The Road to a B

A student in my intro class came by the other day with a lot of questions. It soon became clear that he was confused about a lot of things, going back several weeks in the course. What this means is that we did not do a good job of monitoring his performance earlier during the semester. But the question now is: what do do next? I’ll sign the drop form any time during the semester, but he didn’t want to drop the class (the usual scheduling issues). And he doesn’t want to get a C or a D. He’s in big trouble and at this point is basically rolling the dice that he’ll do well enough on the final to eke out a B in the course. (Yes, he goes to section meetings and office hours, and he even tried hiring a tutor. But it’s tough–if you’ve already been going to class and still don’t know what’s going on, it’s not so easy to pull yourself out of the hole, even if you have a big pile of practice problems ahead of you.)

What we really need for this student, and others like him, is a road to a B: a plan by which a student can get by and attain partial mastery of the material. The way that this, and other courses, is set up, is that if you do everything right you get an A, and you get a B if you make some mistakes and miss some things along the way. That’s ok, but if you’re really stuck, you want some sort of plan that will take you forward. And the existing plan (try lots of practice problems) won’t cut it. What you need is some sort of triage, so you can nail down topics one at a time and do what it takes to get that B. And that’s not something we have now. I think it needs to be a formal part of the course, in some way.

16 thoughts on “The Road to a B

  1. One of my colleagues schedules ALL of her examinations during the regular semester, and reserves the final exam period for a "hail Mary" exam for last-minute learners to show their stuff. Right now, a superior grade on this exam bumps them up a grade level. However, this is still a work in progress.

  2. I'm trying to reconcile this post with the fact that not everyone in the class can be above average. I'd imagine Columbia, like other colleges, already have a grade inflation problem, no?

  3. I've been experimenting with quizzes to provide the monitoring, or more importantly self-monitoring on the part of the student (Dylan Wiliam claims this is an important part of getting good student performance).

    I've structured this as follows:
    The quiz is worth one point for turning it in, right answer or wrong answer.
    I give the quiz in class and then 5 min later, I give the answer; the student's grade their own work.
    The student then grades themselves on a 3 point scale, (3) I understood it, no problems. (2) I had some confusion, but I think I understand it now, and (1) I'd like you to go over that again.

    I've only used it once so far, but I'm pretty pleased. It is one week into the class and I know that 5/25 students don't understand how to interpret histograms. Something I didn't figure out until the midterm last semester.

  4. I've done this for many years. It solves several problems.

    1) I do not give make-up exams; the final substitutes for a missed exam if needed. (But in a small class I take a poll to decide on exam dates, and in a large class of course one has to avoid religious holidays and dates that obviously will conflict like the day before a big out-of-town football game :-)

    –In my large classes I have also allowed other outside work to substitute for a missed exam. This is all stated clearly in the syllabus.

    2) And it is available as a "hail-Mary pass", as said. The way I implement it is to drop the lowest grade if all the regular exams and the final are taken. So a poor grade on a regular exam can be compensated by a good grade on the final.

    3) Students who are not quite satisfied by their grade at the end of the class are welcome to take the final in an attempt to improve the grade.

    4) To do this correctly, each student needs to know what his or her grade will be if the exam is not taken, in advance of the final. So this information has to be made available to each student (obviously in a way that is private and secure so as to comply with appropriate law).

  5. I overweight homework and underweight exams. 60% of the grade is determined by homework, which (1) encourages students to do lots of problems during the semester, (2) gives them (and me!) weekly feedback, and (3) rewards students who work hard but freak out on the exam. I think it also encourages collaboration and communication among the students, which are important post-graduation skills.

  6. Rick: especially if its important they learn to copy correctly

    But seriously a colleague's term was ruined by all the meetings and paper work that flowed from them noticing the exact same mistake was copied by a dozen or more students.

    Technology can help here e.g. random numbers generated for individual study questions along with an automatic calculation of an individualized anser key. Even got that work once ;-)

    Also, in one of my classes the student who got close to the highest marks on the tests and exams refused to hand in thier assignments even when offered an oportunity to do so after the exam – my only guess was that they were disgusted with the above "copying".

    K?

