This entry is for my students in Biology 447 to leave anonymous comments regarding the lecture from Sept 24 2007, or any other lecture, really. Thanks for your feedback, guys!
42 comments:
Anonymous
said...
I found that the lecture this morning didn't cover anything that I wasn't already familiar with, but the refresher was appreciated. This is the sort of thing that we should all really know, but I had never actually been taught or told how to use these search engines for peer-reviewed articles. I managed to figure out most of this stuff on my own, but I would have really appreciated a lecture like this when I was in second year. Here's hoping that the tutorial lectures continue to be informative (and fun! yay kittens!).
I think that these assignments will certainly help me out, with keeping up on the work for the group project. Being in a group where everybody leaves everything until the very end is not fun for anyone... and at least we now have the incentive of getting marks for prepping for the project that we are going to be working on anyways.
Sometimes listening to you is like listening to the characters on Gilmore Girls...talking at the speed of light with some humour/wit here and there. It's not a bad thing, really, as long as I can catch what you're saying and put it down in a handwriting that I can't read later.
I agree with the other anonymous dude/dudette that your lecture, while appreciated, is something that would be more useful in first/second year. By fourth year you would hope that a bunch of 23 year olds with several co-op experiences would be able to survive a research project. Btw...even our public servants have been known to cite Wikipedia.
I enjoyed Monday's lecture as it was more laid back and relaxing. These types of tutorials are beneficial in case some of us have forgotten how to use the various search engines properly. It also reminds us what type of sources are valid and which are not.
This is a good way for us to keep up with our group projects and not leave everything to the last minute!
I think that Monday's lecture was great. It's true that we should know most of this by now and it still shocks me to hear that 4th year students have actually quoted Wikipedia, but no one has ever taken the time to actually teach us this stuff. I wish more 1st year profs would take the time to do this! I still found it helpful, however, and I'm sure that the next few tutorials will be even more informative. I still don't have a full grasp of how to properly cite things, and I'm sure I'll enjoy the Referencing tutorial. Plus, you have a way of making the most boring thing fun and engaging! I say keep on doing it!
I appreciated today's tutorial on reading a research article. It made me feel like I wasn't missing out on a lot of the "filler" that I normally skim anyways! These sorts of classes are definitely appreciated, they feel like "tips from the inside" from someone who has a lot of solid experience searching for articles and getting the right things out of them. Cheers!
Hey Dr. Scott, today's tutorial task was a little annoying. It's not difficult to summarize a summary (though it seems pointless to summarize a summary, but I understand there's a reason why we did that), but to do so in about 30 minutes while you're calling out people's names, people are shuffling around and leaving, and I am trying to understand what somebody else thinks they understand from a primary research article....summarizing a summary becomes quite difficult. Sure it's worth 1% but that makes it even more frustrating because you would think it would take a little less effort to gain the percent. That takes me to my next grievance...
The tasks, as simple as they are and meant to help us, should be worth more than a % each, perhaps 2%. They are easy but time consuming. And though one could argue that they are helping us towards the project which is a big chunk of our final mark, you won't be looking at the 'little' things for the big presentation as closely as you are looking at them now...and that makes me believe that the tasks should be worth more.
Please don't make us do another impromptu task unless everybody in the room is going to be quiet and not start leaving 10 mins into the task. Thank you.
You were right, Dr. Clark: That midterm was far too long. I would have benefitted from having one less question (one of the big ones, prefferably), or about 10 extra minutes. I did not have enough time to write down what I wanted to write, and I have no doubt that my mark is going to suffer for that. I'm pretty sure that I'm not alone in this sentiment. Please, make the final less time-crunched... at least for my own mental health.
Like you said the exam was too long. More specifically having two long questions back-to-back took a long time. These questions were large in their wording and required them to be read a number of times so that one can understand what they were asking. It would have been best to make the questions shorter and to the point (a story is great but its distracting). I think that having 3 short answer style questions (like the one on growth rate) followed by one long answer on the midterm would have been better. Like the other poster said, my mark will suffer from this as well.
