Peering Exams

Yesterday, I have just finished marking and calculating marks for the various POs for all my courses for the first semester of 2020/2021. For me doing all the marking on the computer put a great deal of stress on my back. This slows me down a little. Anyway I get to experience several new things with this semester's online teaching and assessment.

All the tests and exams are conducted as open book exams within a given specific period. Of course, we have done this for the previous semester. I only have small classes last semester and have more control over how the tests/exams are conducted (could even individualise the questions if needed). For this semester, however, I have more than thirty students for each course. Conducting online tests/exams are trickier with such number of students. To decrease possibility of inter-candidate communications, the time given for each question is often just enough. Being open book also requires that the question is not a simple repeat of textbook materials and questions from assignments but yet the students should have come across the general way to answer them. Thus, it takes some amount of thought in designing such questions. That's why I cringe a little when others talk about deadlines and make peer assessments on the question papers. Each of us have justifications of putting up such questions and one gets uncomfortable when others question them. It is always good to remind ourselves to be polite ad kind among colleagues, and that we are all trying our best to do our duties. Also a good practice is to have the reviewer be among those who have taught the subject before or know enough about (related) subject matter. I have seen senior academics got turned off by this peer reviewing (they have left the university) and normally it is just about the manner of how the matter was being handled. Proper private discussions could have just avoided any problematic situations. 

For me, the tests/exams are a matter of testing the students whether they have understood enough on the subject matter. It is not about us being clever or about us obtaining the correct distribution of marks or following a strict set of universal procedures. So whatever the worry about putting online open book exams there is, I frame the matter in this context. So when I mark the exam scripts, I do look for some genuine differences among the answers given by the students. I was in fact delighted to see departures from the given solution schemes, showing they have found different ways of getting the solutions to questions. Some give problematic answers that one has to think about what thoughts are appearing in their minds and where they have gone wrong. So it is not just getting the marking tasks done. Good students will be able to express their solutions clear and systematically. It is a surprise to me to see a few who could not write equations down properly, perhaps due to bad habits. Some even struggle with the Greek symbols. Usually this could have been introduced in the earlier courses, just like one sees the Greek alphabets being written out in the inner cover pages of the University Physics books. I remember during my early days of teaching quantum mechanics, I encourage the students to ask questions even about the symbols that we use, so that this issue is settled early.

Given the only few semesters left of my teaching, I hope to see more flexibility of running the courses. Flexibilities encourage creativity, which should have been critical ingredients of teaching and learning. Like the interview of Abel Laureate, Isadore Singer in my previous post, good academics thrive on freedom of intellectual thoughts. I look forward to teach special relativity and advanced quantum mechanics in the forthcoming semester and hope I can teach better.