[nflug] Meeting on October 20

Ken Smith kensmith at cse.Buffalo.EDU
Fri Oct 5 14:38:33 EDT 2007


On Fri, 2007-10-05 at 14:16 -0400, Franklin Kumro Jr wrote:
> counting from zero, you know how many tests I got points off cause I
> started at zero :-p

The first couple semesters I taught classes I wound up with an inverse
bell curve for the exams.  It was pointed out to me that I was asking
questions that were all of roughly the same difficulty level, and the
students basically "got it" (right side of the curve) or "didn't get
it" (left side of the curve) with no middle ground.  So I realized I
needed to vary the difficulty of the questions.

My first attempt at a "Give me 10 points for free" type question was
doing something that looked like this:


					0) Name: _______________

			Midterm Exam
			============

1) Blah blah blah...

I suppose it wasn't truly fair because this was the test paper and they
were expected to write the answers for questions 1 thru 9 in one of
those "Blue book" exam booklets.  But most of the class didn't get
question 0...  I decided to give them full credit if they'd written
their name on the front of the Blue book (which they all had...).

>From that point on the "Give me 10 points for free" question has been a
"real" question (looks like the rest of them and is positioned below the
"title" of the question page) that's something along the lines of "What
does TCP/IP *stand* for? (NOT what *is* TCP/IP - what does it *stand*
*for*?)".  And despite that I'll usually still get several students who
will fill a page describing it...  :-)

-- 
                                                Ken Smith
- From there to here, from here to      |       kensmith at cse.buffalo.edu
  there, funny things are everywhere.   |
                      - Theodore Geisel |




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