Am I missing something here? January 27, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in education, engineering, science, teaching.Tags: grades, homework, teaching
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Like everyone else, I came across the article on why college students leave engineering.
I was reading it with my jaw hanging open. Specifically this:
The typical engineering major today spends 18.5 hours per week studying. The typical social sciences major, by contrast, spends about 14.6 hours.
My first thought was: Where the heck can you go to school and study for 18.5 hrs/wk and still manage to pass enough classes to get an engineering degree?!
My second thought was that it explained something that has been puzzling me. Last semester, my students complained about the amount of homework I assigned for my 1-credit class. There was about 1 homework assignment per week, and I figured this meant they’d be spending an average of 1-2 hours outside of class on assignments.
When I started school, the rule of thumb was that 3 hours per week outside of class PER CREDIT was required for an A, two for a B, one for a C. This meant that if you planned to go to school full time (which was 12 credits per semester) and get an A average, you needed to be spending about 36 hours per week just on homework in addition to your 12 hours of seat time in a classroom.
I also learned that, for some classes, this was a significant underestimate (usually math, engineering and physics classes) while for other classes, it was an overestimate. I remember one senior-level sociology class that I took where I spent, on average, three hours per week on homework and still came out with one of the highest grades in the class. This is why I always felt it was a good idea to have a nice balance between technical and non-technical classes: it would even out the homework load a bit.
My understanding of a typical homework load is obviously a couple decades behind. (Although I am not sure I plan to change my tune any time soon.) However, I did feel good about one point in the article:
STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) have also had less grade inflation than the humanities and social sciences have in the last several decades.
Apparently you can study less in engineering than you used to have to obtain a degree, which I have to admit bothers me a bit. However, it’s still harder than humanities and you’re more likely to actually have to earn those grades. Despite the fact that we’re probably pushing STEM fields more than we really need to, I do hope employers take that into consideration. STEM students have to be more committed to make it through their fields, which are also more technically challenging. I’d think that should be worth something.
Lessons learned: teachers need organizational skills, too December 19, 2011
Posted by mareserinitatis in education, teaching.Tags: classes, grades, grading, homework, teaching
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I have now developed a greater understanding of a strange professorial quirk that I observed over the years. I had at least one professor each term who would get visibly annoyed if you tried to give them an assignment at any time other than the first thirty seconds of a class period.
My understanding is due to that fact that I have recently become eligible to join the Super Secret Society of Teachers Who Have Lost a Student’s Assignment. (I’m suffering from a cold, so I was unable to come up with a snappy acronym. Please feel free to make an effort on my behalf.)
*headdesk*
When I was teaching geology labs, I was usually teaching four sections each week in a different building. I found that the best way to keep track of student work was to have four plastic filing envelopes. Each envelope was a different color, and I always knew which one to grab before each class. At the beginning of class, I’d hand stuff back. At the end of class, it would all get filed away in my envelope. This was straight-forward, and I never lost any homeworks this way. The labs were done in class and handed in at the end. If they had to hand something else in, it went into my mailbox, which was in the same building as my office (but different than the labs).
This semester, I had 90 students in four classes, in three buildings. My mailbox was in a different building than two of my classes, and all of them were in different places than my regular office. I usually had two of my envelopes with me (two classes were on Tuesday and two were on Thursday). Students also had the option of submitting homeworks online, as much as I hate grading those.
What I hadn’t anticipated was running into students who would randomly hand me homeworks between classes, leave them at the department with the admin staff, or all sorts of other unexpected things. And, as it happens, I ended up misplacing some homework. In fact, I went through and filed everything on my desk, and still never found it. I believe it has ended up in the same place that unmatched socks end up…except that paper always ends up falling back out and will likely be found in the spring of 2013 or some similarly odd time.
If I end up teaching this class again, I think I’m going to make it a policy that homeworks be handed in online. Sadly, this means that I can’t use the stair distribution when grading:
(Thanks to Concurring Opinions for the image.)
I hate grading in front of a computer screen, but I have to admit that it significantly reduces the organizational demands required to keep track of all the assignments. Lurking in the back of my mind, however, is the idea of having to teach a very large class where homeworks simply must be dealt with the old fashioned way. (And no, I’m not talking about burning them.)
Homework – with apologies to the Fixx November 7, 2011
Posted by mareserinitatis in education, engineering, teaching.Tags: grading, homework, students
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How much is enough (homework)?
I was correcting a homework submission this weekend. The homework was actually a ‘test review’: that is, I wanted the students to write down specifics about how they studied for an exam; how well they did on the exam, especially looking at which errors they made; and trying to tie their performance on the exam to how they studied for the exam. In other words, I’m trying to teach metacognition and self-evaluation skills for exam preparation.
This has been a frustrating homework because so many of the students are very vague.
“I did x and y to study for the exam, but not z. I did okay on the exam, so I guess I’ll keep doing that.” I was really hoping they’d get very specific about how they studied for individual concepts. I’m not grading very harshly because I view this lack of specificity as a result of my lack of specificity in assigning the homework. I keep making notes of things that I need to do better next time around, but I’m not going to punish the students for not doing the homework I intended but did not clearly articulate.