I felt this midterm was too vague. I understand that the goal was to test for comprehension however I think that there must be a better way to do so. I didn't run out of time because I didn't even know what I was supposed to write. I wasn't sure how much detail you wanted and I feared you would find my answers long winded and "annoying". I wasn't sure if you wanted us to go into the details of the mechanics behind pathogen tests or just explain what the tests look for or to only state differences in pathogens we thought we would find. I feel that I have a very good grip of the material and I understand the concepts well but I became very lost and unsure of what you were looking for in each of the questions. I feel like there was so much I learned and knew that I failed to right down purely out of confusion.
Before I say what everybody else has been saying, let me acknowledge the fact that the last question was the example question us you had given us in class on Friday. So, thanks for that. I did prepare for that specific question, but when I actually got to writing it down on the midterm I was in quite a rush and forgot/missed a lot of stuff. I suppose you could say that I should have timed myself better, or done that question first if I already had the answer in my head, but regardless, the fact remains: too long!
I don't mean to be rude or disrespectful, but it's ironic that you put so much emphasis on communicating properly and your own questions came across as being awkwardly long and vague. Especially the eutrophication question, I read it over and over to try and figure out what exactly you were looking for. Again, I would hate to come across as being disrespectful...but I hope your questions on the final will be clearer and formatted in such a way that they wouldn't feel overwhelming.
I really appreciate the fact that you have provided us this medium to give you feedback, it's not often that profs do that (actually, this is my first such experience).
Biology exams are often long, I realize that, but please don't forget that students need time to think before they put down an answer and it helps us to see a question broken down in parts, instead of everything in a bundle.
I agree with the other posters. Due to the vaguness of the questions I found myself writing everything I knew about the topic at hand. This definately effected the amount of time I spent answering each question. For example the long answer question left me wondering what you specifically wanted us to write about. I believe that I have a firm understanding of the material but the time pressure due to the wording of the questions affected the quality of my answers. I think that one of the short answer questions could have been cut out of the exam or the long answer question could have been made more specific.
I really do appreciate the feedback. I don't know if any of you are checking this list for responses, but if you are: I wasn't expecting the vagueness comments. My immediate thought was that there was confusion between "vague" and "open-ended" but a quick review of the exam later, and I don't see any parts where you weren't given fairly explicit instructions what to write about. At least three people have cited this, and I'd really like to find the problem and fix it - it is important to me to get this right.
One example given was the question on eutrophication: Describe the process of eutrophication, including the roles of various forms of nutrient cycling, in these environments, and the effects of pollution on these environments, including the effects on the stability of the ecosystems in each.
That seems pretty straightforward to me, but clearly there is a disconnect between what I saw as straightforward and what others saw as vague. I could have made the question more explicit by separating it into parts, for example:
Describe a) the process of eutrophication, including the roles of various forms of nutrient cycling, b) the effects of pollution on aquatic environments, and c) the effects of pollution on the stability of aquatic ecosystems.
I haven't changed the content there, but I have drawn attention to the different "parts" of your answer by labelling them as such. By contrast, I could have gone with:
Describe the process of eutrophication.
and not provided those specific callouts to what I expected you to include in your answer, and just graded according to which ones you managed to hit (this is the way many exams would be structured, and which I found frustrating as a student).
Is there a preference as to which of these questions is easiest to answer? Is there any real difference between them?
As I've mentioned before, my goal is not to convince anybody that my way is the right way - I feel that by being transparent about my teaching (and testing) style we might be able to both find out where I am going wrong, and find out where you might be going wrong. That being said, the biggest complaint I received last year was that students had never been asked these types of questions before, and felt that was an oversight in the education provided to them in their first three years. I've had the same conversation already more than once today. Objectively speaking, how much of the problem is that my questions were poorly crafted, and how much was that you guys haven't been asked to do this before? Another way to put this to you: Was my mistake a poorly worded question, or was it in insufficiently preparing you for the types of questions you would face on the midterm?
(This is separate from the length issues; were I to do it over again, I would drop the question on growth rates.)
