TITLE: "Tell Me Something You Learned"
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: May 08, 2018 4:45 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
I spent big chunks of the last two days grading final projects
and final exams for my Programming Languages course. Grading
exams is important but not a lot of fun, so I released a little
tension on Twitter as thoughts popped into my head:
I love final exam answers that appear to be randomly generated
from a list of terms learned in the course.
Also fun: code that appears to be randomly generated from a
list of functions learned in the course.
... and then a student surprises me with a creative, efficient
solution. I like those answers just as much.
Answer of the day so far: "Local variables help us be more
ambiguous solving many problems at once."
I don't know what that means, but I love it.
I hope folks did not think I was "punching down". I know how
stressful final exams are for most students, and I know how
challenging a comprehensive final exam in this course is.
Students have to write code, explain ideas, and connect ideas
to code. It's tough. The tweets were just me having a little
fun during what is otherwise a slow, laborious process.
This exam ended differently than any of the previous finals in
this course. The final question, worth 5% of the exam grade,
was this:
Identify one topic from the course that is not covered by an
exam question but about which you learned something valuable.
Write two to three sentences about what you learned.
I used to include a more wide-ranging version of this question
to end my AI final exams many years ago, in which students had
a chance to write a summary of the important ideas they had
learned in the course. I'm not sure what reminded of the idea
(perhaps one of
James Tanton's essays),
but this seemed like a nice way to give students a chance to
boost their grades without a curve. I figured I would be
generous and give them some latitude with their own experiences.
My hope was that students could end the exam on a good note,
feeling positive about something they learned and appreciated
rather than solving yet another problem I fished out of fifteen
weeks of material. There was a small risk -- what if a bunch
of them panicked at the unusual question and couldn't think of
anything to say? But that risk exists for almost any question
I ask.
The question seems to have gone over quite well. Some students
talked about a specific topic from the course, among them
variable arity functions, currying, higher-order procedures,
and syntactic abstraction. That's mostly what I had in mind
when I wrote the question, even if some of their answers were
covered in part somewhere else on the exam. Others answered
more generally than I expected. A couple talked about how the
course gave them a deeper appreciation for data abstraction; a
couple of others wrote about the experience of writing an
interpreter and having to live with their design decisions as
the code as it grew over three weeks.
All but one student wrote an answer substantive and reflective
enough that I didn't even have to think about how many points
to award. I was happy to read them.
I really shouldn't have been surprised. Most students care
more about their learning, and get more out of a class, than
exam answers and classroom participation might indicate. They
face a lot of pressures, and as a result have a limited amount
of time and energy to express about any one course day in and
day out. But making software matters to most of them; sometimes
even big ideas matter. This question let them express some of
what made the class work for them.
This problem had unexpected effect... I ended the exam
on a good note. I put down my grading pen feeling good
about the course, knowing that each student learned something
that stood out to them, that they appreciated enough to write
a few sentences about. I got a small glimpse of how they
changed as a result of the course. I put the question on the
exam for the students' sake, but it affected me as much as it
affected them.
That's not a bad way to end the semester.
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