  7. In programming courses, I tend to give extra assignments to those types of students depending on where they're at. I've heard of others giving specific, tailored assignments to struggling students, but generally I make a single extra lab available to the whole class. It's probably easier for me because the experience of programming is the best teacher.

    Depending on your situation, you might be able to make up an extra assignment that's somehow tailored to struggling students (who tend to need an alternate teaching perspective to have something click). Something where they create visualizations might help, or maybe a data set that they understand well from another area of life.

  8. I teach at a community college. Most of my students just want a C so they don't have to take stats again when they transfer. I have my weighting spread out, so exams are 40%, homework is 20%, 20% is two papers they do looking at how news reports about research differ from the studies themselves, 10% for labs (SPSS stuff) and 10% for attendance, participation, and preparation for class. I also offer an extra credit assignment intended to tip those on the edge over the grade point (no more than 3 points total) that ask conceptual questions very different from the rest of the course.

    This means that every semester I end up awarding Cs to students who get under 50 on all the tests, but who put the time in on the other stuff and do it well. They generally feel better being having a lot of opportunities to improve their grades rather than just a few.

    Having said that, I had the same uncomfortable experience last semester that you talked about. A student came to me who was taking the class for the 3rd time. He still didn't understand even the basics. I suggested tutoring, referred him (and the whole class) to khan academy, and spent chunks of time with him. It was no good. Sometimes we just can't create a path for those who are that far behind.

  9. I prefer an independent international GPA for classes as core as intro statistics.

    The professor teaches the class. Then The student goes to a GMAT style test center and takes his computerized 3 hour statistics exam. He walks out with his international grade in the class, with an absolute score and comparative score of topic competence.

    Professors still have a lot of power as recommenders and references.

  10. Hopefully:

    I don't know of any such standardized test for statistics. But I agree that this would be a very good idea.

  11. (Tried to sign up but your system failed, saying "sendmail" was unknown, or something quite like that.)

    Here's a great thing: Personalized Systems of Instruction. Hard to set up, but easy to manage afterward. It's especially good for stat/math kinds of courses where the material tends not to change much. It allows students to move at their own speeds.

    Regarding grade inflation: The idea of grading is really all wrong if you think about it. To get a bad grade means you have not learned well. To require that some people get a bad grade means that the design of your system must be such that some students will not learn. Why do we want some students not to learn? The better approach is to require mastery of every section before allowing the student to move on to the next section. That way no student can be behind.

    Of course lectures are also a very bad thing. We try to target the middle of the group and allow the best students to be bored and the worst students to be lost. In this day and age, we ought to make a video recording of every lecture and let students watch them when they please — when they are ready. Then you can spend your time actually *teaching* instead of lecturing.

  12. I think I just got caught up in a lot of different syllabus material. I try to apply the practice of differentiated instruction. I'm in no way a master, but I try to meet each student where they are. I usually only have 2-3 levels for a class, but as long as students are mastering the material I consider my job completed successfully. I want each student to learn something from the course and it may be things at completely different levels. If two students both master the same material but at different levels, they both earn an A. I try to challenge all ranges of student intellects.

  13. Hopefully – fairly standard at Oxford – someone else other than the professor sets the exam and marks it.

    I was in that situation once – someone else setting the exam – and it had it advantages.

    With statistics (as has come up before) it tends to devolve into teaching and examining (narrow) puzzle solving rather than critical thinking about uncertaintly and what to make of it. Thats hard to teach and harder to examine and almost impossible for people to agree upon. But its what important especially to non-statisticians.

    Mike: "where the material tends not to change much" hopefully not for statistics that would be dreadful!
    (and almost all non-Bayesian)

    K?

  14. One interesting approach is the one used by Kumon, an after-school instructional program that originated in Japan.

    The difference in their pedagogical approach is that instead of controlling time and level of effort and measuring accuracy of problem solving (or other testing behavior), they control accuracy to very near 100% and measure time to completion.

    This is similar to some computer aided instruction software that I saw developed in the late 80's and early 90's which required that students pass tests that they could take as often as they wanted and as early as they wanted.

    In either of these programs, the road to a B, as you put it, is simply to pass each test with an acceptable score. The traditional crap-shoot of taking the mid-term or final exactly once and seeing you do is replaced with a more certain outcome at the expense of uncertainty in the time required.

Comments are closed.