I think that it would have been helpful if you gave us an example of the type of answer you were looking for. I agree, I think we were insufficiently prepared for the types of questions we would face on the midterm. I also found the questions vague. like when asked the effects of pollution on stability, I didn't know what you were looking for. I knew it generally caused instability by eutrophication, etc, but did you want us to go into details of types of pollution, and how each can affect it differently, etc.
when asked the effects of pollution on stability, I didn't know what you were looking for. I knew it generally caused instability by eutrophication, etc, but did you want us to go into details of types of pollution, and how each can affect it differently, etc.
It's starting to sound like a lot of the problem is you were expecting the exam to be harder than it was. As I've stated all along, I don't want exhaustive detail, I want you to demonstrate to me that you understand the material in context of the big picture.
From what you suggested above: reciting details of different types of pollution and how they affect stability: that sounds counter to demonstrating understanding to me, and more like reciting detail. Coupled with the fact that we never discussed specific effects of different kinds of pollution on stability in the first place...
A solid answer to that part of the question would have been, just as you state, "pollution tends to promote instability by introducing eutrophication." For full marks, you would add why eutrophication promotes instability: "Increased primary productivity occurs when nutrients such as phosphorus are provided, which are otherwise limiting for growth. These primary producers grow exceedingly quickly, driving out competitors and reducing species diversity; the loss of aerobic species due to eutrophication-associated oxygen depletion further serves to reduce species diversity. This loss of diversity, accompanied by increases in net biomass and shortening of the food webs, result in an overall decrease in ecosystem stability."
Was everybody just expecting it to be harder than that?
I felt like the midterm was a bit on the long side but overall very fair of what was expected of us. The questions asked seemed relevant and demanded we knew how to synthesize and and analyze our lecture material.
However, I too thought the eutrophication question was a bit vague. I was able to discuss most of the points (I think), but was unclear was how to LINK all those concepts together for an answer you were looking for. We have 3 different ecosystems, the concept of stability, nutrient cycling, AND pollution. All of these are obviously related, but I wasn't sure if you wanted all defined/described THEN discuss their relationships or how you wanted us to approach each relationship (stability vs. productivity vs. pollution, etc. for EACH ecosystem). It just seemed like a lot of concepts thrown in and how to show their relationships properly was the difficult part for me.
Hey Professor Clark, I also thought the midterm was fair. But an extra 5-10 minutes would have been very helpful. Also, I think it'd be good if you could give us choices for the final...i.e. define 5 of the 7 terms given, answer one of the two essay questions, etc. That's all.
I think the only problem I had with the midterm was with the eutrophication question. I felt that if you had just restricted the question to lakes, one could still easily write enough for 10 marks. With oceans and estuaries, I felt like the question should have been out of 20 or something. Otherwise, I found the midterm all right. I didn't have an issue with time, but it was one of the longer midterms I've had.
I found the midterm too long for an hour's time, and the essay-type questions too broad to write briefly about in an hour combined. Would it be possible to make the midterm worth less (say, 10%), and the final worth more? Now that I know what level of detail or number of questions to expect, I think I'd do better on the final than I did on the midterm.
Thanks for your midterm/final talk yesterday, you definitely made some valuable reminder points about having a strategy for writing an exam.
However, my concern is that I'm not sure if I can quickly read all the questions, understand them enough to figure out which ones I know best, jot down some points to give a somewhat structured answer, write all those points in decent English all the while spending 1 minute per mark...and be done in 40 minutes and still have 10 minutes to look over my exam. I understand that a very efficient person would be able to do that fairly well, like you pointed out, we haven't written very many essay type Bio exams. They have mostly been multiple choice or short answers where point form is preferred. Even for a knowledge extensive course like Embryology, Biol303...when I took it, there were only Multiple choice questions. I understand you are trying to help us here, but quite honestly, it is a little frustrating when you're trying to do well in your final year but due to circumstances (read other bio profs' preference for multiple choice) beyond your control, your marks end up suffering.
Also, exam writing is very stressful, I don't know about other people, but I think nobody ever dances into an exam. I drew a complete blank when I got to the definition for "light compensation point". Simplest thing ever! Anyway, my personal loserness aside, it's a little too much to expect us to be so efficient in such a short period of time. I wish I could take 1 minute to recall each point I need to put down and within that minute put it in writing...but I just can't do that. And if the class average for this 4th year class was 65%...I think that in itself is an indication that most people can't demonstrate that level of efficiency during an exam.
