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[hikarugenji]

Yesterday I read through the student evaluations from the Japanese 101 students last quarter. As usual, the majority of the negative comments received were on two topics: the grading system and the teaching method

Comments

[aquahaute]

Isn't "results not effort" the basis of most grading systems?

[hikarugenji]

That's a good point; I guess it's more that effort does not necessarily equal results as much as people might be used to. I also think it may be harder than normal for the students to tell whether they have studied enough.

[sashanan]

A gag I usually score with is convincing people that Chinese keyboards have 40000 keys on them.

[tab_cat]

What do you guys do with negative feedback anyways? Do you speak to the students about them and try to make them understand?

[hikarugenji]

The comments are anonymous, so we can't do that -- if the students come to us with concerns we will try to address them and explain what's going on. For a lot of the students they don't really care why the system works the way it does, their complaints are just expressing their frustration at the amount of time they have to put in the class -- i.e. it's not my fault, it's the teachers'.

[khiemtran]

The grading system doesn't care if you spent 5 minutes or 5 hours studying, and one of the things that frustrates many students is that time spent does not necessary equal grade received.

I experienced something similar in uni in a class where roughly half the students were straight comp sci and the other half (including myself) were comp sci and engineering. The comp sci students had what seemed like a third of our workload and most wanted the ability to put long hours in on the projects to get high marks. We just wanted the ability to deliver exactly what was required to get high marks. Luckily for us, the marking system came down on our favour, but some of the comp sci students were quite annoyed that their extra hours of work hadn't got them a better grade.

[ler]

I hear similar complaints from my students. They all want "effort" put into the grading system. In my professional opinion, that's shit. I don't really care how many hours they work on their reports; I care how good the reports are. If they want study tips (other than the "tell me what the exam questions are" variety), or they want more formative feedback, that's great. I would love my students to be more efficient at learning, and I'll do anything to help them in that respect.

Rewarding them for putting in more hours doesn't teach them to be better learners. It teaches them that hours are more important than content.