Who's tried Ungrading in STEM courses?

[symbolipoint]

In fact some types of schools use a "competency based" form of instruction which goes along a grading system which assigns mainly from three letter grades ONLY IF the student earns a certain minimum score in the course within a 1-year time period. If the student earns credit successfully, it is from A, B, or C. Otherwise, the student earns NO CREDIT AND NO GRADE, and essentially, if the student does not at some time finally earn grade and credit, he had just wasted his time; very likely not having given adequate effort.

 

[kuruman]

In fact some types of schools use a "competency based" form of instruction which goes along a grading system which assigns mainly from three letter grades ONLY IF the student earns a certain minimum score in the course within a 1-year time period. If the student earns credit successfully, it is from A, B, or C. Otherwise, the student earns NO CREDIT AND NO GRADE, and essentially, if the student does not at some time finally earn grade and credit, he had just wasted his time; very likely not having given adequate effort.

It looks like this scheme is the usual grading system with the lower two grades, D and F, merged and removed from the transcript. I suspect that the rationale for this is that, by disallowing the option of just barely passing the course with a D, students are made more acutely aware that the responsibility of getting the credit rests with them. It could also be viewed as a "feel good" measure. If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you even tried.

After reading the discussion here, I wonder whether @vela's question can be answered.

m curious if anyone has tried "ungrading" in their STEM courses and if so, how it worked out.

Is it even possible to try "ungrading" if one's institution requires grade submission? To avoid chaos, the method of student assessment, grades or no grades, must be established across the institution and not be left up to the individual instructor.

At my institution, students are allowed to take up to 6 courses on a "Pass, no Pass" basis except for courses that are requirements for the student's major or minor. The instructor is not informed of the student’s status and the registrar records grades of D or higher as Pass and grades of F as No Pass. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to decide unilaterally that my course is Pass/no Pass for everybody without getting into deep trouble.

 

[PeroK]

The astonishing experience with grading that I mentioned earlier was this. After grading and scaling the second exam in a large course I took the class average to compare with the first. Much to my astonishment, the second average was two one-hundredths of a point of the first exam average. I had never seen anything like this before so I did some more digging to see how individual students fared. Students whose second score was within ±5% of the first score were labeled as "no change in performance." Students outside that range were labeled "worse performance" (low end) or "better performance" (high end) than last time. Well, the tally showed 20% no "change", 40% "worse" and 40% "better". My interpretation was that some students who did well the first time around slacked off and rested on their laurels as it were, while others who did not do so well got scared and took measures to do better. As luck would have it, the numbers in each group were about equal and the 40% above and below swapped places relative to average.

If my interpretation is correct, then one can argue that it shows that grades serve as an incentive to do better and, simultaneously, as a ustification to slack off.

I suggest what you found may be in large part what's called regression toward the mean:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean

 

[vela]

Is it even possible to try "ungrading" if one's institution requires grade submission? To avoid chaos, the method of student assessment, grades or no grades, must be established across the institution and not be left up to the individual instructor.

Clearly, I can't tell the school, "Sorry, I don't assign grades."

I'm looking at using the ideas within the course. For example, instead of using exams to decide whether a student is successful, I could instead use assignments where the "grade" is either "good," "needs revision," or "missing," along with feedback students could use to revise their work if needed. The ability to revise is key here. Instead of just getting a score and moving on without giving it much thought, students have the incentive to learn from their mistakes, by revisiting their work and improving it.

This process is similar to how writing essays is taught. In a writing class, you don't simply write an essay and have it graded. You write a first draft, then have the instructor or classmate read it over and comment on it. Then you repeat the process with a second draft, ideally incorporating the feedback, and perhaps third draft. Eventually, you submit your finished essay.

 

[gleem]

This process is similar to how writing essays is taught. In a writing class, you don't simply write an essay and have it graded. You write a first draft, then have the instructor or classmate read it over and comment on it. Then you repeat the process with a second draft, ideally incorporating the feedback, and perhaps third draft. Eventually, you submit your finished essay

So, who can take credit for the final essay?

 

[vela]

So, who can take credit for the final essay?

When you submit a paper for publication and the reviewer suggests changes to be made, who takes credit for the final paper?

 

[gleem]

Really, how can you compare the two?

 

[berkeman]

When you submit a paper for publication and the reviewer suggests changes to be made, who takes credit for the final paper?

