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by derleth
5451 days ago
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> Skip papers altogether and simply do a one-on-one interview about the topic to evaluate their knowledge of it. OK, so you have to deal with the fact some people are intensely nervous around authority figures and a one-on-one is not going to reflect their knowledge: They'll be so nervous they won't be able to answer intelligently, or at their full capacity. > Make students write papers in class. Then for God's sake scale the paper sizes and complexity to class length. (You don't know how to do that. You think you do but you don't.) > Don't assign homework. Grade entirely based on class participation. This has all the downsides of the one-on-one coupled with all the downsides of large group dynamics: Some people are going to dominate the discussion, some people are not going to be able to get a word in edgewise, and there's nothing you can do to change that. The ones who dominate the discussion are not always the ones who are getting the material, and being a wallflower does not correlate with much of anything relevant to most college courses. (There are exceptions.) |
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I think some of these can be mitigated though (whereas cheating probably can't, especially in my mind since I intensely disapprove of Turnitin).
A few ideas:
For the interviews, start by requiring office visits for more trivial things and build up to the main interview.
I had one professor that regularly started class by having every write for a few minutes (like 5-10) about something they found interesting in the assigned reading. Aside from making sure students actually read, assigning an amount of time rather than a topic allows students to select a complexity level they feel is appropriate for the time allowed.
For class participation, this obviously requires some re-thinking of what class participation means. It also probably requires smaller classes. In a class of 10 students, I find it unimaginable that the professor wouldn't know before grading anything approximately what grade each student will receive.