Topics Education

Question I teach a sophomore level course at a public university and recently asked two questions on an informal evaluation of the course: How concerned are you with getting all of the points you deserve on every assignment? and How concerned are you with getting more points than others who did less work on every assignment? Students responded with a number on a 7-point scale such that 1 = not at all and 7 = highest priority. I thought the responses to the two questions would be highly correlated and that I could use this information to point out that giving unearned points to one student is unfair to the rest of the class. However, there was almost no correlation between the responses (r=.08), the mean response for the first question was very high (5.8), and the average for the second question very low (2.1). The question: is it possible to make sure every student gets all the points they deserve without also making sure they get more points than students who did less?

Accepted:
October 13, 2005

Comments

It seems to me that your students’ position is very reasonable on oneunderstanding of what you mean by “less work.” Students come intovarious classes with different levels of preparation and skill, and so,it will take “less work” --i.e. “less effort”-- for some students, forexample, to answer all of the questions correctly on an exam than itwill take other students. On this understanding of “less work,” yourstudents are saying that they don’t want their effort to be taken intoconsideration when you are determining their grades. They are sayingthat they don’t deserve a better grade just because they worked harder.

Ifon the other hand, by "less work" you mean "answered fewer questionscorrectly," then I see your difficulty. It doesn't seem possible forstudents to get the grades that they deserve, if they don't get morecredit when they answer correctly more questions. I wonder whether youand your students have the same thing in mind when you think of "lesswork."