You said that if you were to give a crappy answer at work if somebody asked you what was wrong with the water source you'd get fired...true...but Dr. Clark, work is a lot different than writing a 50 minute midterm. I have done 5 co-op placements and trust me when I say that my colleagues have only praised my efficiency...I'm sure a lot of other people in class feel the same way. I spent my first work term ages ago banking cancer tissue and sending off the rest to pathology with plenty cancerous tissue left over for proper diagnosis...that was a lot of patients' cancer diagnosis at stake. If I proved to be efficient there, it's frustrating that writing a biology exam makes me think otherwise.
The midterm is over, and what you said about it yesterday makes complete sense...but please try making a slightly more realistic final. Please. Thank you.
Apologies for the rant, I hope I haven't been rude.
Would it be possible for you to provide some sort of rubric that tells us in details what is expected of us in the different mark ranges? Maybe a chart outlining the different levels of effort/fluency/content/overall audience involvement/other related requirements for a 60%, 70%, 80% and a 90% mark for the in-class presentation?!
I think that the midterm was fair and at this stage in the game students should be prepared for the vague "Describe the process of eutrophication" and welcome any additional cues the prof offers.
I think there are a combination of reasons why a person would not do well on a long answer exam; whether it be not being used to the style of exam or not being prepared for the exam in general.
Personally, this is my 5th year here, and my only excuse is that I have just come off an 8 month workterm and would admit my exam writing skills were a little rusty.
I would suggest for next year that you do assignment 5 at the beginning of the course so that students have an idea of what you expect out of your long answer questions, as many biology profs vary in their expectations.
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42 comments:
I found that the lecture this morning didn't cover anything that I wasn't already familiar with, but the refresher was appreciated. This is the sort of thing that we should all really know, but I had never actually been taught or told how to use these search engines for peer-reviewed articles. I managed to figure out most of this stuff on my own, but I would have really appreciated a lecture like this when I was in second year. Here's hoping that the tutorial lectures continue to be informative (and fun! yay kittens!).
I think that these assignments will certainly help me out, with keeping up on the work for the group project. Being in a group where everybody leaves everything until the very end is not fun for anyone... and at least we now have the incentive of getting marks for prepping for the project that we are going to be working on anyways.
Sometimes listening to you is like listening to the characters on Gilmore Girls...talking at the speed of light with some humour/wit here and there. It's not a bad thing, really, as long as I can catch what you're saying and put it down in a handwriting that I can't read later.
I agree with the other anonymous dude/dudette that your lecture, while appreciated, is something that would be more useful in first/second year. By fourth year you would hope that a bunch of 23 year olds with several co-op experiences would be able to survive a research project. Btw...even our public servants have been known to cite Wikipedia.
I enjoyed Monday's lecture as it was more laid back and relaxing. These types of tutorials are beneficial in case some of us have forgotten how to use the various search engines properly. It also reminds us what type of sources are valid and which are not.
This is a good way for us to keep up with our group projects and not leave everything to the last minute!
I think that Monday's lecture was great. It's true that we should know most of this by now and it still shocks me to hear that 4th year students have actually quoted Wikipedia, but no one has ever taken the time to actually teach us this stuff. I wish more 1st year profs would take the time to do this! I still found it helpful, however, and I'm sure that the next few tutorials will be even more informative. I still don't have a full grasp of how to properly cite things, and I'm sure I'll enjoy the Referencing tutorial. Plus, you have a way of making the most boring thing fun and engaging! I say keep on doing it!
I appreciated today's tutorial on reading a research article. It made me feel like I wasn't missing out on a lot of the "filler" that I normally skim anyways! These sorts of classes are definitely appreciated, they feel like "tips from the inside" from someone who has a lot of solid experience searching for articles and getting the right things out of them. Cheers!
