Any one of you have ever gotten a perfect score in a test or exam?

[Baruch]

Different skills ... preparing test material or homework material vs lecturing.  Too many professors rely on a textbook.  My college calculus book was terrible.  The joke in physics is ... some long derivation ... then "its a miracle" and the result QED.  Gaps that are "intuitive" ... if you are a professor.  Good math books explain every step, without assuming prior familiarity.  Calculus by Gilbert Strang is so much better.

My test prep books for Security+ ... thank goodness I reviewed several before I picked one.  I can spot good review/test material today, but not 40 years ago.  This stuff I used recently, had both the correct and wrong answers, and explained why the correct was correct and the wrong was wrong, and didn't beat about the bush getting there.  1000 test questions.  But you have to be already somewhat familiar with the material to do that ... had to know the jargon.  Only one section in the actual test, wasn't covered in the book (though I found out later that test prep software did cover it).  The test prep cram stuff is otherwise ineffective, you need to understand the material, not just memorize it.  Then the specific question can't throw you (and yes, test writers throw in tricks to throw you off).

[Cavebear]

They may be experts in their field, but may not understand the purpose of testing or how to do it.  50 questions in all, but one that is worth 40%?  Miss that one question and you fail?  Also, tests should evaluate what you have taught, not what you haven't taught.  If you want students to know how to do a thing, teach them that thing.  If something is irrelevant enough not to be included in the course objectives or in the lectures, it's probably not relevant enough to include in a test.  You wouldn't test third graders on calculus, especially if you never taught them calculus.

The final almost seemed like he got help from a knowledgeable colleague.  Or maybe he just used someone else's test who taught the same course.   In the professor's defense, he was a good lecturer, explained things well, and was articulate.  I liked going to his class.  He may have been new, and the mid term was the first test he ever put together.  He was sharp enough to recognize at mid quarter, that there was a serious problem, and he fixed it, although I had lost all motivation to study for his tests by then.

Professors are not talented at designing tests.  They tend to ask about what they know that they think the student should know, but they are not good at remembering what they have taught.

And I will give you a great example.  I took a senior seminar about the breakup of the Soviet Union to complete my poli-sci degree when I was 43.  The professor gave us a map she labeled of the CIS (Confederated Independent States) and specifically told us to memorize it because it would be on an exam.  Naturally, we did.

Only, she had made a mistake on the map.  And when exam time came, we dutifully reproduced her map.  And penalized us for the error.

Now, there was a basic difference between the other students and I.  I was older.  I had a career.  I knew something about making an argument.  After we complained in general about the unfairness of being panalized for memorizing her own map with her own error, she refused to relent.

She didn't realize that, professionally, I was her equal. I stayed after the class and explained these things to her.  I pointed out that it was her error.  I explained that, as a fellow professional, I would not tolerate such a travesty of academic justice.  I explained I would go to the Dean with her original map and the test maps showing we had followed her instructions to "memorize the map".

She was not happy.  She did not like my threat.  But she did understand that I wasn't backing down on it an that presenting an objection to her higher-ups wasn't a problem to me.

The next class, she announced that the map question was no longer being counted.  She didn't admit her error, but she discounted the error in the test scores.

I didn't care bout the test score personally.  A C was as fine to me as an A.  All I needed was to pass the damn class to graduate.  And I would have passed the class with the map being wrong and counted wrong.

But it was the principle of the question and I was pissed.  I will generally fight for fairness any chance I get.  She couldn't threaten my career nor me getting my degree. 

Cavebear

[Baruch]

"And penalized us for the error." ... often happens in the Humanities rather than STEM.  And if you are a fellow academic in training, they can destroy you, as they pull your wings off ;-p

[Cavebear]

"And penalized us for the error." ... often happens in the Humanities rather than STEM.  And if you are a fellow academic in training, they can destroy you, as they pull your wings off ;-p

Which, as I pointed out, the Professor not only couldn't, but backed down.  Professionally, I was her equal.  She didn't like that, but I stood my ground and explained it to her.  She had her 20 years of academic bureaucracy experience and I had my governmental beauracracy experience.  Once she got past her assumed control over a "student", we got along a lot better.

And it wouldn't have made any difference to me if she was a guy *for those sexist types out there".

[SGOS]

Only, she had made a mistake on the map.  And when exam time came, we dutifully reproduced her map.  And penalized us for the error.

