Today is one of my very favorite days. I finished my grading. Then, before I turn in the final grades, I write each student who made an A to personally congratulate that individual. For someone who works that hard and did that well, I think something more than an anonymous grade report is appropriate. So, I wrote out the following letter and then emailed it to each student who made an A. I very much like doing this. It makes me smile. I have worked with these folks for months and they responded to my challenge. I get a real thrill from being able to let them know that the work was worth it (in my opinion) because they received the highest possible grade. A is for Excellent!!!!
Mr. or Ms. XXX,
I wanted to let you know that I have finally completed the grading for Accounting 302 and you have earned the grade of A for the spring semester. Congratulations!!! As I am sure you are aware, it is a very challenging course. It is a course that requires a lot of work and requires that the work be done consistently over an entire semester. Most students can be excellent for a week or two but it takes a special talent to perform consistently excellent work for an entire semester at this level of difficulty.
I always believe that every student is capable of making an A but you were one of a small group that actually did earn that A. You were one of the few who managed to make it happen. Good for you! I am proud of you and pleased by how well you did. More importantly, I hope you are proud of yourself.
It was a pleasure working with you this semester. I enjoy having the chance to work with every student but I’m always delighted by those students who have the drive, ambition, and passion necessary to get an A in this course. If I can ever be of assistance in the future, please let me know.
And, finally, I want to request a favor. For the last decade or so, it has been my custom to ask the students who make an A in any of my classes to write a paragraph or two to guide the next group of students. You may remember reading (at the beginning of this semester) the advice given by the A students from last fall. I think it is very helpful for one group of excellent students to explain to the next group how it is done. You can save them a lot of time and experimenting. Students will believe what other students say 100 times more often than they will believe what I tell them. “Here’s how I managed to get an A in Professor Hoyle’s class” can be a great help to the next “crop” of students. I hope, over the next 2-3 days, that you’ll sit down and write out what you did that worked so well and send it to me by email for distribution next fall.
My only two requirements: be serious and be honest. You know how you did it – share that information with future students.
Congratulations!!!! Go out and celebrate!!! YOU DID IT!!!!
Have a great summer!!!! Yeah, work hard but make time to read books and go to museums and check out art galleries and talk to as many people as you can and learn about who they really are. You need a broad education about the wonders of life as well as a great knowledge of accounting.
JH
Sunday, 1 May 2011
Monday, 18 April 2011
The Default Major
A colleague just pointed out a great article in the New York Times, titled "The Default Major". Here's a few choice pieces:
These sound like things I've heard my own colleagues say in the hallways at Unknown University.
Nothing new. But somehow, there are professors in my school (several come to mind without much effort) who hold the students to high standards AND get top evaluations. The common threads in their classes is that they DEMAND that students come to class prepared and cold-call from day one. And they make classroom performance (either measured by the quality of participation or by numerous in-class quizzes (often of the unannounced, "pop quiz" variety) a major part of the grade.
Of course, they work a lot harder than the other professors in the classroom, but DUH.
Students will slack, not go to class, and cheat like crazy if all the instructor does is read off PowerPoint slides and give softball take-home assignments. They're rational, after all.
I view the course design (of which the grading scheme is a major part) as a mechanism design problem. In other words, it's an exercise in putting together a grading scheme that forces the students into behaviors that I want them to engage.
For the most part, they're rational - they'll find a way to get the grade they want while minimizing effort. The trick is to set the class up so that they can't slack. Unfortunately. that's harder than the old "30% of the class grade is based on the mid-term, 50% on the final, and 20% on quizzes" structure.
But it's possible.
Business majors spend less time preparing for class than do students in any other broad field, according to the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement: nearly half of seniors majoring in business say they spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying outside class. In their new book “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college on a national test of writing and reasoning skills. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than students in every other major.Let's see - the students don't study as much, they minimize effort, cheat on take-home exams, and don't come to class prepared.
...
