At 12:19 PM 4/8/02 -0300, Robert J. MacG. Dawson wrote:
>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. if you want to consider what students do in courses as a sprint ... fine but, i don't the problem i see with your depiction of this is that the TESTS ... are THE criteria ... and all other things are just proxies FOR the tests ... i don't buy this either in the case of my correspondence example ... there is no way you can replicate on the mc tests ... WHAT you have wanted them to do with the assignments ... the handling of data sets ... the use of the software ... the repetitive nature of the problems you make them work on ... now, the assignments surely are not independent facets of behavior but, they are not replicates (or proxies for) the tests either each of these things is a component and, instructors have to make some decisions about how to handle these components .... and, in the case i offered as an example ... my decision has been that it would indeed be unfair to give the work they do in all these assignments such small grade weight ... for example, students in this course have asked many times if they would be able to use minitab (which they have to use for their assignments) ON the mc tests ... and, the practical answer is no ... there is no way to have in all the places that students take tests ... ACCESS to minitab guaranteed ... so, while there are some items on the test about HOW minitab might be used ... this is no substitute for the actual use of it ON all the assignments ... course grades are not like 100 meter dashes ... in the case of dashes ... competitors have been training for years and years ... and have entered hundreds of races so, there is (excuse the pun) a "track" record for them over time ... improvements, changes, levels, and the like ... but that is not true for students in a course ...we know little or nothing of their past ... only what they do for us in the context of a class ... and what we require of them surely, as a student yourself once in time ... if you had to spend 90% of your course time on activities that counted 10% of your grade ... you would have been mad and, rightfully so now, if there were options for you TO do or NOT to do this 90% and, you could still make an A in the course by some other means, that would be ok but, if there is no way to get around doing the 90% ... then that represents a different matter just like on a test IN class, what if you put 90% of the questions on the test cover only the first 10% of the content in the course ... you would argue overkill as far as your taking the test and WHAT you studied for ... the reverse holds too . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
