What If I Didn't Get What It was Asking?

Posted by Gennao Sabbat.

I got a midterm back today: I failed. Something like 30%, so I really failed. However, the average was 50%, so I didn't monumentally fail. Back before taking the test, I knew something bad would happen.

First, when he said it was open book, open notes, open anything. This is a problem because now he's entitled to make the exam questions extremely difficult, since you can look up anything. He also won't give you any constants or conversion factors, since you can look those up, too. This was especially a problem for me because I don't own a textbook for the class. I would only use it for one term if I bought one, and I like having money more, so I use the reserve copy in the library for the homework.

Second, the test was three problems. Three problems in two hours is saying a lot, and almost nobody finished early, so it really was two whole hours. The real difficulty here is that for any one of the problems, if you don't get the first part, you can't move on, because it's all sequential. That means that when I was missing one minor conversion factor, which wasn't given, and which may or may not have been in the book for all I know, the rest of the problem couldn't be done. I tried to show the work I would go through if I had this one variable, hoping the grader would notice that there was only one part I couldn't do, and reward partial credit. He didn't. He graded in such a way that if I couldn't get the first part, I may as well have left the whole thing blank and gone home early. For the record, if I had had that one conversion factor, I would've easily gotten above the class average.

I know why teachers make exams terribly difficult. If everyone does poorly, then the curve helps everyone. It's actually more fair to the students if everyone get a poor absolute grade because we're graded relatively. (That last statement is not true in all cases, but for many classes, and most of my classes.) However, the objective is that the class average be 70%, as in C average. A 50% average shows a lot of fault on the instructor, such as not explaining concepts or formulas clearly enough or making the tests too difficult or hard to understand.

The professor has stated, and I believe has demonstrated, that he really wants us to pass. He'll do what many generous teachers do and round up your grade if your final exam grade shows improvement from your midterm grade. So there's still hope for me. And clearly he'll be doing that a lot this quarter, as most of the class got an F on the midterm. I guess I just miss the days when your test was a lot of little problems, and if you couldn't understand one, you'd skip it and never look back, and it wouldn't come back to bite you too hard. Now I'm at the point where I spend an hour on one problem, most of it just sitting and thinking, and I still end up with almost nothing to show for it.