I survived my week of 7 tests, my nerves were even more shot then they usually are during finals. The hard part about mid-terms is that you have to attend regular classes/labs and activities as well as taking exams, as opposed to the relatively free days during finals. I did indeed survive, though, and now that all of those are over I don't have any tests to worry about for a few weeks.
This week did inspire me to make one resolution: when I am a professor, I'm going to do my best to try to find some alternative to the "Three Exam System." I know that it's convenient to break material up into three units, and I am not criticizing any professors for doing so, but the problem is that most people distribute their three exams fairly evenly throughout the semester, which means there are periodic avalanches of exams that hit hapless students all at once.
Again, not criticizing anyone who does teach like this, because having two exams can mean quite a bit of information per test, while having more than three can be too disruptive in the teaching flow.....so it's a hard thing to work out logistically. I thought I'd post this as an open question to readers, has anyone taken or taught a course with an exam schedule they thought was particularly unique, effective, terrible, etc? Please discuss.
EDIT: Just wanted to add, I am also interested in this because I am going to have the opportunity to actually teach a freshman ConBio course next fall! More details on that program will come soon, it's part of a ConBio "Learning Community" we're working on establishing, as a mentorship/support system to encourage more people to take advantage of the Conservation and Biodiversity track that my university offers within the Zoology curriculum.
1 comments:
more than being super careful about not having a three exam structure, I think it's key to have a structure that is different than other profs. Here at Michigan, every science intro class (that I know of -- my knowledge encompasses bio, physics, and chem) has a 4 exam structure. Consequently, my students seem to often have 2-3 exams all in one week about once a month.
If you're lucky enough to be at a small school, you can coordinate with colleagues (this is what my university did). Alternately, you can just try and have a different format than the format you know most other intro classes use.
Another idea that I find intriguing is making some small and some large units. You could make 2-3 week units with a 50 point test and 4-6 week units with a 100 point test (or something along those lines). That way, you stagger when tests are, you cover all the material, and you're able to look for organic breaks in the material rather than cramming 3-4 units into the same time frame. I think this would work nicely. In my class, for example, the ecology unit took 4 weeks but was fairly comprehensible material (the way the prof taught it, that is) whereas the prof chose to have a really difficult evolution unit in the same 4 week time period. My students had a much harder time dealing all the advanced material from the evo unit, and I think they had a really easy time (and too brief of an overview) in the ecology unit. We could have cut a week out of ecology and added it to evo, and that would likely have helped the class format.
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