Ooops..

First revision session today on Class Test 3. Three students pointed out an error in Question #20. It was a very inspired question, but not with ‘ulcer’ accidentally replacing ‘cancer’. That rather dramatically changed the meaning of the question. Which might explain why only a minority of students divined that I meant ‘cancer’, and 75% of the students chose the answer that made sense if you read ‘ulcer’.  So three opinionated students get the 5% extra credit that goes with finding a mistake in one of my tests. And memo to other students: this is a strong argument for bitching at me if you have a good case.

So the revised marks distribution is as follows.  No student got all the remaining 26 questions correct, but under my algorithm, nine got 100%.  A, 13; A-, 17; B+, 9; B, 11, B-, 14; C+, 8; C, 7; D, 10; Fail, 1; 10 no-shows. The average mark, excluding the no-shows, was 84%. So after all is said and done, an improvement over Class Test 2, at least on the students’ part.
I like to think of these things as teachable moments. Even well-meaning scientists screw up. And students should argue their corner. It makes everyone think.

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