Blog Entry #4

This week's reading covered grading and cheating. Some of the more interesting topics in the reading included grading papers, grading group work, involving students in planning assessment, and electronic cheating prevention.

The section on grading papers in First Day to Final Grade was thorough in describing how a teacher should approach grading. It covered details, like setting expectations and choosing pen colors for grading, to broad topics, like giving feedback and grading on a curve. I think that this is very useful because one of the more important ways to communicate ideas in science is to write about your research findings in Journals. Helping students learn what writing a good paper involves is paramount. I would implement the books suggestion on laying out content and format by referring the students to a Journal in their field and having them use the guide to authors for their paper. In large classes it may be necessary to set a standard journal guide like the one from Science. Along these same lines, I think that allowing revision to papers is important. I have always liked the idea of peer reviewing papers among the students before they get a final grade from me. In Biology, we have many people read and reread any article that we write before it even gets sent out for peer review. This tactic would limit the amount of papers that the students would write, but it would be quality over quantity. This would help students get used to refereeing papers. The reviewers would need to look at the Journal's guide for authors and the peer review page, probably using Nature as a model. I will also look into interesting colors for grading that might not bring up images of massacred words and ideas.

The grading group work section was helpful in explaining how a teacher could fairly grade individuals on a group project. I think it is important for potential scientists to learn how to collaborate and present results. To do these things they will need group projects. Grading these has always been suspect to me, but the section on assigning grades for individuals in a group has a clear formula. I would likely have students present in groups to save time even though I always hated group presentations. I dislike the idea of grading the entire group the same because I was always a hard worker and it seemed unfair. I would likely try to have part of the grade be group and part be individual to avoid having students feel like their group was biased in some way and call their grade into question.

Involving students in planning how they are assessed is beneficial for both students and teachers. It can reduce the confusion about how students will be graded making them more relaxed and saving the teacher from having to explain to each individual student what they need to do. The book describes Contract Grading and Competency-Based Grading as well as a hybrid of these two. I would like to use this to allow students who are technically proficient to get graded traditionally by going what is expected, but also include some room for students who may not start out as skilled to improve their abilities and not have to be too disadvantaged by overly aggressive competition. Showing the ability to grow and improve is as good as showing that you are good enough to not need to grow by doing what is expected. Learning how to adapt and find out what you need to know is more important than knowing things in the sciences these days. Many Graduate level courses stress being able to find and synthesize information rather than being able to recall facts. There is just too much science out there for anybody to remember.

Cheating is and always has been a big problem. I was most interested in the electronic forms of cheating that the book talked about mostly concerning plagiarism. The book suggests that a teacher can use websites to check whether papers have been copied from others. I liked the idea of keeping electronic records of students papers because there are times when tests and papers are stored by groups and the members use them from time to time. I think that this could save a lot of time by simply mentioning that it is a requirement to turn in papers and why. That should hopefully stop this from happening. The internet also makes it easy to spot some plagiarism. When I had to review a classmates paper, I came across a really well written passage that didn't seem to fit the rest of the paper. I typed part of it into Google and it came up with a scientific paper on the topic that was exactly the same. Even with that it would have been allowable if it was cited at all. I think that I will need to cover proper citation in classes as it is a very important part of writing. As far as overall cheating goes there are many small things that can be done to deter those who attempt to cheat. Tallahassee Community College has a really in depth website on preventing cheating that reads like it was written by somebody that spent a lot of time thinking up ways to cheat. I found a site offering some suddestion on what to do if you think you catch somebody cheating. It is from Michigan State University involving Suggestions for Instructors. As I mentioned earlier there are websites for comparing papers concerning plagiarism. One of them is located at Turnitin.com.