Those kinds show up from time to time.  They are not the rule by any means.  The best teachers I have had were in college, but I also encountered the worst there. 

One professor was a nice enough guy but such an incompetent lecturer that I felt sorry for him.  There were a hundred students in his class, and during one lecture, about 90 of them stood up and walked out in a pre-planned protest.  I and maybe 10 others stayed.  I don't know why the others stayed.  I stayed because I felt sorry for him, but it probably made things worse because it forced him to keep fumbling through his lecture while he was humiliated.  I ended up just sitting there observing him at his worst.  I felt like voyeur watching a masochist.  He should have dismissed the class and saved some dignity.

[Cavebear]

Those kinds show up from time to time.  They are not the rule by any means.  The best teachers I have had were in college, but I also encountered the worst there. 

One professor was a nice enough guy but such an incompetent lecturer that I felt sorry for him.  There were a hundred students in his class, and during one lecture, about 90 of them stood up and walked out in a pre-planned protest.  I and maybe 10 others stayed.  I don't know why the others stayed.  I stayed because I felt sorry for him, but it probably made things worse because it forced him to keep fumbling through his lecture while he was humiliated.  I ended up just sitting there observing him at his worst.  I felt like voyeur watching a masochist.  He should have dismissed the class and saved some dignity.

My calculus instructor was a dutch guy almost no one could understand, so we were left to the grad students fro help.  And my small group of 20 had another foreign grad assistant whom few could understand.  All of us in that group fled utterly.  Might have been a coincidence that we were all stupid in that group, but I doubt it.

[Baruch]

My calculus instructor was a dutch guy almost no one could understand, so we were left to the grad students fro help.  And my small group of 20 had another foreign grad assistant whom few could understand.  All of us in that group fled utterly.  Might have been a coincidence that we were all stupid in that group, but I doubt it.

Lucky, only had one graduate teaching assistant, for one engineering class, only for a few sessions.  The regular professors were bad enough ;-)

[trdsf]

Those kinds show up from time to time.  They are not the rule by any means.  The best teachers I have had were in college, but I also encountered the worst there. 

One professor was a nice enough guy but such an incompetent lecturer that I felt sorry for him.  There were a hundred students in his class, and during one lecture, about 90 of them stood up and walked out in a pre-planned protest.  I and maybe 10 others stayed.  I don't know why the others stayed.  I stayed because I felt sorry for him, but it probably made things worse because it forced him to keep fumbling through his lecture while he was humiliated.  I ended up just sitting there observing him at his worst.  I felt like voyeur watching a masochist.  He should have dismissed the class and saved some dignity.

Yeah, our lone programming prof at my college was hands-down one of the most brilliant programmers (and just plain nicest people) I ever knew, but alas he was incapable of communicating that knowledge in a classroom setting.  Terrific one-on-one or one-on-few.

My freshman year, they had so many people wanting to take Programming 151 (which was officially a math course since CompSci wasn't its own department until the 1982-83 term) that he decided to just accept everyone who wanted to take it and ended up with 160 students.  Fully ¹/₁₀^th of the student body.  Imagine ten percent of the undergraduate student body at, say, Ohio State all being in once class.  Yikes.  Over the first two weeks, sixteen students dropped out and nobody noticed.  I believe it remains to this day the largest single class ever held at my alma mater.

So it really wasn't conducive to good learning even with the best of professors, since there were a finite number of machines to be usedâ€"about eightâ€"giving a computer to student ratio of 1:14.

Note to younger post-Internet forum members: yes, there really was a day when not everyone had their own computer (or two or three), and you generally had to timeshare on a larger system.  Even I find it hard to imagine anymore, and I was there.  :)

Ultimately, I learned more about programming on my own dinking around the Teraks and the VAX and my Sinclair than I did in that class.  But I never could blame the prof for that, because despite his communications shortcomings, even a good lecturer would have had trouble.  And because he was a genuinely good guy.

[Cavebear]

And I will add to our younger readers, that in 1969, I once filled an entire shoebox with punch-cards to get the campus mainframe to make ONE LEGAL CHESS MOVE.  Not off the board, not to move to a square the piece couldn't take (like your own).  And I did it in FORTRAN which was all equations.

And I got an A in the class (back when it was possible to fail a class even if you tried hard).  Because the professor couldn't do it! 

