Here are some things that I hated as a student. At the time, I thought they existed just because my teachers didn’t understand or care how terrible they were.
My experience teaching in the humanities was slightly different. I had a bunch of small assignments throughout the semester, and the students could repeat the assignments if they got a low score. But they didn't! And of course they still complained about their grades at the end of the semester. But I sympathize deeply with your experiences, and now you know why my syllabus always had very specific instructions about fonts, margins, paper size (yes!), etc.
I don't know in this instance, but my experience is that students vary widely between universities. I teach at a small liberal arts school at a wonderful location and the above behavior wouldn't surprise me, many students are there to have a good time, they put in marginal effort and are fine with marginal grades. However, I've also taught at a top tier R1 school, those students will do every assignment early, all the non-required readings, flood office hours, etc.
I've also taught at an extremely liberal school, and a low low ranked state school and each student populace has unique characteristics. You eventually learn how to tailor the assignments to the populace.
On a separate note, a colleague of mine came up with the perfect solution for borderline grades. Have an extra credit assignment worth 1-2 percentage points due in the middle of the semester. When the class ends, you can point to that assignment for students on the border, "You should have done the extra credit." For students who do the extra credit and on the border-- to be honest it is never come up.
The best professors I had in college (class of 2020) used the opposite strategy of what Parrhesia suggests, emphasizing daily quizzes. This makes intuitive sense to me because what do students do when their grade depends only on a final and perhaps a midterm? They cram the night before and promptly forget everything they learned immediately after. The daily quizzes didn't just make sure we remembered content from the previous class but also tested material from as early as day 1 to make sure it didn't fade away. (The scientific literature confirms that spaced recall and interleaving are among the best strategies for learning) This was immensely useful - our prof learned that there was a certain concept we just couldn't fully grasp and had to keep returning to it because we would miss it over and over on quizzes. How would the prof or students have discovered this otherwise? If everyone gets something wrong on a test I've had teachers go over it quickly in the following class but that's always the end of it. It's interesting that Parrhesia's argument is that midterms are bad because what matters is how much you know at the end of the course because his proposed solution would have the exact opposite effect of what he desires.
Brilliant write-up. I have taught IT at High School level and assessing assessments used to stress me out. It was the worst part of the job by far - that and professional development. Such a nonsense.
I think there's another (secondary) difficulty with allowing students to retake the final multiple times. I find it very difficult to come up with an exam that tests what my students are supposed to have learned and is fair. This is already nontrivial in a low level math class like vector calculus, but it's a beast in a class like introductory topology. I would find it very hard to cook up five different final exams for a student who wanted to retake it... and if I didn't change it, it would be prone to the evolutionary attack you describe in "Regrades". I'd find that very stressful.
You've omitted a group of students who are harmed by cheaters. The students who complain to me about cheating are always the students who are not cheating themselves, but are sorely tempted to do so. They end up feeling like losers if they fail with honour but see students getting Bs by cheating. All cheating complaints I've ever heard from students came from this group.
In any case, the argument you make in "Homework grades and deadlines" is why I think we do it. I don't know if you and Parrhesia are aware of this or not, but the old-fashioned European way was more-or-less what Parrhesia described, though with fewer retakes permitted. There would be an end-of-year examination for all the classes, and at least some countries/universities would let you make-up for a bad-but-not-too-disastrous exam by giving a second chance at a later date. (I believe everyone would weed out the trolls by only giving a second chance to students who scored above some cut-off, but I am not sure about this.) Europe has slowly been moving away from this at least since the 90s and more towards the American way of having all sorts of smaller stakes assessment averaged together. (Take this paragraph with a grain of salt. I know there is a lot of truth to it, but I am not very confident in all the details. I am most familiar with the French educational system and first started hearing about "contrôle continu" (=continuous testing) in the 90s. It may be older than that.)
My experience teaching in the humanities was slightly different. I had a bunch of small assignments throughout the semester, and the students could repeat the assignments if they got a low score. But they didn't! And of course they still complained about their grades at the end of the semester. But I sympathize deeply with your experiences, and now you know why my syllabus always had very specific instructions about fonts, margins, paper size (yes!), etc.
How interesting! Any idea why they didn't repeat the assignments?
I don't know in this instance, but my experience is that students vary widely between universities. I teach at a small liberal arts school at a wonderful location and the above behavior wouldn't surprise me, many students are there to have a good time, they put in marginal effort and are fine with marginal grades. However, I've also taught at a top tier R1 school, those students will do every assignment early, all the non-required readings, flood office hours, etc.
I've also taught at an extremely liberal school, and a low low ranked state school and each student populace has unique characteristics. You eventually learn how to tailor the assignments to the populace.
On a separate note, a colleague of mine came up with the perfect solution for borderline grades. Have an extra credit assignment worth 1-2 percentage points due in the middle of the semester. When the class ends, you can point to that assignment for students on the border, "You should have done the extra credit." For students who do the extra credit and on the border-- to be honest it is never come up.
Not really. Matt Hill might be right that it's university-dependent. This was at a largish Cal State campus.
The best professors I had in college (class of 2020) used the opposite strategy of what Parrhesia suggests, emphasizing daily quizzes. This makes intuitive sense to me because what do students do when their grade depends only on a final and perhaps a midterm? They cram the night before and promptly forget everything they learned immediately after. The daily quizzes didn't just make sure we remembered content from the previous class but also tested material from as early as day 1 to make sure it didn't fade away. (The scientific literature confirms that spaced recall and interleaving are among the best strategies for learning) This was immensely useful - our prof learned that there was a certain concept we just couldn't fully grasp and had to keep returning to it because we would miss it over and over on quizzes. How would the prof or students have discovered this otherwise? If everyone gets something wrong on a test I've had teachers go over it quickly in the following class but that's always the end of it. It's interesting that Parrhesia's argument is that midterms are bad because what matters is how much you know at the end of the course because his proposed solution would have the exact opposite effect of what he desires.
Brilliant write-up. I have taught IT at High School level and assessing assessments used to stress me out. It was the worst part of the job by far - that and professional development. Such a nonsense.
I think there's another (secondary) difficulty with allowing students to retake the final multiple times. I find it very difficult to come up with an exam that tests what my students are supposed to have learned and is fair. This is already nontrivial in a low level math class like vector calculus, but it's a beast in a class like introductory topology. I would find it very hard to cook up five different final exams for a student who wanted to retake it... and if I didn't change it, it would be prone to the evolutionary attack you describe in "Regrades". I'd find that very stressful.
You've omitted a group of students who are harmed by cheaters. The students who complain to me about cheating are always the students who are not cheating themselves, but are sorely tempted to do so. They end up feeling like losers if they fail with honour but see students getting Bs by cheating. All cheating complaints I've ever heard from students came from this group.
In any case, the argument you make in "Homework grades and deadlines" is why I think we do it. I don't know if you and Parrhesia are aware of this or not, but the old-fashioned European way was more-or-less what Parrhesia described, though with fewer retakes permitted. There would be an end-of-year examination for all the classes, and at least some countries/universities would let you make-up for a bad-but-not-too-disastrous exam by giving a second chance at a later date. (I believe everyone would weed out the trolls by only giving a second chance to students who scored above some cut-off, but I am not sure about this.) Europe has slowly been moving away from this at least since the 90s and more towards the American way of having all sorts of smaller stakes assessment averaged together. (Take this paragraph with a grain of salt. I know there is a lot of truth to it, but I am not very confident in all the details. I am most familiar with the French educational system and first started hearing about "contrôle continu" (=continuous testing) in the 90s. It may be older than that.)