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?
About Me
- Scooter
- I'm a teaching assistent for introductory physics for non-physics majors.
4 comments:
Hi Scooter,
This seems like a tough problem--different lab sections all get graded by a rotating TA per week? That IS a lot of 'handing off' of papers, and there is potential for things to get lost. Sounds like there needs to be a better mechanism to document who was in class during the quiz-- I wonder if you could have each student who turns in a quiz have that quiz "checked" by the TA at the time on an attendance sheet, so that they have records of attendance/that the quiz was taken. That way if a paper gets lost, you know the student was at least there at the lab, or discussion section, etc. and that the blame is on the TA side, not the student side.
Other thoughts?
My first reaction is to handle the immediate problem of the missing test. The easiest way to solve this is to give a make-up type quiz -- same material that could have been covered in the original quiz but a different quiz than the one previously given. This way the aptitude of the student is still tested while not giving the same exact quiz -- which might provide for the opportunity for the student to improve their grade.
The second issue is the problem of having different TAs passing off exams to each other -- creating a whole host potential problems (including but certainly not limited to the misplacing of a test). As Melissa suggested, one could create a check off sheet that would mark attendance for that day in relationship to how many exams one should have. The only problem is that, while one can be reasonably sure of who was there, this does not prevent the misplacing of exams. Granted this can happen even if one isn't handing off exams to someone else but the probability of it occurring increases with the amount of hands in the proverbial pot.
My question is: Why is this practice necessary? What is the rationale behind it? If it is a matter of norming, this can be taken care of in a whole host of more efficient ways. If it is attempting to achieve something else, can it be done in another fashion that does not create this problem?
The TA's grade the quizzes then hand them off to someone who is in charge of entering all of the scores into a data base. This cuts down on the grading time for the TA's and makes entering the grades more streamline. Given that this problem occurs quite infrequently and that it was of no fault of the student I think it is fair to give the student an exemption on the quiz and not count it at all. (I believe that this is what the professor did) I like the idea of checking off all the students on a roster as soon as I get the quizzes. That eliminates the problem of possible dishonesty from the student.
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