The wait-and-see approach to exams

After another rash of first-exam failures, this time in another course, I have identified what I am calling the “wait-and-see approach to exams.” In this approach, students view the first exam as an unknown entity.  Because they do not know what to expect from a professor in terms of exam style, difficulty, and grading they apply minimal effort in their studying.  “Maybe,” they think, “this professor writes easier exams and grades more leniently than all prior professors, in which case spending three or even four hours studying would be a monumental waste of my time.  By waiting to see how the first exam goes after 10 minutes of studying I can minimize my effort and in the event that it is unwarranted.”  (An alternative approach would be to over-study for the first exam in the event that a professor writes harder exams and grades more stringently than all prior professors.  I suspect that these students exist in much smaller numbers than their wait-and-see counterparts.)  Alternative explanations for this performance are that “they just don’t care,” that “Dr. Smith doesn’t show enough videos to keep students interested for an entire 50 minutes,” that “like this year’s East coast snowstorms, this class of poor students is an anomaly and is likely never to be seen again,” and that “Dr. Smith is a poor professor.”  The final option has been rejected in the interest of mental health.  Besides, at least I’m trying.

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Failure

I have taught Introduction to Sociology at a large university and a small commuter campus, during the spring, summer, and fall, with classes ranging from 15 to 65 students.  In each of these settings I followed the same basic format and in each of these settings I achieved what I considered to be success based on the performance of my students.  As a result, my intro class was the least of my worries heading into my first semester at a liberal arts school.  Then 1/3 of my intro students failed the first exam.

Beyond the fact that I try to maintain an even temperament, the fact that I had successfully taught intro in all of those different places is probably what prevented me from freaking out (I guess that point number 3 here is important to note).  As a result, I ended up writing the performance of my students off as another symptom of their freshmenness.  Of course, blaming the freshmen will not get you very far if you don’t work to help them.  Before the second exam I spent quite a bit of time going over student answers to questions on the first exam, making my expectations even clearer, and talking about studying techniques.

In the end, students did much better on subsequent exams and their final grades were only slightly lower than in all of those other settings.  Without my teaching experience I don’t know if I would have blamed myself or my students.  As usual, the reality was somewhere in between.

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