This week’s reading is dealing with academic honesty, testing and grading, which I find quite practical. This also reminds me of the old days of being so scared of receiving my grades, whether it is good or bad.
According to both Davis and Lang, plagiarism not only refers to cheating during an exam but also refers to using other’s resources without any citations. According to Lang, 70% of students admit to some cheating in college. He also mentions that internet plagiarism has become the major concern on all campuses (Lang, 2008, p. 198). I knew nothing about using a reference page and doing an in-text citation before I came to the United States. It doesn’t mean that we do not give credit to the authors in China, instead, we do the citation like an oral one by using a sentence begin with the phrase of “according to”.
Davis makes some suggestions about preventing the students from the academic dishonesty. She says that students are less likely to cheat if the instructor treat them fairly enough, grade consistently, and encourage their works (Davis, 2009, p. 347). In my opinion, students are less likely to cheat when everyone is not cheating and obeying the rules. When I was a senior at college, the professor will only do her work instead of watching us during the exam time. It’s probably because we have taken too many tests and she totally trusted us. When I was conducting the exam for the public speaking course, my students are all freshmen. We were told to watch them carefully; I am wondering if I am using the strategy of not watching them, will my students still behave well? In other words, do you believe that the full trust the teacher set upon the students will make them not cheat?
Both Lang and Davis have mentioned about using text-matching software to make comparisons between student’s papers and the database stored in the software. Lang uses Turnitin.com as an example of the text-matching software. He points that there are some controversies going around this database “regarding to both its effectiveness and its legality” (Lang, 2008, p. 207). I would like the class to discuss about the text-matching software. Would you use it to catch your students of cheating or would you rather not using it because of its controversy?
On chapter40, Davis talks about whether to give a surprise quizzes or not. I agree with her opinion that surprise quizzes can improve student’s performance. I also received some feedbacks from the students that they don’t like the surprise quiz because they are not prepared. I usually give the surprise quiz at the beginning of the class to test if they have read the chapter I assigned to them. Most of the time, they never read the book. I am not sure if a surprise quiz is a good way to stimulate them to prepare the chapters. Would you use this method to test your student’s pre-reading assignment? Would you give them extra credit if they do the test well?
Davis has also mentioned some interesting information, such as, letting students “buy” information during the exam by deducting points when students ask the teacher to reveal the information on the test (Davis, 2009, p. 381). She also mentions about using “crib sheets” during an exam. She suggests students to treat the “crib sheets” as a study aid (Davis, 2009, p. 382). I am wondering if any one of us are going to allowing these to happen in our exams? Do you think these suggestions are viable?
There are also some points that I disagree with Davis. She says it is better not to give students a choice of questions to answer because it’s a waste of time for the students and hard for the teacher to know if students are equally knowledgeable about all the topics covered on the test (Davis, 2009, p. 403). She also suggests of avoiding negative wording when composing an exam question (Davis, 2009, p. 395). I have seen the choice of questions in many of my exams and I think this reduces the pain of the students to do multiple works. I also think that the negative wording in some questions is a good idea for the teacher to trick the students who do not read the test carefully. Instructors can set the negative words as capitalized ones to remind students.
No comments:
Post a Comment