It’s Finals Week! I am just giving one Final Exam this time
around – first semester General Chemistry. I’m all set, that is, I’ve written
and taken my exam. My usual strategy for exams I’ve given is to write the exam
at least a week ahead of time. Then I wait a couple of days to allow my brain
buffer to clear. I then take the exam “cold” either first thing in the morning
or right after lunch when I’m a little sleepy. I have to be able to complete
the exam in a third of the time I am giving the students. By complete,
I mean writing out the complete solution set that can be eventually given to
students after I grade and hand exams back. This means actually writing things
out legibly and coherently instead of the scrawls that I sometimes get from students (which skip steps
and loses points).
Finals week has a different schedule because time blocks of
2 hours are allotted. My usual class meets MWF for an hour (really 55 minutes).
Since the final exam is cumulative and therefore covers more material, I
usually make it a little shorter so the students don’t feel the time pressure.
It took me slightly under 30 minutes to take the two-hour exam so that should
work well. In any case, students are stressed as usual and studying away. I wrote the following e-mail to my class this morning to
help them not stress out so much.
=====
Hi, folks -
Since I’ve had some questions about the
nature of the Final exam, here are my answers for everybody.
1. The Final Exam is cumulative and
will cover material equally spread out over the semester, i.e., there won’t be
one topic strongly privileged over another. Clearly anything I went through in
class is more important than anything I didn’t cover much in class (but is in
your textbook).
2. The Final Exam isn’t written to be
harder than the Exams you’ve had so far. It’s at about the same level in terms
of expectation. So since you’ve had three exams already, you have an idea of
what this level is.
3. To balance the fact that the exam
covers more material, it is actually written as a 90-minute exam although you
will have 120 minutes to complete it. This means that most of you will actually
finish early with time to spare. It doesn’t mean you will answer the questions
correctly necessarily, but you won’t feel the time pressure as you did in
previous exams. (Previous 55-minute exams that were tight and really aimed at
55 minutes.)
4. My office hours this week are: Mon
1-2pm, Tue 12:30-2:30pm, Wed, 9:30-11:30am. This takes advantage of in-between
final exam times to maximize your ability to visit if you have questions.
=====
My final exam is on Wednesday afternoon so I expect to spend
all day Thursday grading, and hopefully I’ll be done by day’s end. Unless I
have a Time-Turner, of course. Then I might be able to work some magic. But
WAIT! Guess what happened today?
The highlight of my day at work was when one of my students
(who is a senior this year) came by this afternoon to drop off a thank-you card
and gift. I wrote her a bunch of recommendation letters for grad school (Ph.D. programs).
She’s an excellent student and already has acceptance offers coming in (which
is fantastic). Anyway, the gift is a Time-Turner! She says it is to help me get
through grading my Finals. This is very fitting given my earlier blog post on the use of Time Turners under a strangely narrow set of
circumstances. In honor of the gift, Hufflepuff Hippo will pose with his new
Time Turner and (still relatively) new wizard hat (sewn by my super-talented better half)!
To top things off, I had another brainwave
today. Last week I was chatting with another senior student who was in my
second semester Honors General Chemistry class three years ago. I found out
that she is interested in going into teaching chemistry at the high school
level. (I almost did this myself but ended up teaching college instead – it’s
an interesting story but for another time.) Anyway, I was looking over some of
the material for next semester’s class. If you have been following my blog you
will know that I had posted an open letter to my students about
wanting to approach the Honors General Chemistry class very differently. While I know that it’s going to be a lot of work on my part to pull this off, it will be of
great benefit to the students (I think). Well, today I thought that I should
ask this senior student if she wants to participate in putting together the
class as my hybrid research-and-teaching assistant. I have a nice external
research grant that has flexibility allowing me to use the funds creatively so
I can now offer my student a paid assistantship, which is the least I can do if
she’s going to put in the hours and work with me on this project. I’m meeting
her tomorrow to pitch the idea and see if we can find an arrangement that
works, and if she has enough time to participate. So I might get some help, the student gets some training, and the class might even go better especially if we have lots of in-class small group work (which I'm planning).
So I’m now excited about grading my Finals and getting to
work on my next semester’s class! An excellent start to Finals week – I hope it
ends well too. We’ll see.
No comments:
Post a Comment