Please read this document before progressing to the answer-scheme link
below; you may wish to revisit
and re-read this document after viewing and thinking about the answer-scheme.
You may be quite unpleasantly surprised by the
grade you received on your midterm exam. This is perfectly understandable, and
(although you may not think so) I do feel your pain.
You might easily feel like burying the paper,
or destroying it (or me) in a ritual bonfire, or at the very least setting it
aside and trying to avoid looking at it even for a moment…
But we are all adults, and engaged in a
challenging endeavour. I expect that you will wish to hear some guidance
about the exam, and your performance, so in that spirit I will attempt to allay
some of your fears, if you’ll let me. Here are my answers to some
frequently-asked post-midterm questions:
Depends on what you mean by “bad”. Bad relative
to the class average value? Relative to your personal expectations? Bad across
the entire paper, or mainly on a couple of questions?
The issue of recovery depends less on the
numeric grade and more on your willingness to try to improve it. It’s safe to
say that pretending you didn’t get a bad mark, or sulking about the process,
are not appropriate ways to react.
On the individual-student level, there are
often 20-30 percentage-point improvements between midterm and final exams, and
even improvements of 40 or more points are not unknown. On the class-wide
level, final-exam average is usually 5-10% above midterm average. Some students
will not move at all (1% or less), while others may even drop a bit
(overconfidence?), but most do rise.
By asking that question, you have already
begun.
Perhaps the first step is to accept that the
style of the final exam will be substantially the same as the midterm, so you
cannot hope to see a more comfortable exam. Then you can make a thorough
appraisal of how you did on the midterm, where you went wrong, if the problem
was a lack of understanding, or a lack of creativity, or something else.
As an exercise, try to calculate your midterm
grade according to whether you seriously believed you could answer a question,
that is eliminate from the total those questions on which you were quite sure
you wouldn’t do well. In most cases the “modified” percentage will be at
or above class average for the parts you could do, and this tells you
that you’re no worse off than other students – and misery loves company.
Everyone learns differently, but experience
suggests to me that unless you practice questions and get feedback on your
answers, you will not be able to deal with my exams… so why not give this a
try?
If you think I will discriminate on that basis,
then I suppose you wouldn’t have been willing to come to office hours for any
reason! Surely the students most in need of my assistance, those who may
benefit the most from my time and feedback, are exactly those (forgive me)
crappy-midterm folks.
I’m no elitist – any student who asks for help
will get it, whether at the top of the class or, well, lower down… and if you
are embarrassed about asking “dumb questions”, do you really believe
that you are the only person who doesn’t know the answers? A bold and
self-aware student who doesn’t know the answers, and is willing to speak up
about it, impresses me far more than a smug secure student afraid to admit
ignorance – every time!
You’d be surprised, if you haven’t visited much, how useful it can be to attend office-hours (or review-sessions) and just listen to other students’ questions and answers. After doing that for a while, you will feel irresistibly drawn into the fray yourself, and will become very much part of the team. It isn’t necessary – or even desirable – to wait until you can get one-on-one time with me. Remember that science is a team effort – if you don’t engage in it, you’re punishing yourself and also others who could benefit from hearing about your viewpoint.
Well… that’s actually a bit of a dangerous
precedent. No one gets too worried about the odd bad result on your transcript,
but if you were to get into a habit of walking away from courses, everyone
would begin to notice. At the 100-level, mere survival really is
enough, and the sort of effort needed to recover to that point is less than you
would have to expend to reach a top-of-the-class final grade. It’s much better
to adopt the optimistic attitude of the brave recovery from adversity – you’ll
feel better, and your academic record will look better too!
I guess if you feel like giving up because
you’ve decided you hate me and cannot work with me, I may not be able to change
your mind. Does it hurt me more, or you, if you adopt this
position? (Just asking.)
So I shall look forward to seeing more interested students taking advantage of consultation-time as the course goes forward.
Click here to reach the detailed answer-scheme page. Please ask me nothing about the midterm until you have completely
worked through the answer-scheme document.