Quiz Day

11:00 a.m. I'm sitting in my first class waiting for the last two students to finish their quiz. One of the students came to class 20 minutes late and the other started when everyone else did. It's now 50 minutes into the test and they're the only ones left.

This first quiz is going to let me gauge the student's ability as well as my own teaching performance. If there are a lot of students who didn't perform well, then I'll have to change my teaching style to try and make things more clear to them. I'm also going to toss in some extra credit questions for one of the quizes to come to let people make back some points if they didn't do so great on this first one.

One of the reasons that I didn't mind letting the late student go ahead and start the test was that the roads are pretty bad in town and out in the county because of a late-night snow storm. I've already had two students email me to say that they wouldn't be able to come in because of the weather. One said that she probably wouldn't be in on Monday either because of an illness. I'm going to have to check with my Chair to find out what the department policy is on the length of time someone can put off a test. I can always make up a different version of this quiz that she can make up - since I don't want the students to have to wait for that one last grade to come in.

One down and one to go.

I grabbed my NEC back from when I let a friend borrow it and I'm falling back in love with the thing. Chris had borrowed my folding keyboard a while back (for the PDA) and can't find it now. I kind of like this a bit more. It's not exactly as portabla as the PDA but it's much easier to type on.

12:51 p.m.

I've just graded the psych test. Out of 52 students who took the test, 27 of them got a D or lower. This is after I went through and found that around 5 questions weren't really fair and that I'm not going to be able to use the quiz-maker program again; at least not like I did in the past. There were only 50 questions for the test so I simply doubled their scores to get their final grade. With just doing that, the highest score was just an 80. This is because all of the questions are worth two points. That didn't seem right. So I considered the 5 questions to be my own mistake and awarded each student 10 points, once the scores were doubled to make up for it.

I've just checked and found ou that 5 students didn't show up to take the test and didn't email me prior to class to tell me that they wouldn't be there. I was pretty easy with my lack-of-attendence policy, but if they don't show - it's not my fault.

Heh. I just had two of my Soc students approach me here in the library to ask abou the nature of the test. I told them not to worry; that it's the first test and if things don't work out for the class, I'll grade on the curve (meaning probably assign 10 points). I went through the questions that the test-maker had spit out for me and they didn't look too difficult but I think I'm going to have to either make up my own questions, hand out a pre-test or teach from the tests from now on.

I'll fix it. I don't want my students failing the class for any mistake on my part.

I have one hour until class. I'm mostly bored right now since I've finished with grading the first test. Thankfully, though, I have the NEC with me so I can type away frantically about whatever's crawling through my mind or some odd observations of society or the Shawnee State subculture.

Hrm. Thirsty. BRB.

2:30 pm. I'm all but done with the Soc quiz. There's only three students left. This test went a lot faster than the morning's exam. I wonder if it's my teaching skills. I'm going to go immediately down to the department and grade these quizes to see if there's a big discrepancy in the average grade. I know that I'm probably going to have to alter my teaching style for Psych but I didn't think that there would be much of a problem for Soc. Hopefully, the chair won't have me teach another psych 101 but I get the feeling that it is their normal course to teach so I may have to adapt.

2:37 pm. One student left. When a student takes a really long time I always wonder if it was because they didn't study or if they were hammering over the material that much.