Donald R. Bacon, a business professor at the University of Denver, studied group projects at his institution and found a perverse dynamic: the groups that functioned most smoothly were often the ones where the least learning occurred. That’s because students divided up the tasks in ways they felt comfortable with. The math whiz would do the statistical work, the English minor drafted the analysis. And then there’s the most common complaint about groups: some shoulder all the work, the rest do nothing.“I understand that teamwork is important, but in my opinion they need to do more to deal with the problem of slackers,” says Justin Triplett, a 2010 Radford graduate who is completing his first year in Radford’s M.B.A. program. From his perch as a teaching assistant, he estimates that a third of students in the business school don’t engage with their schoolwork. At Radford, seniors in business invest on average 3.64 hours a week preparing for class, according to the National Survey of Student Engagement.
...
One senior accounting major at Radford, who asked not to be named so as not to damage his job prospects, says he goes to class only to take tests or give presentations. “A lot of classes I’ve been exposed to, you just go to class and they do the PowerPoint from the book,” he says. “It just seems kind of pointless to go when (a) you’re probably not going to be paying much attention anyway and (b) it would probably be worth more of your time just to sit with your book and read it.”
How much time does he spend reading textbooks?
“Well, this week I don’t have any tests, so probably zero,” he says. “Next week I’ll have a test, so maybe 10 hours then.”
He adds: “It seems like now, every take-home test you get, you can just go and Google. If the question is from a test bank, you can just type the text in, and somebody out there will have it and you can just use that.”
These sound like things I've heard my own colleagues say in the hallways at Unknown University.
Nothing new. But somehow, there are professors in my school (several come to mind without much effort) who hold the students to high standards AND get top evaluations. The common threads in their classes is that they DEMAND that students come to class prepared and cold-call from day one. And they make classroom performance (either measured by the quality of participation or by numerous in-class quizzes (often of the unannounced, "pop quiz" variety) a major part of the grade.
Of course, they work a lot harder than the other professors in the classroom, but DUH.
Students will slack, not go to class, and cheat like crazy if all the instructor does is read off PowerPoint slides and give softball take-home assignments. They're rational, after all.
I view the course design (of which the grading scheme is a major part) as a mechanism design problem. In other words, it's an exercise in putting together a grading scheme that forces the students into behaviors that I want them to engage.
For the most part, they're rational - they'll find a way to get the grade they want while minimizing effort. The trick is to set the class up so that they can't slack. Unfortunately. that's harder than the old "30% of the class grade is based on the mid-term, 50% on the final, and 20% on quizzes" structure.
But it's possible.
Sunday, 17 April 2011
Another Good Ride
It was another nice day today (but windy as all get out). So, I did another 17 1/2 mile ride. Yesterday, my feet were freezing (it was about 50 degrees). Today, it was warmer (no need for a jacket), but the wind was brutal - over 20 mph at times.
Still, it was good, and about 5 minutes faster than yesterday for the same course. I was pretty tired after yesterday's ride, but the forecast says rain for the next few days, so I figured I'd take the ride when I could get it.
I must have gone harder than I thought, because about three hours later, I got a hamstring cramp of truly biblical proportions. Luckily, the Unknown Family was out of town, because I actually yelled (and loudly)
But given the chance, I'd take the ride again if I could. It's biking season!
Still, it was good, and about 5 minutes faster than yesterday for the same course. I was pretty tired after yesterday's ride, but the forecast says rain for the next few days, so I figured I'd take the ride when I could get it.
I must have gone harder than I thought, because about three hours later, I got a hamstring cramp of truly biblical proportions. Luckily, the Unknown Family was out of town, because I actually yelled (and loudly)
But given the chance, I'd take the ride again if I could. It's biking season!
Some Good Thinking
In writing this blog, I have occasionally shared one of my favorite quotes about teaching: "Teaching does not come from years of doing it. It actually comes from thinking about it.“ I bring up this quote whenever I lead any discussion of teaching. Almost inevitably, someone in the audience asks how a teacher goes about thinking about teaching. It is easy to make a joke about sitting in a dark room in focused contemplation but most of us would just fall asleep.
I believe one of the best ways to think about teaching occurs when you write an examination for your students. Since I have spent most of my current weekend writing a test, the process certainly has been on my mind.
Writing a test brings up so many questions having to do with your class.
--What level of understanding is a student supposed to have developed based on how you structured the coverage?
--What are you trying to test? What are your priorities?
--How do you write questions that differentiate between students who truly understand the material and those that don’t?
--How do you write questions that stress thinking and understanding rather that just pure memorization?