That said, I came across a perplexing bit of commentary in one submission: “I didn’t have much time to study for this exam because of all the other homework I have to do. I have a lot of assignments for my university studies class, which is only worth one credit.”
So the student was passive-aggressively complaining about how much homework I assign.
Believe it or not, nothing pisses me off more than a professor who is callous about study time required for courses. The professor who assigns 30 minutes of homework per week is not adequately preparing the student, and the one who assigns 30+ hours is an ass. I do realize there’s a bit of a curve involved, and some people need to study more and some less. When I took my first calculus class, I was fresh out of trig and jumped straight into Apostol’s calculus text. It often took me in excess of 20 hours per week to study and finish homeworks, but I was also the only freshman who’d never stepped near a calc book before putting foot on campus.
When I planned my course out, I tried to break the topic matter into bite-size chunks. Our class meets one hour per week for about 15 weeks. I’m also a big believer that I’m wasting my students’ time if all we ever do is talk. So therefore, I planned either short lectures or in-class activities for most classes. Then, to reinforce the concept, I will assign a relatively short homework assignment.
I use the rule of thumb that you need to put in three hours of homework time per credit for an A (on average). I’m teaching a one-credit class, and the assignments are pass/redo (or fail if they don’t turn them in or don’t redo them within the specified time), so I try to shoot for a homework time of about one hour. That is, you can do a mediocre job of the homework if you put in a full hour. If you want to do a better job and lower your risk of having to redo the assignment, you’ll put in more time, but likely not more than 3.
I have some students who obviously put in a lot of time. I have some that hand in assignments with every i dotted and t crossed. Then I have some who wander in and hand me scribbles on a piece of paper.
The student’s comment is interesting because I think it indicates both that (s)he has failed to sit down and think about how much time is actually required to study. I find that disappointing, but if I teach the class again, maybe I really should consider talking about time management. (As an aside, I find it frustrating that universities will often let you take more than full-time credit loads without any additional costs. I think it’s to encourage people to get through faster, but I’ve noticed it simply has the effect of overloading the students and not giving them adequate time to study for any of their classes sufficiently. They feel like they have to do this to reduce their overall loan and/or financial burden.)
It also indicates the student has failed to realize that I have spent time thinking about how much homework I should be giving. I am guessing the student will be very surprised when they get into certain classes where the professor thinks a student should be able to accomplish a task in the same amount of time as the professor. There will be classes where it’s impossible to even pass without an excess of 20 hours devoted solely to that class. And that student will really be floundering then.
I simply left a comment on the paper: ”Wait until you get into upper-level EE classes. 
” I’m guessing they won’t appreciate what I’m talking about for another year or two.
In the meantime, I think I’ll kick back and listen to the Fixx…and think about how much is enough.
I also blog at Engineer Blogs, home away from home to some of the best engineering blogs.
Fed up with homework January 30, 2011
Posted by mareserinitatis in education, societal commentary, teaching, younger son.Tags: homework, school
2 comments
I’m not fed up with my own homework. (I’m pretty much past that stage, thank goodness.) I’m fed up with the fact that the younger boy, who in first grade, is being given homework.
You know, that stuff that has shown to be absolutely useless for elementary age children?
Every weekend, we get a packet of homework. I’ve had to come up with reverse psychology measures to induce him to complete these. One of the most sure-fire ways is to start doing it for him, but make sure I’m reading aloud the problems because he’s probably hiding somewhere near by. I also read the wrong answers that I’m putting down.
I know he hates it when things are wrong, so he eventually feels the need to come over and correct my erroneous answers. He laughs at me because I can’t figure out his homework when it’s so easy. Then he whips through it in about 15 minutes or so.
That’s the thing that gets me: it’s easy for him. But he hates doing it with a passion. In the past year, I’ve been seeing my fun, easy-going boy turn into a stress bomb.
The kids are also supposed to be doing book reports – two a month. The handbook says that parents are supposed to be helping and that they need to be either neatly written or done on a word processor. However, on the last one, the teacher said that he needed to hand write his book reports now because she wants him to practice his handwriting. (And believe me, it’s really not that bad.)
A six-year-old is now supposed to spend time writing out paragraphs by hand?
As you may have guessed based on what I’ve already written, this caused a horrid reaction. After spending the afternoon attempting to coax him, listen to him crying, seeing him scared to come near me lest I force him to sit down with a pen and paper, I’ve given up. For the rest of the year. Maybe the next one, too. I’ve wasted too many weekends coercing my child to do something I thought was ridiculous rather than enjoying our time together doing something fun.
I am not going to make a first-grader hand write a book report. My husband didn’t even know how to read or write when he entered first grade. Neither of us recalls doing anything as extensive as a book report until at least third grade. And when we did them, we were given papers that prompted us to fill in particular information. We had to write one or two sentences at most.
And you know what? It obviously didn’t hurt either one of us to wait that long.
I’m in favor of challenging children…when it’s developmentally appropriate. I know that my son is physically and mentally able to perform these tasks. However, he’s not emotionally ready, and I think pushing this on a kid this young is doing more damage than good. There are so many other ways to learn at this age that are fun and just as educational.