' .1* semester-ending grades .
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' .2* semester-ending grades .
;Shown above are the stats from the Fall 2014 AP Psychology Final Exam, and the semester-ending grades from my two class periods.
Our Final was an online test in Canvas this year, and that process went smoothly. Thank God. We were worried about (a) asking colleagues to proctor our Final who had never proctored an online exam before[1], and (b) trusting the technology to work during a high-stakes exam like the Final. In terms of colleagues proctoring my students’ Final, everything went well; this will be an area of growth, however, for our Faculty as a whole. And in terms of the technology – students’ devices working properly, wifi staying solid, and Canvas feeding the exam – all went well.
Separate from the actual Final Exam, we made a change to the course syllabus, specifically in regards to how the Final grade is calculated into the course grade. For the past few years, we’ve allowed the Final exam score – if higher than a student’s overall grade – to trump that course grade. This allowed students to really demonstrate what they know and are able to do, and for that demonstration to overwrite earlier struggles. From the vantage of standards-based grading, I really liked that. Unfortunately, too many students took it as an opportunity to slack during the semester, with the hope of thowing down an A on the Final. Realistically, without doing the hard work throughout the semester of studying and practicing, that was an unrealistic hope. So, for this year, we removed that: the grade on the Final would no longer trump a student’s overall course grade. Instead, we raised the point value on the Final, so that, mathematically, a strong showing on the Final would effectively overwrite or out-weigh earlier struggles[2].
All in all, the semester went well, as did the Final Exam. But, I still struggle with the philosophy and practice of “grading” student learning…
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We had two concerns: colleagues actively proctoring students who were taking a test online, where their textbook, their notebook, and Google were just a click away; and their ability to troubleshoot if there was any hiccup in the technology. ↩
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The downside, of course, is that in the current system, if a student does not do well on the Final, it “hurts” more than previously. Unfortunately, that seems to have been the case with a few students this semester. I now need to decide what my response to that will be: do I leave the scores as they are because the Final was a demonstration of what they know and are able to do? Or do I “curve” the Final for the student, allowing their earlier work to weigh more heavily? I’ve yet to decide. ↩