I need to elaborate a little on this. I had planned to put this in Cyclone42's "Why we are doomed as a country" thread when we started discussing everyone needing calculators, but I figured it deserved its own time. I feel bad for the professor, it's his second semester here, came from Korea (but speaks excellent english) he got both his Masters and Doctorate from MIT (doctorate was last year, so he's literally JUST out), and does lots of really neat work with robotics.
Let me summarize the quiz, there was nothing we haven't seen before and nothing outrageous. Also, here's the reason it was no-calculator:
One clarification about why I didn’t allow calculators.
I thought I’d told you this before. I was tipped off about that some students were putting Laplace transform tables in their calculators (cheating).
Problem 1 involved performing a Laplace transformation (which everyone should know how to do, as Math 267 (Diff Eq) is a prereq for the class) and solve a linear system of equations (high-school math) We had the exact same sort of problem on an optional (but suggested) homework set, the numbers were simplified. Then you had to apply the quadratic equation (again, high-school math) to find the zeros of the numerator and denominator of your solution.
I'll concede parts (c) and (d) weren't that straightforward, but (c) was the actual "controls" part, reducing a block diagram (which we've done in homeworks), and (d) was finding the "rise time" (which he told us was going to be on the quiz in lecture). Part (d) was also the only problem that required the actual "numbers" of your solutions. I had a wrong number on (a), it propagated all the way through the problem, and got docked on (d) because the answer was wrong. Point is, this shows that your numbers weren't that important, if you went through the problem and applied the correct steps (i.e. - you knew the material) you got full credit. It is easy to see, however, how people lost so many points. If you didn't get a reasonable answer for an early part, you lose a whole bunch of points real quick because you can't do the later parts.
Problem 2 was the same as a problem we had on the homework due just before the exam, he also told us
both in lecture and during a help session (where he showed us exactly how to do it) that, "there will be a problem just like this on the quiz."
2b was showing a the equation from (2a) is stable/unstable using a method we had to do 5 times on the homework due before the quiz.
Now, here's the kicker of the whole thing. Several weeks before the quiz he gave us an in-class practice quiz, both to show us what his quizzes are like and check our knowledge.
Over 1/4 of the class received their practice quiz, sat for 3-5 minutes, got up, and left, or just didn't come at all.
The "newspaper" comment in the original e-mail stems from the following incident:
*Professor is teaching, student has newspaper fully open*
Professor: "Excuse me, are you reading the newspaper during class?"
Student: "Yeah." *Moves paper below chair, but continues to read it*
Also, on that homework before the exam, he found "two teams of two students" cheating, they deliberately copied their homeworks. Incidentally, this reminds me of an old conversation. Back when I was taking Statics, Flag Guy's roommate was the grader and had to proctor exams. He told us that he saw people cheating all the time during the exams (bubble sheet), but was told he couldn't do anything because the process of getting them for academic misconduct was so long and difficult it wouldn't be worth it. Basically, unless the professor saw it, they couldn't do jack. (Fortunately, the problem fixed itself when the professor didn't tell anybody, but gave out three different exams. A bunch of people got really confused when they got their exams back with a 0 on it.)
Sorry for the long rant, but this has been bugging me for a while. I guess it scares me that the lack of a calculator can cause this much trouble. I honestly wonder how many people only know how to solve linear systems and quadratic equations using things like simult() and solve() on their TI-89's. If it's getting bad now, what will it be like in the future?
I'll leave on a note from a conversation I got from a different professor during a conversation on this topic.
Students today just want to be told the answer. They don't want to figure it out for themselves, they want someone to give it to them.
:no:
