End of the Year Grade Grubbing

Usually around the last two weeks of classes I start getting a lot of students who are really concerned about their lab grade and what their status is. Although this is understandable I hoped that by laying out a clear syllabus this quarter I could avoid much of this activity.

The difference this quarter is that it seems the students understand what they needed to be doing and are just concerned about whether I noticed that they've been doing it. I also started last quarter making a reminder announcement around mid-quarter to the class of what is expected of them and how the grading is done. I like doing this because it addresses many of the students who approach me in the last two weeks with concerns about how their grade is; by that time it is too late for them to make changes to their grade anyway.

Frustrated on Physics Teaching

I'm frustrated by some aspects of the course design in physics 7C. The students are expected to learn concepts and ideas through explorative means. For example, they are to learn how electricity and magnetism works in roughly four labs what I studied for a year. They are given vague scenarios in which they are expected to intuitively come up with solutions.

The problem is this; in physics the solutions to problems are generally non-intuitive (that's why physics is so useful and often so hard) but we don't give the students ample tools to solve the problems. everything is treated in a very 'hand wavey' manner and the frustration in the students shows.

There is a balance between having a student that can apply formulas to a problem and get a solution without understanding anything that he or she did and a student who cannot even begin to apply the mathematics to solve a problem, but has a lot of qualitative analogies and pictures to understand the problem. Richard Feynman said something like, "It is not nature's job to act in ways that we can understand, but it is our challenge to employ means to understand her. Mathematics is the language in which we must employ to understand her actions. Without understanding of that language there is no way to gain insight into how nature operates."

I think that in 7C we de-emphasis the very thing that students need in order to understand what they are doing and at the same time denying them the tools they need in order to successfully solve the questions we are asking them. It is only an even blend of physical and mathematical understanding that the student can gain a true appreciation for the subject.

Welcome

Hello,
I'm a physics teaching assistent for undergraduate physics for non majors. Most students that I see are chemistry and biology majors often looking to go to med school.

To get started with my blog I already have a problem that came up last quarter and I'm soliciting advice on how to avoid the same problem again.

Here's what happened; each week the students take an in class quiz. each T/A grades one quiz each week so we all grade one of the quizzes for the quarter. I graded my quizzes and they all got returned to the students. Shortly afterward one student said that she did not receive her quiz back. Looking through our records we found no evidence of her quiz at all. The only possibility could be that she did not take the quiz and is lying to get a better grade or that we lost the quiz.

I looked everywhere, but could not find her quiz amoungst my stuff. The student was in my lab section and I've had a lot of interaction with her so I feel that she is a hard working honest person. I think that we lost her quiz and now we have to figure out how to accurately assign her a grade for her work. The other consideration is that she thought she did very well on the quiz and hoped it would bring up her grade.

Possible solutions? Renormalize her grades so as to factor out her missing quiz?
Ask her to retake another similar quiz?

How could this problem have been addressed sooner?