Hey Dr. Scott, today's tutorial task was a little annoying. It's not difficult to summarize a summary (though it seems pointless to summarize a summary, but I understand there's a reason why we did that), but to do so in about 30 minutes while you're calling out people's names, people are shuffling around and leaving, and I am trying to understand what somebody else thinks they understand from a primary research article....summarizing a summary becomes quite difficult. Sure it's worth 1% but that makes it even more frustrating because you would think it would take a little less effort to gain the percent. That takes me to my next grievance...
The tasks, as simple as they are and meant to help us, should be worth more than a % each, perhaps 2%. They are easy but time consuming. And though one could argue that they are helping us towards the project which is a big chunk of our final mark, you won't be looking at the 'little' things for the big presentation as closely as you are looking at them now...and that makes me believe that the tasks should be worth more.
Please don't make us do another impromptu task unless everybody in the room is going to be quiet and not start leaving 10 mins into the task. Thank you.
You were right, Dr. Clark: That midterm was far too long. I would have benefitted from having one less question (one of the big ones, prefferably), or about 10 extra minutes. I did not have enough time to write down what I wanted to write, and I have no doubt that my mark is going to suffer for that. I'm pretty sure that I'm not alone in this sentiment. Please, make the final less time-crunched... at least for my own mental health.
Like you said the exam was too long. More specifically having two long questions back-to-back took a long time. These questions were large in their wording and required them to be read a number of times so that one can understand what they were asking. It would have been best to make the questions shorter and to the point (a story is great but its distracting). I think that having 3 short answer style questions (like the one on growth rate) followed by one long answer on the midterm would have been better. Like the other poster said, my mark will suffer from this as well.
I felt this midterm was too vague.
I understand that the goal was to test for comprehension however I think that there must be a better way to do so. I didn't run out of time because I didn't even know what I was supposed to write. I wasn't sure how much detail you wanted and I feared you would find my answers long winded and "annoying". I wasn't sure if you wanted us to go into the details of the mechanics behind pathogen tests or just explain what the tests look for or to only state differences in pathogens we thought we would find. I feel that I have a very good grip of the material and I understand the concepts well but I became very lost and unsure of what you were looking for in each of the questions. I feel like there was so much I learned and knew that I failed to right down purely out of confusion.
Hi,
Before I say what everybody else has been saying, let me acknowledge the fact that the last question was the example question us you had given us in class on Friday. So, thanks for that. I did prepare for that specific question, but when I actually got to writing it down on the midterm I was in quite a rush and forgot/missed a lot of stuff. I suppose you could say that I should have timed myself better, or done that question first if I already had the answer in my head, but regardless, the fact remains: too long!
I don't mean to be rude or disrespectful, but it's ironic that you put so much emphasis on communicating properly and your own questions came across as being awkwardly long and vague. Especially the eutrophication question, I read it over and over to try and figure out what exactly you were looking for. Again, I would hate to come across as being disrespectful...but I hope your questions on the final will be clearer and formatted in such a way that they wouldn't feel overwhelming.
I really appreciate the fact that you have provided us this medium to give you feedback, it's not often that profs do that (actually, this is my first such experience).
Biology exams are often long, I realize that, but please don't forget that students need time to think before they put down an answer and it helps us to see a question broken down in parts, instead of everything in a bundle.
Thanks,
Ad Astra
I agree with the other posters. Due to the vaguness of the questions I found myself writing everything I knew about the topic at hand. This definately effected the amount of time I spent answering each question. For example the long answer question left me wondering what you specifically wanted us to write about. I believe that I have a firm understanding of the material but the time pressure due to the wording of the questions affected the quality of my answers. I think that one of the short answer questions could have been cut out of the exam or the long answer question could have been made more specific.
Hey all,
I really do appreciate the feedback. I don't know if any of you are checking this list for responses, but if you are: I wasn't expecting the vagueness comments. My immediate thought was that there was confusion between "vague" and "open-ended" but a quick review of the exam later, and I don't see any parts where you weren't given fairly explicit instructions what to write about. At least three people have cited this, and I'd really like to find the problem and fix it - it is important to me to get this right.
