through the problems and concepts on your own. Everyone can agree on that. But, the answers ARE necessary to make sure you're one the right track. Part of the learning process is making mistakes, and then using the knowledge from lectures/textbooks to figure out where the mistake was made and how to fix it. If you can't know you made a mistake, how is that learning? It wouldn't make any sense to assign homework problems all semester but never tell the students what solutions were right or wrong, and it doesn't make any sense to do so with a review sheet either.
I didn't read all of the comments in depth, but it seems to me that a lot of people are missing a really fundamental point: you (the prof) don't have to have a review at all. Really, it's up to the students to review for themselves.
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