--How do you write questions that are not too vague without simply lining up the information that the students need in a tidy row?
--How much information do you provide and how much should students be able to figure out on their own?
--What exactly do you expect an A student to know?
--Or, put another way, if students were in your class and did what you asked them to do each day, could they answer each of the questions that you are posing on the test? Are there any questions that go beyond what has been covered (and, if so, does the student still have a reasonable chance of arriving at a proper answer).
--Do you want students to have to rush through the exam to complete it or would you prefer for them to be able to work at a leisurely pace?
--Do you just want answers or do you want answers with explanations?
--How much time do you want them to spend reading the test. For example, a 20-page test can have great depth but does not leave much time for actually answering questions.
--Are you asking the same thing in more than one question? If so, does the redundancy add anything to the test?
--Are you leaving out material that should be tested?
I woke up at 6:15 this morning and realized that I was lying in bed trying to figure out how to structure a question about a particular piece of material. I knew that I could ask the question in such a way that it would be overly complex and no one could get it correct. Or, I could make some adjustments and it would be too easy and every student would be able to answer it. Neither of those does me much good in trying to determine a fair grade. How should I tweak that question so that I can gauge who knows and who doesn’t know?
The material I was thinking about at 6:15 was important material for my class. How could I set up the question in such a way that the students with a deep understanding would get it correct while the students with no understanding could not get it correct by guess work or luck?
Of course, that leads to the question: How well have we covered this material? What should I expect the average student to know in order to achieve the average grade?
I know a lot of teachers use test banks produced by textbook publishers or they carry over exams from year to year. I even meet teachers occasionally who seem to be afraid of writing their own test questions. I’m honestly not sure what they are afraid of. I do know that writing a good test can take an enormous amount of time. However, nothing makes you think more carefully about what you have covered and what you wanted to cover than spending a long morning writing a test that successfully allows students to demonstrate in a fair manner what they have come to understand.
Time well spent – even at 6:15 on a Sunday morning.
I believe one of the best ways to think about teaching occurs when you write an examination for your students. Since I have spent most of my current weekend writing a test, the process certainly has been on my mind.
Writing a test brings up so many questions having to do with your class.
--What level of understanding is a student supposed to have developed based on how you structured the coverage?
--What are you trying to test? What are your priorities?
--How do you write questions that differentiate between students who truly understand the material and those that don’t?
--How do you write questions that stress thinking and understanding rather that just pure memorization?
--How do you write questions that are not too vague without simply lining up the information that the students need in a tidy row?
--How much information do you provide and how much should students be able to figure out on their own?
--What exactly do you expect an A student to know?
--Or, put another way, if students were in your class and did what you asked them to do each day, could they answer each of the questions that you are posing on the test? Are there any questions that go beyond what has been covered (and, if so, does the student still have a reasonable chance of arriving at a proper answer).
--Do you want students to have to rush through the exam to complete it or would you prefer for them to be able to work at a leisurely pace?
--Do you just want answers or do you want answers with explanations?
--How much time do you want them to spend reading the test. For example, a 20-page test can have great depth but does not leave much time for actually answering questions.
--Are you asking the same thing in more than one question? If so, does the redundancy add anything to the test?
--Are you leaving out material that should be tested?
I woke up at 6:15 this morning and realized that I was lying in bed trying to figure out how to structure a question about a particular piece of material. I knew that I could ask the question in such a way that it would be overly complex and no one could get it correct. Or, I could make some adjustments and it would be too easy and every student would be able to answer it. Neither of those does me much good in trying to determine a fair grade. How should I tweak that question so that I can gauge who knows and who doesn’t know?
The material I was thinking about at 6:15 was important material for my class. How could I set up the question in such a way that the students with a deep understanding would get it correct while the students with no understanding could not get it correct by guess work or luck?
Of course, that leads to the question: How well have we covered this material? What should I expect the average student to know in order to achieve the average grade?
I know a lot of teachers use test banks produced by textbook publishers or they carry over exams from year to year. I even meet teachers occasionally who seem to be afraid of writing their own test questions. I’m honestly not sure what they are afraid of. I do know that writing a good test can take an enormous amount of time. However, nothing makes you think more carefully about what you have covered and what you wanted to cover than spending a long morning writing a test that successfully allows students to demonstrate in a fair manner what they have come to understand.
