I want to stretch the students, and used the latest test to do it. It worked. Most of them hate me for it. 

The format was the same as the first test, but challenging questions dropped the mean score  to 73% (median 76%), down 10% on last time. No one got everything right, but two students got 100%. That is possible under my marking algorithm, which I designed so my tests could generate teachable moments and challenge the students, while also producing grades, the least interesting purpose of tests (zzzzzzz). I am very pleased with the algorithm: it really does allow those competing goals to be achieved simultaneously, particularly when I take the grade as the best two scores from four tests. This means there is a lot of space to bomb, while allowing students to get good grades so long as they improve. Rigorous thinking is hard work, and the only way to get students to do it is to challenge them while holding the grading gun to their heads.

I discussed three of the test questions in class today, and that worked really well because the students had agonized about the answers when they were doing the test only yesterday. Opinions were strong, we had a good discussion, and I got my points across in a way that no amount of lecturing or non-graded discussion can achieve. 

The more I teach, the more I think we have to stimulate students to up their game, even if they don’t want to. Lowering the bar serves no one. Among the 2/3 of my class that got less than a B on this test there will be many who are willing to put the effort in. My turn to help. Excellent.

Anyhow, the marks spread was…. 

A, 11; A-, 3; B+, 10; B, 9; B-, 14; C+, 10; C, 9; D, 21; Fail, 13 (which includes 4 no shows).  I was pretty pleased with this distribution.  There is clearly nothing wrong with the test, because a substantial minority of the student did very, very well. There were a few students who were exasperated because they feel they have been doing the stuff and yet are not getting rewarded with great grades. Those folks are as important to me as it gets, and will be fixed by a few revision sessions.  The others? I do hope they learned that you gotta come to class and you gotta engage. A few of the students must have been quietly pleased with how well they did when they heard some of the comments in class today. A sample from the comment wall:

why dont we just have a few short answer ?’s to avoid these shennanigans…

I feel like the trickery of these tests are going to ruin all of our grades..

why was it so hard?

Yup it blew my mind

I did better on this test than the last one…

I got 60% higher on this one cause I got 0% on the first one 🙂

I thought that test was pretty hard and ambiguous

test was hard I agree…

I concur, the test was confusing, to be frank, quite b.s.

too the asshole who asked for the harder test last time…your an asshole (sic, sic)
[this a reference by a grammatically challenged student to a post after the 1st class test: “Can you make the tests harder”]

ya you asshole!

im gonna have to second the asshole comment

Sadly, none of the folk who got an A posted.