I may have written this before but at the risk of repeating myself I have to talk about assessment for just a minute. One of the things that I've realized in my long years as a college professor is that while educators may say that assessment comes in basically two forms, summative and formative; there is really a third type of assessment: behavioral. The main reason I give roughly weekly quizzes in my classes is not because I want to assess what they know at a point in time or because I want the quiz to help them learn a new skill or piece of knowledge but rather because I want to them to keep up in the class. The assumption is that if I give quizzes every week, the students, not wanting to do poorly on them, will keep up with the work and studying in the class.
What this means is that I'm using a relatively minor assessment to drive the big thing I want to change, namely the students' behavior. The quizzes become the tail that wags the dog of behavior (using a metaphor often used to describe the escalation of response to Serbian nationalist killing the Archduke of Austria in 1914). A colleague of mine and I often refer to giving a quiz as "Wagging the Dog". Usually this is a pretty effective technique for modifying the typical student behavior of waiting until the last minute to study for the bigger exams in the class.
Not so much in one of my physics classes this semester. I gave a quiz today and the number of answers that showed that almost no preparation had been done was pretty high for a sophomore level course full of students who have said that they'd like to enter professional careers somewhere down the line. Most of those students who did poorly have also managed to miss at least one class period a week for each of the last three weeks which certainly is a contributing factor to their cluelessness. Again, usually the fear of doing poorly on the weekly quiz over the previous week's material at least motivates them to come to class but not some of this group.
Not to be a curmudgeon or a cynic (or that old guy that says everything's going to hell in a handbasket) but it really seems that there's this increasingly pervasive attitude among many students that a college education is an entitlement. Usually students who have this ailment of thought don't make it to my class as they are washed out in their earlier coursework. However, this semester I seem to have gotten a group of students whose really strong natural talent has allowed them to get through much of their first year coursework with sufficient grades to allow them to make it into my course. Unfortunately, most of these students have ignored the lower than hoped for grades in the two courses that are the best predictors of success in my class, Precalculus and Chemistry II, and so have not learned the lessons necessary to be successful here.
Unfortunately, the last day to withdraw from the class without penalty has come and gone.