One example given was the question on eutrophication:
Describe the process of eutrophication, including the roles of various forms of nutrient cycling, in these environments, and the effects of pollution on these environments, including the effects on the stability of the ecosystems in each.
That seems pretty straightforward to me, but clearly there is a disconnect between what I saw as straightforward and what others saw as vague. I could have made the question more explicit by separating it into parts, for example:
Describe a) the process of eutrophication, including the roles of various forms of nutrient cycling, b) the effects of pollution on aquatic environments, and c) the effects of pollution on the stability of aquatic ecosystems.
I haven't changed the content there, but I have drawn attention to the different "parts" of your answer by labelling them as such. By contrast, I could have gone with:
Describe the process of eutrophication.
and not provided those specific callouts to what I expected you to include in your answer, and just graded according to which ones you managed to hit (this is the way many exams would be structured, and which I found frustrating as a student).
Is there a preference as to which of these questions is easiest to answer? Is there any real difference between them?
As I've mentioned before, my goal is not to convince anybody that my way is the right way - I feel that by being transparent about my teaching (and testing) style we might be able to both find out where I am going wrong, and find out where you might be going wrong. That being said, the biggest complaint I received last year was that students had never been asked these types of questions before, and felt that was an oversight in the education provided to them in their first three years. I've had the same conversation already more than once today. Objectively speaking, how much of the problem is that my questions were poorly crafted, and how much was that you guys haven't been asked to do this before? Another way to put this to you: Was my mistake a poorly worded question, or was it in insufficiently preparing you for the types of questions you would face on the midterm?
(This is separate from the length issues; were I to do it over again, I would drop the question on growth rates.)
Again, I really do appreciate the feedback.
Thanks!
Scott
I think that it would have been helpful if you gave us an example of the type of answer you were looking for. I agree, I think we were insufficiently prepared for the types of questions we would face on the midterm.
I also found the questions vague.
like when asked the effects of pollution on stability, I didn't know what you were looking for. I knew it generally caused instability by eutrophication, etc, but did you want us to go into details of types of pollution, and how each can affect it differently, etc.
Now we're starting to get somewhere!
If I might quote from the previous post:
when asked the effects of pollution on stability, I didn't know what you were looking for. I knew it generally caused instability by eutrophication, etc, but did you want us to go into details of types of pollution, and how each can affect it differently, etc.
It's starting to sound like a lot of the problem is you were expecting the exam to be harder than it was. As I've stated all along, I don't want exhaustive detail, I want you to demonstrate to me that you understand the material in context of the big picture.
From what you suggested above: reciting details of different types of pollution and how they affect stability: that sounds counter to demonstrating understanding to me, and more like reciting detail. Coupled with the fact that we never discussed specific effects of different kinds of pollution on stability in the first place...
A solid answer to that part of the question would have been, just as you state, "pollution tends to promote instability by introducing eutrophication." For full marks, you would add why eutrophication promotes instability: "Increased primary productivity occurs when nutrients such as phosphorus are provided, which are otherwise limiting for growth. These primary producers grow exceedingly quickly, driving out competitors and reducing species diversity; the loss of aerobic species due to eutrophication-associated oxygen depletion further serves to reduce species diversity. This loss of diversity, accompanied by increases in net biomass and shortening of the food webs, result in an overall decrease in ecosystem stability."
Was everybody just expecting it to be harder than that?
Hi Dr. Clark,
I felt like the midterm was a bit on the long side but overall very fair of what was expected of us. The questions asked seemed relevant and demanded we knew how to synthesize and and analyze our lecture material.
However, I too thought the eutrophication question was a bit vague. I was able to discuss most of the points (I think), but was unclear was how to LINK all those concepts together for an answer you were looking for. We have 3 different ecosystems, the concept of stability, nutrient cycling, AND pollution. All of these are obviously related, but I wasn't sure if you wanted all defined/described THEN discuss their relationships or how you wanted us to approach each relationship (stability vs. productivity vs. pollution, etc. for EACH ecosystem). It just seemed like a lot of concepts thrown in and how to show their relationships properly was the difficult part for me.
