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Name: Liz

IDEA: Individual student problem-solving session/oral examination (I am trying it this semester). Students are presented with a problem at the beginning of the session, and they have 10-15 minutes to solve it. Then they send me a picture of their work and talk through their solution. I ask questions about their solution, and other questions related to the problem. The grade is weighted equally on the actual solution and the presentation/question-answering.

Pros: Student problem-solving methods are really transparent. It is easy for me to tell if a mistake was due to a conceptual error, an arithmetic error, or a “written typo.” Students have the opportunity to catch their own errors during the presentation part. Questioning reveals a depth of understanding. Grading is instantaneous (with a rubric). Students end up studying the entire semester’s material to prepare, because the questions can come from any section we have completed. This is great practice for many job interviews in quantitative fields.

Cons: It takes a 30-minute appointment for each student in the class (this semester, there are 80). This is not scalable to a large class, and it is very time-consuming even for a smaller class. There is an element of chance in terms of a student’s comfort with a certain type of problem. The presentations are extremely anxiety-producing for many students.

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Name Liz

IDEA: Repeatable MC concept quizzes (I am trying it this semester). Students take very short, low-stakes, open-note “mini-quizzes” of no more than 5 questions. Questions are randomly chosen from a pool; students may repeat the assessment 2 or 3 times and take the highest grade. Each mini-quiz is available for a week or more before it is due. The pools are re-used for larger-stakes assessments.

Pros: Students like the chance to try again, and because the questions are reused, they are motivated to practice more even when they earn a good grade. Because they are open-note and repeatable, they do not require any supervision (e.g. LDB, Monitor, etc.). This is a low-maintenance assessment from the instructor perspective. Common errors can generate interesting class discussions.

Cons: The pools must be relatively large to avoid students getting lots of repeated questions. Good concept questions can be difficult to create. It’s tough to enforce deadlines for repeatable quizzes in Blackboard (students can take the mini-quiz after the due date).

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Neha

IDEA: For a coding exam in class, I will have students create a 5-min video explaining their solution strategy. The exam itself will be time-bound take-home exam. (Trying it this semester)

Pros: Ideally would have liked to do oral QA like Liz did, but in the interest of time and flexibility, I am doing the video.

Affords grading flexibility.

Captures to some extent if student did the work independently.

Cons:

Might not be scaleable for larger classes.

Students might make generic video. Needs a scaffold for what is expected in the video

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Neha

IDEA: WebEx based exams with or without Breakout rooms.

With open microphone and camera. I used the breakout rooms to move the students to answer questions. For larger classes several breakout rooms can be used to split the students and TAs can monitor them

Pros: Potentially scalable to large classes. Virtual backgrounds can be used to maintain privacy. Students can join WebEx sessions on their phone if they don’t have camera.

Cons: Does not eliminate cheating completely since the students can still use the internet or communicate with other students over text or shared docs. Student can still use Chegg since the browser is not locked.

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Cody

IDEA: Partial credit for multiple choice questions on a Blackboard test to mimic the kind of partial credit that I would have given in a paper and pencil test.

Pros: Even if students don’t get the right answer, they can receive some credit for figuring out part of the solution.

Cons: I usually write pool questions for multiple choice questions, so this would add to the workload somewhat when developing them.

It is hard to know exactly how a student will mess up a solution so designing answers for partial credit is not an exact science.

This will only work for particular questions and not a solution for all numerical problems.

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Cody

IDEA: No “big” high stakes exams. Weekly quizzes instead. Drop the lowest two to account for internet connectivity issues. [Tried this fall semester]

Pros: Lowers the stress for each quiz since a poor performance on one is won’t affect their grade as much. [Students liked this, though not all]

Forces students to focus on the material each week since they will be assessed on it that week. [If it is 3 or 4 weeks in between students can check out for a week]

Cons: More work for me! [Having to create pool questions and align each weekly quiz with that week’s material can take a lot of time]

Harder to connect overarching themes and ideas across several units [make the quizzes cumulative, I didn’t really do that this semester]

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Nancy

IDEA: Discussion boards. I’ve used traditional ones, though voicethread and similar are alternative options for these. I’ve watched my third grader using voicethread in his own classes which makes me want to try it more. I’ve been resistant because I haven’t wanted to have students learn a new technology.

Pros: Allows students to engage with more informal “real life” scenarios with the materials, questions that we would have discussed in class if we were face to face.

Cons: Without being prescriptive about it (post one, respond to two, etc) it is difficult to get students to engage with each others’ ideas instead of just posting their own.

9 of 13

Name Ivan

IDEA: Project heavy with an optional final. In addition to small weekly quizzes and homeworks, I have done 4 bigger projects this semester and made the final optional. The final is a timed take home (you can start anytime in a given window but once started you have 2 hours). The final can then be used to replace your lowest grade and if it is the lowest then it is discarded.

Pros: Scales well in a bigger class and I believe it is less stressful on the students. Plus the projects do test their knowledge in a more realistic scenario than sitting down for 2 hours

Cons: It is possible to rely on your classmates/internet for project ideas and in some cases, the project work itself and might miss out on some key concepts you are supposed to pick up.

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Gautom Das

IDEA: For the laboratory course, I asked students to do VoiceThread presentations on their experiments. Especially, I offered a couple of at-home experiments where there can be a lot of variables. In this, 5 minutes presentation they are required to present what they did, analysis and findings as they would present in any presentation.

Pros: The VT presentations give me a sense of their level of understanding and effort. And the big plus is that way I know they actually did the experiment systematically and analyze them.

Cons: There are lot more videos to watch and grade. Time is a big constraint

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Tiffany Gierasch

IDEA: Have students submit a study guide before every exam. (I did this in Fall 2020.) I have continued to give exams at the same frequency as I did in person - this is about every 3 weeks, for a total of 4 unit exams and a final exam. I didn’t want to reduce class time to make room for more exams/quizzes.

Pros: Allowed me to reduce the weight of exam a little bit. The biggest pro is that it “tricked” the students into preparing for the open book exam. My spring & summer students had underestimated the amount of prep needed for open book/note exams.

Cons: How to assess? How to structure? I left it open-ended on Exam 1 and they turned it things of varying quality - a fascinating study (which I don’t have time to do) would be to correlate study guide quality to exam performance. They mostly get credit for doing it, so the “assessment” part is underdeveloped.

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Sarah Leupen

IDEA: Compare student performance on pooled vs. unpooled questions to get an idea of the advantage of making pooled questions.

Pros: Straightforward to implement, easy to get the answer to this question which, if negative, will save a LOT of time on future online exams.

Cons: Any differences could be caused by failure to match pooled and unpooled Qs (e.g. the ones I chose to make into pools could just be harder or easier) rather than the effect of pooling. Also, it may be already obviously true that we should pool every chance we get.

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Farah Farahati

IDEA: I have used three equally weighted grading components in Assignments, Exams and Discussion presentations to assess the students.

Pros: I have used Packback (PB) is an artificial Intelligent discussion board. PB is grading and providing feedback to the students’ posts right away and is giving the chance of revising and reposting the posts to improve their grade.

I post two real world application related to the current events and ask the students to respond to my post or their classmates.

Cons: Although majority of the students liked the idea of fully asynchronous class, some of my students expressed their interest to have live class discussions online and it was difficult to make happy everybody.