Are there any downsides to removing the potential for students to compensate poor test and quiz scores with strong homework and take-home work?
I remember having some terrible graduate instructors at the University of Oregon who clearly had 0 desire to teach and routinely expressed frustration when first year students could not keep up with their doctorate level notation and language styles. Most students passed by a hair thanks to homework and quizzes, mixed with study groups and studying topics which weren't covered properly in the class. Had it not been for a heavy weight on HW (about ~35% IIRC) most of the class would have failed. And cynically that homework weight must've been intentional - they knew there was a problem with their course instruction and they covered up presumably high fail rates by bumping HW grading...
The problem with evaluating large groups of people is that many will fall through the cracks, not due to malice but because there is no one-size-fits all solution. Yeah you can improve cheating metrics but how many non-cheaters, good qualified students who put in the work, were also negatively affected by your grading rubric? 0? 1? 100? 1000? Unknown?
And as a corollary this bleeds right into tech recruiting where scores of qualified candidates are put through a song and dance routine which arbitrarily and sometimes biasely culls for no valid reason other then being a day that ends in y.
> Are there any downsides to removing the potential for students to compensate poor test and quiz scores with strong homework and take-home work?
It facilitates cheating in a way that's almost impossible to counteract.
The other way around works though, where you work hard to make sure your final exam isn't something they can cheat on, then allow that to overide or pull up the other grades. This isn't really helpful for people with high test anxiety but it does help.
You can't get this stuff perfect, but you can make sure the result is at least fair.
Once we realized that these same graduate assistants were treating some folks to a different standard, a group of us got together and basically forced them to grade us the same way.
It was bullshit, we were all neck deep in debt paying some incompetent to not teach us, and then haze us with capricious grading and classroom policy.
Weeeelllll... it depends on how you calculate it. Minimum course credit grade was a "C" and total A-C were unaffected; or, at least, in the noise. There was some motion from D-to-F, which affected total GPA average for the course. Honestly, I don't remember the magnitude of the change.
These courses had 600+ students in them.
I'm also certain they stopped a lot of this when I stopped teaching. The "cheaters" would get caught, later, anyways.
I remember having some terrible graduate instructors at the University of Oregon who clearly had 0 desire to teach and routinely expressed frustration when first year students could not keep up with their doctorate level notation and language styles. Most students passed by a hair thanks to homework and quizzes, mixed with study groups and studying topics which weren't covered properly in the class. Had it not been for a heavy weight on HW (about ~35% IIRC) most of the class would have failed. And cynically that homework weight must've been intentional - they knew there was a problem with their course instruction and they covered up presumably high fail rates by bumping HW grading...
The problem with evaluating large groups of people is that many will fall through the cracks, not due to malice but because there is no one-size-fits all solution. Yeah you can improve cheating metrics but how many non-cheaters, good qualified students who put in the work, were also negatively affected by your grading rubric? 0? 1? 100? 1000? Unknown?
And as a corollary this bleeds right into tech recruiting where scores of qualified candidates are put through a song and dance routine which arbitrarily and sometimes biasely culls for no valid reason other then being a day that ends in y.