TEACHSOC: Re: 8:00 Classes

[Claudia Scholz]

In my 8am Intro Soc class of 100 students, I give daily quizzes, usually at the beginning of class, sometimes during the lecture or at the end.  I tell students it's not just about showing up, it's about being prepared.  These aren't pop quizzes per se, since I usually post the PowerPoint slides, which include the quiz questions, on the class webpage the night before.  The quizzes reward students who review the slides ahead of time, who bring their books to class, who arrive on time and stay until the end.  I make no secret of any of this... I'm conditioning them into behaviors associated with good students and I tell them so.  When a third of the class failed to correctly define manifest and latent functions last week, I teased them "How many of you KNOW there's a glossary in your textbook where these terms are defined?"  I don't do it to humiliate them, and they do laugh at this joke.  I tell them that the definition of a student is not someone who knows stuff but someone who knows where to find stuff, who know what the tools at his/her disposal are.  Then for the next quiz I asked them a question that wasn't in their books but in their notes from the previous class... (yeah, I'm sneaky)

I give 3 exams in this class.  The in-class quizzes, plus some online quizzes, together make up a 4rth exam grade.  This rewards students for showing up and moves the class away from the "high-stakes"exam model where their entire grade rests on multiple guess and True-False questions.  I drop the lowest 3-4 in-class quiz scores and the lowest 1-2 online quiz scores (probably equivalent to 10%) and I don't accept quizzes from students who are absent or who come in late/leave early.  Like many of you, I tell students I'm not in the business of judging the validity or truthfulness of their reasons for not showing up.

In order to make my life a little easier, I have all the students buy a pack of 3x5 index cards at the beginning of the semester and tell them that I will only accept quiz responses on these cards.  That means grading simply involves sorting the cards into stacks, usually check, check-plus, check-minus.  Since I can only demand about an hour of the department reader-grader's time each week (in semesters when we even have a reader-grader/TA), he simply enters the scores into a spreadsheet for me.  I tell the students that I drop the lowest 3-4 scores and that I don't accept late quizzes or quizzes from students who aren't in class that day.

This approach is a bit "anal" (as my students would say) and if these classes weren't so large I would certainly assess attendance and preparedness in a different way.  For now, these "index card quizzes" allow me to achieve some of my socialization and assessment goals for the class even if I can't give students individualized attention.

- claudia