Dennis Roberts wrote:
> however, BY FAR, most of the course work is taken up by doing these
> assignments ... perhaps 100 hours for assignments and, only 5 for the
> tests. it would be almost unethical to say that because of the lack of
> variability in grades on the assignments and, the fact that they CAN (and
> probably do ... though rarely do students know one another in this course)
> get help ... that assignments should only count say ... 5/10 percent of
> the course. this would be totally unfair to the students.
I disagree. By that argument, the 100m sprint event at the Olympics is
colossally unfair because the athletes spend years training for it and
only get "graded" on a few tens of seconds. Thus, we ought to decide the
medals on career averages including training runs, only holding the
actual Olympic race if those results were close enough that one race
might change it.
Fairness *to*the*students* requires that they get significant benefit
if possible from the work that they do. Fairness does not necessarily
demand that they be evaluated at all; there are many learning situations
in which the student is not evaluated at all.
If the student is evaluated, the primary reason is usually to indicate
what the student has learned from the course. (I wrote "what they have
learned", not "how hard they worked attempting to learn it", as this is
still the expectation of future instructors, employers, etc.) Fairness
demands only that the evaluation reflect what it claims to reflect to a
reasonable degree of accuracy - both in the sense that a student who
learns the material gets a good grade, and in the negative sense that a
student who gets a good grade knows the material.
If the tests cover approximately the same material as the assignments
(yours surely do??) then they may fulfil the requirement of fairness
*to*the*students* as well as the assignments. It is not a matter of
being "fair to the coursework". As all the students do the same
assignments and write the same tests, it balances out for the students.
Of course, perfect fairness is unattainable, or attainable only at
infinite cost in terms of other desiderata. ("Well, it's so clean, sir!"
"It's certainly uncontaminated by cheese!") As soon as any other goals
are acknowledged, small sacrifices in fairness must be made. So yes,
putting much weight on the exam does penalize the student who happens to
work harder (deliberately or otherwise) on the assignments than on
studying for the exams; and putting much weight on the assignments
penalizes the student who "gets it together" late in the term.
-Robert Dawson
.
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