Students do get sick too in college, so that affects there exam grades. I mean lots of things to take into consideration. I have one kid who were never ever sick in high school but somehow got sick in college, flu, cold that kind of thing, nothing serious.
This has turned into a really good thread, I’m interested especially in the curve-to-weed-out course discussions which I find fascinating, not having experienced such myself in college.
Sounds like a straw man argument to me.
Again, the students should use the study groups and office hours available to them and should take ownership of their performance. But of a 19 year old gets upset and sheds some tears, being met with a cold-hearted “suck it up” isn’t very understanding or compassionate. The number of college students with active mental health problems is extremely high these days. Not saying this is an “excuse”, but should a student feel demeaned or demoralized or distraught after an insensitive conversation with a TA, there could be consequences for that student. These are not NASA scientists or the chief surgeon speaking to a medical resident. Hopefully when your kid or spouse cries, you don’t tell them to “suck it up”. There often is crying in marriage. A little sensitivity goes a long way. As other have said, it goes both ways.
Also good grades affect the student’s live in many ways. I was asked by my insurance company to provide a transcript of one kid in college to get a good student discount. When I mentioned to my brother that my insurance rate is not high, he kindly reminded me because I had the good student discount.
I have a hard time imagining how any (new or otherwise) CS instructor teaching a data structures course would do so without any programming assignments or projects.
Most of my classes did. These two didn’t. And the programming assignments weren’t anything like the exams for Data Structures.
I think the OP is spot on, and the number of parents complaining that the TA is too harsh just lets me know that kids are coddled too much these days. There have been many anecdotes here on CC, even in this thread, where teachers rarely had students complaining about why they deserved better grades, now it is commonplace. I think it begins very early, even in the sports culture of “everyone gets a trophy”.
Sadly, it is not only here that I hear these types of stories. Many of my friends say that when they give reviews for recent college grads on a new job, the kids have meltdowns. They dont understand why, they arent rated a “4” or whatever the top rating is. I have friends in HR who say, parents try to negotiate starting salaries for their kids. Everyone thinks his kid is a special snowflake, and yes we all love our kids, but they are not learning how to deal with disappointment well at all.
Ditto on the data structures/no homework thing.
My daughter is a private tutor for two courses this semester. Sometimes smart kids just had terrible hs teachers in the intro course and lack fluency in either algebra or laboratory sciences. Getting a C in a college course is a major accomplishment for them.
On the other hand, I know a med student who was the only one to correctly identify all of the human bones during the “bag test,” where bones are hidden in a sack and students have to feel for identifying features. Thing is, she learned it in HS from a demanding bio teacher and has been able to do this since age 16. It’s not that she was smarter, or worked harder, but that she happened to live in the school district that had a teacher who taught this.
UCB, maybe you should read what you posted. Not old exams, unlike the old exams I’ve found googling for Berkeley CS classes. Trove of treasures on the Internet.
I have never worked in an academic department that does this, and while I’ve admittedly never been in a peoper STEM department, I’ve been at a variety of universities, and in both social science (with a heavy quantitative and even coding component) and humanities departments.
There aren’t many faculty left around the academy who were teaching in the 60s and 70s, but I know some of them—and from talking to them, I’d conclude that parental involvement in grade disputes seems to be new (though fortunately still very, very rare), but grade-grubbing students (whether through complaining, or nagging, or crying, or sexual offers, or whatever) are most definitely not a new thing.
What is the reason that they do not do this (or give blessing to recognized student groups to offer public exam files accessible to all students)?
What probably happens when old exams are not released is that instructors are tempted to recycle questions, and private exam files in fraternities, sororities, and such give advantage to the subset of students who have access to them.
Since the OP is describing sophomores it seems like their freshman courses did a poor job in the transition from High School rubric style assessments to College curved assessments. I wonder if there is an opportunity for the OP to show some leadership in his department by addressing this student orientation issue with the freshman teachers or deans.
Or maybe, as noted by another poster previously, the grade-grubber students are the ones who show up more often, just as police officers tend to encounter an overrepresentation of criminals among the people they meet on the job.
Similarly at my S’s orientation, the told us (the parents). “Most of your kids graduated in the top 10%. Half of your kids will now be in the bottom 50%”.
Yup, a new normal…
Well, my opinion will be completely 100% unpopular on this site, but I think the fault lies in our stat driven educational system. If bubble tests completed rapidly exemplify the best of the best, that is what kids think define the best of the best. Deep critical thinking skills that require time to germinate are made subordinate to surface oriented knowledge and speed.