Hope that makes sense!
cheers
Hi Dr. Clark,
I thought the midterms was fair in the types of questions asked, but unfair with the amount of time we had to answer them.
Hey Professor Clark,
I also thought the midterm was fair. But an extra 5-10 minutes would have been very helpful. Also, I think it'd be good if you could give us choices for the final...i.e. define 5 of the 7 terms given, answer one of the two essay questions, etc.
That's all.
I think the only problem I had with the midterm was with the eutrophication question.
I felt that if you had just restricted the question to lakes, one could still easily write enough for 10 marks.
With oceans and estuaries, I felt like the question should have been out of 20 or something.
Otherwise, I found the midterm all right. I didn't have an issue with time, but it was one of the longer midterms I've had.
I found the midterm too long for an hour's time, and the essay-type questions too broad to write briefly about in an hour combined. Would it be possible to make the midterm worth less (say, 10%), and the final worth more? Now that I know what level of detail or number of questions to expect, I think I'd do better on the final than I did on the midterm.
Hello Dr. Clark,
Thanks for your midterm/final talk yesterday, you definitely made some valuable reminder points about having a strategy for writing an exam.
However, my concern is that I'm not sure if I can quickly read all the questions, understand them enough to figure out which ones I know best, jot down some points to give a somewhat structured answer, write all those points in decent English all the while spending 1 minute per mark...and be done in 40 minutes and still have 10 minutes to look over my exam. I understand that a very efficient person would be able to do that fairly well, like you pointed out, we haven't written very many essay type Bio exams. They have mostly been multiple choice or short answers where point form is preferred. Even for a knowledge extensive course like Embryology, Biol303...when I took it, there were only Multiple choice questions. I understand you are trying to help us here, but quite honestly, it is a little frustrating when you're trying to do well in your final year but due to circumstances (read other bio profs' preference for multiple choice) beyond your control, your marks end up suffering.
Also, exam writing is very stressful, I don't know about other people, but I think nobody ever dances into an exam. I drew a complete blank when I got to the definition for "light compensation point". Simplest thing ever! Anyway, my personal loserness aside, it's a little too much to expect us to be so efficient in such a short period of time. I wish I could take 1 minute to recall each point I need to put down and within that minute put it in writing...but I just can't do that. And if the class average for this 4th year class was 65%...I think that in itself is an indication that most people can't demonstrate that level of efficiency during an exam.
You said that if you were to give a crappy answer at work if somebody asked you what was wrong with the water source you'd get fired...true...but Dr. Clark, work is a lot different than writing a 50 minute midterm. I have done 5 co-op placements and trust me when I say that my colleagues have only praised my efficiency...I'm sure a lot of other people in class feel the same way. I spent my first work term ages ago banking cancer tissue and sending off the rest to pathology with plenty cancerous tissue left over for proper diagnosis...that was a lot of patients' cancer diagnosis at stake. If I proved to be efficient there, it's frustrating that writing a biology exam makes me think otherwise.
The midterm is over, and what you said about it yesterday makes complete sense...but please try making a slightly more realistic final. Please. Thank you.
Apologies for the rant, I hope I haven't been rude.
just wondering when we should expect past lecture notes and more importantly, assignment 5 information to be posted online.
thanks!
Would it be possible for you to provide some sort of rubric that tells us in details what is expected of us in the different mark ranges? Maybe a chart outlining the different levels of effort/fluency/content/overall audience involvement/other related requirements for a 60%, 70%, 80% and a 90% mark for the in-class presentation?!
Thanks :)
Dr. Clark, referring to the midterm...
I think that the midterm was fair and at this stage in the game students should be prepared for the vague "Describe the process of eutrophication" and welcome any additional cues the prof offers.
I think there are a combination of reasons why a person would not do well on a long answer exam; whether it be not being used to the style of exam or not being prepared for the exam in general.
Personally, this is my 5th year here, and my only excuse is that I have just come off an 8 month workterm and would admit my exam writing skills were a little rusty.
I would suggest for next year that you do assignment 5 at the beginning of the course so that students have an idea of what you expect out of your long answer questions, as many biology profs vary in their expectations.
Thanks for considering our input!
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