Does the professor get to see the suggestions from the student reviewing the other student's paper? I would think that the reviewer could get some credit for providing useful feedback. I have no idea how those classes work in practice, though.

 

[symbolipoint]

Does the professor get to see the suggestions from the student reviewing the other student's paper? I would think that the reviewer could get some credit for providing useful feedback. I have no idea how those classes work in practice, though.

That part of the discussion is about learning to write essays in school (such as in junior high school, high school, and in some remedial community college language arts classes).

 

[kuruman]

Clearly, I can't tell the school, "Sorry, I don't assign grades."

I'm looking at using the ideas within the course. For example, instead of using exams to decide whether a student is successful, I could instead use assignments where the "grade" is either "good," "needs revision," or "missing," along with feedback students could use to revise their work if needed. The ability to revise is key here. Instead of just getting a score and moving on without giving it much thought, students have the incentive to learn from their mistakes, by revisiting their work and improving it.

This process is similar to how writing essays is taught. In a writing class, you don't simply write an essay and have it graded. You write a first draft, then have the instructor or classmate read it over and comment on it. Then you repeat the process with a second draft, ideally incorporating the feedback, and perhaps third draft. Eventually, you submit your finished essay.

Sorry, I misunderstood your original question. I assumed that your course, being in STEM, would necessarily involve math, calculations and problem-solving. If essays are an acceptable task, then here is I did for assessment in a course entitled "Energy and the Environment" intended for non-majors with or without a previous course in physics. The final grade was based on class participation, which was negatively affected by absences: "if you're not there, you cannot participate by definition." That was worth 15%. There was midterm essay for 35% and a final essay on a different subject for 50%. Students were given deadlines prior to each essay for (a) a proposal of what they were going to write about which was my opportunity to steer them away from trouble; (b) a first draft which I reviewed and offered suggestions for improvement before the final draft. Timely submission of these was worth a certain percentage of the total for the paper. That kept most of them on track.

I gave a numerical score to each paper but not a letter grade. For my convenience, the maximum obtainable score matched the percentage weight for the paper (35 for midterm, 50 for final). I calculated the final letter grade from the sum total of points. Quite a few students lost points because they didn't turn in the drafts. Also, I considered this a writing course and took off points for egregious and appalling errors, e.g. it's and its; their, there, and they're; affect and effect and so on. My point to the students was "if you want to communicate effectively and not affectively, you'd better use the language correctly."

 

[vela]

Really, how can you compare the two?

Weren't you implying that the others who provide feedback on a paper (like a reviewer) deserve credit in addition to the student (the author)? Did you really never go through this type of process when writing essays in college? Did you receive such substantial feedback that you thought another student should be considered a co-author of the essay?

 

[vela]

I assumed that your course, being in STEM, would necessarily involve math, calculations and problem-solving.

The course does. Part of what started me down this path was the tendency for a substantial number of students to cheat because it's so easy to do now, especially once the classes went all remote. I (and many of my colleagues) have noticed how some students will turn in work using strange notation or with the same strange mistakes and typos. It was pretty obvious they looked up the same solution online and just copied it. Since I wasn't really interested in assessing their ability to copy solutions from the internet, I gave them assignments to explain in words how to solve a problem.

 

[vela]

Does the professor get to see the suggestions from the student reviewing the other student's paper? I would think that the reviewer could get some credit for providing useful feedback. I have no idea how those classes work in practice, though.

I recall that did happen in my lower-division writing course. I ignored a suggestion a student made on my essay, and the instructor later noted he thought I should've followed the suggestion. I don't think we received any sort of credit for reading and commenting on each other's essays though.

 

[kuruman]

The course does. Part of what started me down this path was the tendency for a substantial number of students to cheat because it's so easy to do now, especially once the classes went all remote. I (and many of my colleagues) have noticed how some students will turn in work using strange notation or with the same strange mistakes and typos. It was pretty obvious they looked up the same solution online and just copied it. Since I wasn't really interested in assessing their ability to copy solutions from the internet, I gave them assignments to explain in words how to solve a problem.

