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  • 1.  Testing Questions

    Posted 8 days ago

    Given the numerous recent changes, what are the most effective strategies for testing in both traditional and online calculus classes?



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    Robert Cappetta
    Florida SouthWestern State College
    FL
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  • 2.  RE: Testing Questions

    Posted 7 days ago

    I don't believe best-practices for assessment in traditional settings has changed much over the years.  I believe a nice mix of different Blooms levels (some drill-and-skill, some open-ended questions, some analysis questions) is what is best.

    Now, for online classes, the drill-and-skill needs to be pretty much abandoned because students can cheat.  I am not a believer in online proctoring as I think it creates privacy issues.  How I've done it, is that once a student starts the assessment in the LMS, they only have a certain amount of time to take it, scan it, and submit it.  I also will have 3 or 4 different versions of the same assessment so students who "work together" can mostly be caught.  I do all this myself; never, EVER use an auto-generated quiz from MyMathLab or WebAssign or whatever.  Those questions are terrible!

    So, the questions should be all higher-order Blooms.  Give contextual problems and ask them to explain what it all means!  What does it mean for a limit to go to infinity?  What does the tangent line slope mean?  What does the definite integral actually give you?  All these answers should be in context to the problems. 

    Also, Jon Oaks once showed how an LLM was incorrect in many problems.  These are great analysis questions to ask students.



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    Michael Caparula
    Professor
    Kankakee CC (retired)
    Kankakee IL
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    Original Message


  • 3.  RE: Testing Questions

    Posted 7 days ago

    Most of the asynchronous online college-level math courses at our college require an in-person midterm and in-person final. Instructors work with the handful of students who do not live near the college to have the exams proctored at a college close to them or, if all else fails, proctor them via Zoom. Most of the other community colleges near us do something similar (and several have two or three in-person midterms). This cuts down on much of the cheating that might otherwise take place.

    As a case in point to Michael's point that LLMs are sometimes wrong, I recently suspected a student was using AI to solve a problem recently and this was ChatGPT's output:



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    Jeff Eldridge
    Mathematics Instructor
    Edmonds College
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    Original Message


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