And if you have no idea what a keypunch machine is, consider typing 80 characters without an error because if there is one single error, the whole card is worthless.  No redo, no memory.  Perfect or start again.

And THEN stand in line for an hour to get a turn at the mainframe for the guys to load your cards to see if the program worked.  And if your program actually function enough to get some result, they would come out and congratulate.  Because most programs locked up and produced no results!  Even if the results made little sense, if the program worked to END statement, you were GOOD.

I created a small club in my class where I would review the printed programs and point out errors.  I was really good at error detection (like endless loops and bad "if, then" statements).

But I gave it up because "there was no future in it".  HHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAA  It seemed too simple.



LOL!

[SGOS]

My freshman year, they had so many people wanting to take Programming 151 (which was officially a math course since CompSci wasn't its own department until the 1982-83 term) that he decided to just accept everyone who wanted to take it and ended up with 160 students.  Fully ¹/₁₀^th of the student body.  Imagine ten percent of the undergraduate student body at, say, Ohio State all being in once class.  Yikes.  Over the first two weeks, sixteen students dropped out and nobody noticed.  I believe it remains to this day the largest single class ever held at my alma mater.

I believe the largest class I had at the University of Montana was 300 students.  I had a few of those over 200.  They were held in auditoriums with comfortable seating, and were mostly limited to Freshman courses.  Science classes would meet twice a week for two hour labs with smaller somewhat manageable groups, and they were usually conducted by graduate assistants.  Then there would be three lectures each week taught for one hour with an actual professor.  Most of the auditorium classes were actually very good.

Oddly, last night, I happened to look up some data on the University of Montana, and saw they were claiming a student to faculty ratio of 20:1.  I don't know if they still do the massive lecture groups anymore.

[SGOS]

So it really wasn't conducive to good learning even with the best of professors, since there were a finite number of machines to be usedâ€"about eightâ€"giving a computer to student ratio of 1:14.

What a nightmare.  I had a plant physiology lab without enough equipment to go around.  They left the lab open all night, so you could go back and do the lab work in relative quiet.  During the day, we would start at our lab stations until the window to the equipment room was opened, and then there was a stampede with elbows flying like an 1860's land rush.  I hated the way the class was set up. 

[Cavebear]

What a nightmare.  I had a plant physiology lab without enough equipment to go around.  They left the lab open all night, so you could go back and do the lab work in relative quiet.  During the day, we would start at our lab stations until the window to the equipment room was opened, and then there was a stampede with elbows flying like an 1860's land rush.  I hated the way the class was set up.

The 1969 computer punch card rooms were packed in daytime, so I learned to go there at night.  Kind of changed my sleeping habits to this day!

[Baruch]

The 1969 computer punch card rooms were packed in daytime, so I learned to go there at night.  Kind of changed my sleeping habits to this day!

Did computer in HS with punched tape on a teletype
Did Freshman college with IBM cards
Only upper-class men could use the dozen video terminals
Best tool was an upgraded teletype machine (with green-bar paper) in the physics department
Played Pong when it first came out, only a quarter a game in the lounge at the bowling alley

[trdsf]

What a nightmare.  I had a plant physiology lab without enough equipment to go around.  They left the lab open all night, so you could go back and do the lab work in relative quiet.  During the day, we would start at our lab stations until the window to the equipment room was opened, and then there was a stampede with elbows flying like an 1860's land rush.  I hated the way the class was set up.

A couple of the larger dorms had a computer room with one computer in it, and I went the late night route to guarantee myself access.  Eight inch floppies... back when floppies actually flopped!  The computer room, alas, kept library hours and the library closed at 11pm.

I think Wooster paid five to eight thousand apiece for those Teraks; the year I graduated, they sold them off for $150 a pop.  Still have one.  :D

[SGOS]

I think Wooster paid five to eight thousand apiece for those Teraks; the year I graduated, they sold them off for $150 a pop.  Still have one.  :D

I think I paid something like $2500 when the first Apple IIGS came out.  I upgraded it with a $700 10 mega bite aftermarket hard drive, so I could load all my programs and dispense with the floppy disks.  That was before graphics became so important.  When I switched over to a PC, I offered to give it to the local Christian school because a friend taught there, but they didn't want it.  I took it to the landfill and heaved it as far into the junk pile as I could, where the dozer would crush and bury it later in the day.