I know what you mean. My way of handling cheating was to minimize its importance by assigning a relatively low weight towards the final grade. I retired before the pandemic hit so I have no experience with the complications it has introduced. In the last few years of teaching, though, I used flipitphysics (https://www.flipitphysics.com). If you are not familiar with it, it's worth looking into. It delivers content remotely, using 25-30 minute videos with pauses once in a while for students to answer multiple choice questions testing their comprehension up to that point. It has a wonderful homework engine that allows you to modify their canned problems or write your own completely from scratch. An important option is that the instructor can author problems in which a symbolic answer is required and the algorithm can figure out it it's correct. I'm guessing it creates benchmarks by substituting numbers for the symbols in the instructor's correct answer. And there is more. The instructor can set the number of attempts and the penalty for each attempt. In cases where a numerical answer is required, the instructor can trap the most likely incorrect answers so that if one of them is put in, the student will get an error-specific message like "Kinetic energy is $\frac{1}{2}mv^2 \text{ not }\frac{1}{2}mv$." Finally, the instructor can append the ideally correct solution to every problem; it is made available to the student after the student submits the assignment for grading.

Of course, cheaters will cheat and one cannot prevent them from doing so. It is also true that cheaters, by definition, are not interested in learning so why bother with encouraging them to learn? You can lead a horse to water, etc. etc.

Flipitphysics with its detailed reports on each student's activities while logged in, enabled me to examine the students' habits and separate those who were interested in learning from those who were not. A student who is not interested
1. Spends less than the nominal time of 20-25 minutes of each lecture. About 20% of the class spent 10 minutes or less; the all-time record was an awe-inspiring 1 minute 16 seconds. Even I, with my knowledge of the material, could not duplicate this feat because I had to stop and think before answering each multiple choice question sight unseen.
2. Answers the intermediate multiple choice questions in alphabetic order until he/she gets the correct answer to be allowed to move on to the multiple choice without bothering to view the material in between.
3. Spends little time on each homework problem set, gives up after one or two attempts or doesn't bother with homework at all.

Having an insight in a student's working habits is a good way to identify those who try hard, but have little to show for their efforts. These are worth salvaging.

 

[symbolipoint]

I recall that did happen in my lower-division writing course. I ignored a suggestion a student made on my essay, and the instructor later noted he thought I should've followed the suggestion. I don't think we received any sort of credit for reading and commenting on each other's essays though.

If you could be a little more optimistic, at least that was participation, so this is useful or good.

 

[gleem]

Did you really never go through this type of process when writing essays in college?

No. Never, in HS or college. The essay was assigned, the deadline established, the essay written, submitted, and graded.

I was schooled in a different era 40's, 50's and 60's. Classic pedagogical techniques.

My point was that if substantial corrections are made how can the grade of the final essay be attributed solely to the author? Aren't you also grading everybody who helped?

The whole paradigm of education as changed and continues to change and may never stop changing. BTW in the 40's etc. the teacher's assessment was golden AFAIν.

Also, I considered this a writing course and took off points for egregious and appalling errors, e.g. it's and its; their, there, and they're; affect and effect and so on. My point to the students was "if you want to communicate effectively and not affectively, you'd better use the language correctly."

Appalling, egregious?? Spelling errors usually do not change the meaning of a sentence. It's more a reflection of the writer's attitude similar to how one dresses, influence by culture, pride, and respect.
It is hard for me to see how grammatical mistakes could or should change the grade of a non-writing course unless they were so egregious that they affected the content.

On the other hand, with autocorrect and SW like Grammarly readily available it is hard to figure how misspelling can be a problem unless the problem is one of attitude.

 

[gmax137]

This process is similar to how writing essays is taught. In a writing class, you don't simply write an essay and have it graded. You write a first draft, then have the instructor or classmate read it over and comment on it. Then you repeat the process with a second draft, ideally incorporating the feedback, and perhaps third draft. Eventually, you submit your finished essay.

No. Never, in HS or college. The essay was assigned, the deadline established, the essay written, submitted, and graded.

I was schooled in a different era 40's, 50's and 60's. Classic pedagogical techniques.

Same here, 1970s. Nobody read or commented on any of my writing other than the teacher/professor grading the work, submitted once.

 

[kuruman]

Appalling, egregious?? Spelling errors usually do not change the meaning of a sentence.

But they reflect poorly on those who commit them. If I were an employer, all else being equal, I would hire the candidate who knows how to use the language correctly. Whether I teach a writing course or not, I believe that my students should be able to communicate their thoughts properly and that it is part of my job to see to it.