I am a person who absolutely does not care a fig about standardized testing. My kids take standardized tests as a hoop to jump through, not as a way to quantify their accomplishments. If scholarships didn’t rely on them so much, they would walk in cold and take them once and never look back. My oldest graduated with cum laude with his chemE degree and is a successful professional. Based on this website, you’d have thought his success in engineering was doomed before he walked through a classroom door. No, we simply didn’t spend time grooming bubble skills. He was my guinea pig and I have realized that prepping for a few days before the test is not enough for learning how to pace for a 3 hour test, especially when you don’t take mc tests growing up. Ds is a deep critical thinker and can analyze problems and come up with effective solutions. Those skills made him a top student and make him a desired employee. His test scores simply represent not being prepped for testing. (We also waited until the last minute, so he didn’t have the opportunity for multiple tests.)
Here is another “profile” driven example. My ds took cal through AoPS. Bc AoPS does not prepare for the AP, I had originally signed him up for a CB approved course bc we thought he should have the AP label on his transcript. Within 2 weeks he was about to poke his eyes out in boredom from the tedious repetition of plug and chug problems being drilled into them for a top score. He dropped it and ran back to AoPS as fast as he could. He prepped for the exam for a few weeks before the test and did not have an AP labeled class. Ds scored a 5. I’m sure he would have scored a 5 with the approved class as well. But I can guarantee that his math understanding is far superior by the non-approved path. He was challenged and loved it.
Stats and labels drive classroom content. Does that come with a cost? I think it does. I know the argument on here is colleges need a standard. I personally think the one they have selected is a poor one. If whining has increased over the past few yrs, maybe the NCLB test culture and its impact on classroom content/approach is partially responsible.
Disagree with me…no problem!! I homeschool for a reason! :). (ETA: my kids have all told me that college is easier than our homeschool. And I have been thanked more than once for making them work so hard when they have watched friends flounder from not knowing how to learn independently and persevere.)
Well, the first, most practical reason is that they’d need to collect all of them and set up a way to distribute them. This would be a horrible pain for a department of a decent size.
Second, everywhere I’ve worked, faculty hold the copyright on course materials they’ve created, and so there’s a permission issue.
Third, some of us are simply curmudgeonly enough, I suppose, that we don’t like such practices. This is why I don’t ever, ever release lecture notes online, either—if students want to know what’s on the exam, they can come to class when I go over what’s on the exam.
And I don’t get what recycling of exam prompts has to do with this—whether someone does that or not, it’s the faculty member’s call. We all know that such laziness will catch up with you, though, and so we generally don’t do it. (Well, except in the sense that it will always happen—for example, there are only a certain number of vowels across human languages, and so only a certain number of different prompts even possible for asking what the feature set of a given vowel is.)
If the average on an exam is 75%, and an A is 90%, then not everyone got an A, by definition. If everyone DOES get an A, then I would make the next exam more difficult because perhaps the course is not challenging this group of students enough. I once proctored/graded a freshman physics exam that even us TA’s had a hard time getting the right answers on.
The test, as described, does seem harder than what I’d expect for a non-weeder course for sophomores. But overall, I’m guessing the sticking point for the students is an average in the 70s where, in all likelihood, most classes at this top tier university have averages in the 80s (if not mid 80s.)
No reason to change anyone’s grade, but perhaps there’s something to look into
OP: is this the only section? Is this 70’s average usual for all first exams, or all exams, and does this apply to all sections, or is this just this professor’s section, or just this exam? Did you and the professor design the test? What references did you use? Was your goal to have an average in the 70s and if so is that “normal” for your class or department, or out of the norm? Is this supposed to be a weedout class or is it not? What percentage students got A’s? What percentage students got B’s? What percentage students got C’s? Did the students who came to the review session do better than those who didn’t?
How did you respond to students who cried (I suppose you didn’t say “suck it up”)? Were you able to find reassuring words then provide them with references to the tutoring center and the next office hours - or, in the case of the 34, suggest s/he may want to drop the class and take x class that’d reinforce his/her background? What about the grade grubbers (and, alas, no, that’s not new at all… it’s just that you’ve not experienced it before), how have things been since then, any more hounding you and how have you dealt with them? Have you discussed this with the professor? If you think there’s a deficiency with the first year classes (as per the high number of students who didn’t get at least a B), is there a forum where you can address your concerns, either with other TA’s or at the dept level?
Most of my daughter’s Math and Econ college professors release both old tests and “sample” tests and quizzes for the kids to study from (in addition to releasing an answer key after every student has taken the test). They release them on Blackboard along with class notes, powerpoints, etc. It is an excellent aid to study with. Her HS math teachers wouldn’t let their tests leave the building (even the student’s own graded one) because they were too lazy to create new tests from year to year.