Timeline for What can a professor do about an exam that was too long for the allotted time, after the students have completed it?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
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| Oct 23, 2015 at 17:53 | comment | added | Vectornaut | [... cont.] Attempts to idealize your situation and choose mathematically well-defined goals are fraught with peril; it's easy to make models that look fine ahead of time, but turn out in hindsight to differ from your actual situation in crucial ways. For these reasons, I would not expect teachers who study algorithms to expect their colleagues' grading systems to be perfect, or to be designed on the basis of neat, clean mathematical criteria. | |
| Oct 23, 2015 at 17:53 | comment | added | Vectornaut | @blankip: I'm not an applied computer scientist, but I have the impression that applications of ranking systems, such as grading systems, are often very messy. Even in idealized situations, it can be difficult, or even impossible, to find a system with all the features you want (Arrow's theorem is a classic illustration). In many applications, you may not even know precisely what features you want your ranking system to have. [cont. ...] | |
| Oct 23, 2015 at 14:44 | comment | added | blankip | This is lazy grading. If my teacher messed up on a test that much and said they were grading on a curve I would tell them to stick it. What if you got 15 out of 15 questions right on the 40 question test? What if you got the first 10 questions right and then saw you were running out of time and just scribbled down stuff for the other 30 and got 5 right in that set? | |
| Oct 21, 2015 at 17:53 | comment | added | jakebeal | @ff524 Absolutely true: grading on a curve just decreases the damage. Two other solutions I've seen: 1) if there are a number of exams, simply drop the worst, 2) if the final covers the same material as the exams, then take only the best percentage score for a given set of material, e.g., if you did better on the exam it replaces that portion of the final. | |
| Oct 21, 2015 at 17:47 | comment | added | ff524 | Unfortunately, grading on a curve won't fully compensate for an exam that was really too long (and the instructor only realized it after the fact). For example, curving an exam that was too long favors students who can read and understand English quickly, which isn't necessarily a learning objective that was being assessed in the exam. I would love to see a solution that doesn't suffer from this problem. | |
| Oct 21, 2015 at 17:47 | vote | accept | murray | ||
| Oct 21, 2015 at 17:47 | |||||
| Oct 21, 2015 at 17:29 | history | answered | jakebeal | CC BY-SA 3.0 |