Midterms through teacher’s eyes
The sun is calling, the long week is ahead and students are tired of waiting. It’s the week before spring break, and there are teachers who insist on giving tests and assigning papers, but they say it is for the benefit of the students, not to make their lives miserable.
Andy Anderson, principle lecturer for the biology department, is teaching three classes this semester: Bio Ethics, Advanced Physiology and Human Anatomy. He said he gives four midterms, two quizzes and a comprehensive final in his human anatomy class, but students can drop the lowest test.
“The catch about having all those tests and quizzes is that my students are thinking about it all the time. It makes sure they’re learning.”
Anderson is a lucky teacher though, because he rarely does any of his own grading. He said he has teaching assistants (TAs) that do the grading for him, and he creates his tests so that his TAs can easily grade them. He has a multiple choice section on scantrons, an essay section and a fill in the blank section.
“I ask very specific questions – there’s only one answer, so even foreign TAs can grade the tests,” Anderson said. “Since I don’t grade my tests they have to be very precise.”
Anderson has nine TAs and many undergraduate volunteer teaching assistants in order to help prepare students for tests and to grade tests. Anderson puts in hours writing his own tests, however, and he grades any tests taken outside of class.
Anderson said since his TAs do his test grading, he makes sure any breaks don’t interfere with their grading time, by giving them plenty of time to grade tests to be sure all grading is done before a break starts.
“My test Monday is a small class, so the TAs will be done grading by Wednesday,” he said. “In my anatomy class, there was a test last week, and my TAs had finished grading by Saturday.”
Anderson said he tries not to interfere with spring break too much, because he knows the students need the break, although he encourages them to get ahead.
“When students come back for the last few weeks, there are tests and projects, and all sorts of things. So I tell students to take time over break to get ahead,” he said.
Anderson’s advice is well-used – by himself. He plans to spend part of his spring break at his office, in the quiet of the Veterinary Science Building, getting ahead on his lecture notes for a new class he’s teaching this semester.
“I’ve kept up with my students so far, but not all of my lectures are complete, so I’d like to finish through the end of the semester over break,” he said.
Blair Larsen, temporary lecturer, has set up her tests so that she doesn’t have to grade any of them – she creates them as multiple-choice tests and uses scantrons.
Larsen teaches three classes this semester as well, Natural Disasters, a depth science class, online as well as face-to-face, and Geology 1010. She said she has a grader, but she utilizes her grader for assignments rather than tests.
“I have done it before – I’ve had a test or a project due before spring break so I can spend the break grading, and space it out,” Larsen said. “But I don’t really mind either way if the project is due before or after a break.”
Larsen said the reason she is giving a test this week is for the benefit of the student.
“We know students are not going to study during the break. So it’s better for them, they tend to perform better than if the test is after a break,” she said.
Larsen has 300 students enrolled in her Natural Disasters class, so she said she cannot give essay tests, despite the fact she believes essay tests are the most effective way to assess learning.
Larsen said the most difficult thing about having a test before spring break is that students try to prolong the break even more.
“I have students come to me before the break, and say, ‘I’m leaving early, can I take the test early?'” she said.
Larsen had the same issue in Fall 2010 before Thanksgiving break, so she has set aside a time for students who were leaving early to take the test, and for those who cannot make that, she had options.
“They can drop the test. I allow one test to be dropped, and if they get a zero that’s the test I drop,” she said.
Kyle Hancock, assistant professor in the psychology department, is teaching four classes this semester. He said he only gives tests in his undergraduate classes, and one of his classes has a test this week with mostly multiple choice questions, but four short answer questions.
Like Anderson, he uses TAs and scantrons to grade, but he said the hardest part of testing for him, is writing the actual test. He said it’s difficult to make a test fair for all students, and yet differentiate between who knows the material and who doesn’t.
“There is a lot of science that goes into the creation and scoring of an exam that I believe many students do not adequately appreciate,” he said.
In fact, in one of his classes, Psychometrics, he has his students write an exam, and he said students learn that writing a test is much harder than they expected, and blames it on lack of awareness.
“I think it is often easy to lack appreciation for the effort required to create a good exam that adequately serves the purpose of identifying and differentiating students’ abilities until you have attempted to do so on your own,” he said.
John Engler, lecturer in English, said he has about 80 papers due this week in individual conferences with his students in English 2010, but that he’s not grading them over spring break. Instead, he will be meeting with his students and discussing the paper.
“The assignment is graded on completion,” he said. “It’s a second rough draft of an argument paper, and we meet and talk about the differences, what they’re learning through research, etc.”
Engler said he doesn’t treat spring break any differently than any other week of the semester – the students leave on a Friday, and they arrive on Monday in class again.
“If it happens that there’s a test this week, that’s just how it worked out. I don’t organize it that way,” he said.
Susan Anderson, also a lecturer in English, said she tries to make papers due the week before, rather than the week after, spring break. She said she believes it’s nicer for the students to have the paper out of the way, so they don’t have to think about it over the break.
But she doesn’t mind the time spent grading the papers she gets. Susan said she has a class of about 27 students who will be turning in papers this week, and that she will grade over spring break.
“At minimum it should take me four and a half hours to grade these papers, which really isn’t too bad,” she said. “I should be done quickly, since the papers are only three pages or so.”
Anderson said she doesn’t have TAs to help her with grading, but she’s fine with that, because she would always be the one to assign a grade to a paper.
“All the classes I teach are small enough that it’s not an issue,” Susan said.
Other than grading papers and spending time with family, Susan said she plans on using break to catch up on other work she has.
“My husband doesn’t get a spring break,
so it’s a good time to really get caught up,” she said.
– april.ashland@aggiemail.usu.edu