Time well spent – even at 6:15 on a Sunday morning.
Saturday, 16 April 2011
The First Ride of the Season
Up until the last two weeks or so, I've been getting up at least 5 days a week at 4:30 and working out at the local YMCA from 5-6 (mostly spinning on the stationary bike). As a result of this and watching my diet, I've dropped about 15 pounds since the beginning of the year. So, I'm about the same weight at the beginning of biking season that I usually am around mid-Jul. I was wondering how this would translate to actually being on the road.
Today I found out - I took my first ride of the season, and went about 17 1/2 miles (about twice what I usually do at the beginning of the season). Despite the relative cold (about 52 and windy as all get out), it was pretty easy - I was able to keep my heart rate under 150 pretty much the whole way (except for the last 50 yards of a steep half-mile long hill at the 8 mile mark). So, it looks like it'll be a good riding season.
I'll be riding in the Angel Ride, a 50 mile fund-raiser for the Hole In The Wall Camp over Memorial Day Weekend, so I need to get with it. It's actually the second day of a two-day ride where they go the length of northern Connecticut (from the northwest corner to the northeast corner - about 80 miles) the first day, stay at the camp over Saturday night, and ride down the eastern border of Connecticut (northeast to southeast - about 50 miles) the second day. I'll be as part of a group that includes two guys from my weekly bible study and a lady from my wife's grief group (she lost a daughter to cancer a couple of years ago).
And finally, there's only three weeks left to the semester - yeah, baby!
Today I found out - I took my first ride of the season, and went about 17 1/2 miles (about twice what I usually do at the beginning of the season). Despite the relative cold (about 52 and windy as all get out), it was pretty easy - I was able to keep my heart rate under 150 pretty much the whole way (except for the last 50 yards of a steep half-mile long hill at the 8 mile mark). So, it looks like it'll be a good riding season.
I'll be riding in the Angel Ride, a 50 mile fund-raiser for the Hole In The Wall Camp over Memorial Day Weekend, so I need to get with it. It's actually the second day of a two-day ride where they go the length of northern Connecticut (from the northwest corner to the northeast corner - about 80 miles) the first day, stay at the camp over Saturday night, and ride down the eastern border of Connecticut (northeast to southeast - about 50 miles) the second day. I'll be as part of a group that includes two guys from my weekly bible study and a lady from my wife's grief group (she lost a daughter to cancer a couple of years ago).
And finally, there's only three weeks left to the semester - yeah, baby!
Tuesday, 12 April 2011
Finance Videos Online
As I've mentioned before, I'm a big fan of using pre-recorded videos as resources for my students. I've been wondering if they would be attractive to others.
I recently came across a site called MindBites - they provide a platform for the distribution of video content online. Basically, they're an iTunes-type store for instructional videos. So, I uploaded my tutorials (so far, only the first two) for the Texas Instruments BA 2+ calculator, and priced them at $0.99 each (pretty much an iTunes model). I'm curious to see if anyone buys them.
Since I'm already putting much of my core Introductory Finance Class into short videos as a resource for my students, I'll post them to the Mindbites site as well. I figure there might be someone who's willing to pay a few bucks for (as an example) a series of 5 videos (about 3 hours alltogether of lectures on Time Value (with examples for using the calculator, the formulas, and Excel spreadsheets). If not, at least I'll have them done for my classes.
In case you're interested, the videos can be found here. If you decide to download them (the site takes PayPal), leave a review.
I recently came across a site called MindBites - they provide a platform for the distribution of video content online. Basically, they're an iTunes-type store for instructional videos. So, I uploaded my tutorials (so far, only the first two) for the Texas Instruments BA 2+ calculator, and priced them at $0.99 each (pretty much an iTunes model). I'm curious to see if anyone buys them.
Since I'm already putting much of my core Introductory Finance Class into short videos as a resource for my students, I'll post them to the Mindbites site as well. I figure there might be someone who's willing to pay a few bucks for (as an example) a series of 5 videos (about 3 hours alltogether of lectures on Time Value (with examples for using the calculator, the formulas, and Excel spreadsheets). If not, at least I'll have them done for my classes.
In case you're interested, the videos can be found here. If you decide to download them (the site takes PayPal), leave a review.
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