 

[vela]

My point was that if substantial corrections are made how can the grade of the final essay be attributed solely to the author? Aren't you also grading everybody who helped?

No. First, the students are the ones who ultimately decide when their essays are done. They can choose to heed or ignore any feedback they get. Second, the feedback tends to be general, not specific. Only a masochist would go through with a fine-tooth comb and locate every single grammatical or spelling error. You might point out a few and suggest proofreading. Or you might say something like, "I found this paragraph kind of confusing," so the student can consider rewriting or expanding it.

Appalling, egregious?? Spelling errors usually do not change the meaning of a sentence. It's more a reflection of the writer's attitude similar to how one dresses, influence by culture, pride, and respect.
It is hard for me to see how grammatical mistakes could or should change the grade of a non-writing course unless they were so egregious that they affected the content.

On the other hand, why should we ignore proper spelling and grammar just because it's not an English or writing class? Colleges and universities typically want their graduates to possesses good writing skills and to be able to communicate effectively, and employers consistently rate those skills as highly desirable as well.

 

[gleem]

I don't disagree with you regarding the importance of spelling and grammar, it's like dressing appropriately for the occasion. I am a terrible proofreader, missing many misspellings (actually typos) in my own writings. So, if not using spell check or Grammarly I have to go over my work several times slowly to find them.

However, a better way for noncompliant students might be to hand the essay back for correction instead of docking points and having to figure what penalty is appropriate. If you feel you must lower the score, tell them ahead of time that if the essay does not meet standards, the essay will be returned as incomplete and docked whatever you feel appropriate because of your extra work. Frankly I would be more of a stickler on word usage and proper connotation.

For the last twenty years or so kids have had access to Document Software making corrections a cinch.

How many of us remember writing in essays in cursive or using typewriters, Erasable paper and white-out?
Raise your hand .

How many

 

[gmax137]

How about that horrible "corrasable" paper. googl googl goo...

 

[gleem]

Yeah, I used it.

 

[berkeman]

How many of us remember writing in essays in cursive or using typewriters, Erasable paper and white-out?
Raise your hand .

LOL, one of the first DIY projects I worked on when I was a freshman in university (1976) was a simple computerized keyboard so I could type reports in soft copy and print the final clean hard copy. I never got it all working, but let's just say I was highly motivated!

 

[kuruman]

How many of us remember writing in essays in cursive or using typewriters, Erasable paper and white-out?
Raise your hand .

to all of the above. I also think that the main reason teachers don't read essays written in cursive is that cursive is no longer how students communicate there, they're, their thoughts and desires. Instagram has replaced the billet-doux. I also point out that people, who put their trust in spellcheckers and unquestioningly accept their suggestions, are inviting trouble. My wife, a Russian historian, once showed me a student essay in which the author maintained that " $\dots~$ the surfs and pheasants rose in rebellion." Perplexed? Click on the spoiler.

Spoiler

$\dots~$ the serfs and peasants rose in rebellion.

 

[symbolipoint]

to all of the above. I also think that the main reason teachers don't read essays written in cursive is that cursive is no longer how students communicate there, they're, their thoughts and desires. Instagram has replaced the billet-doux. I also point out that people, who put their trust in spellcheckers and unquestioningly accept their suggestions, are inviting trouble. My wife, a Russian historian, once showed me a student essay in which the author maintained that " $\dots~$ the surfs and pheasants rose in rebellion." Perplexed? Click on the spoiler.

Spoiler

$\dots~$ the serfs and peasants rose in rebellion.

Playing at the beach, looking for birds which do not belong there?

 

[symbolipoint]

@vela, post #54 very well said (written)

 

[ZapperZ]

I'm curious if anyone has tried "ungrading" in their STEM courses and if so, how it worked out. The idea is to get away from the using points to determine a student's grade and use different types of assessment that better motivate students to learn.

https://www.jessestommel.com/why-i-dont-grade/

https://www.chemedx.org/blog/ungrading-what-it-and-why-should-we-use-it

My interest arises from my experiences since classes went remote because of the pandemic. Like many other instructors, I saw the mysterious increase in performance by many students on exams (as well as obvious signs of cheating in some cases). To reduce the incentive to cheat, I replaced most of these high-stakes assignments with low-stakes weekly problems, where students had to write up a solution where they had to identify the relevant physical concepts, explain their problem-solving strategy, and finally solve the problem. It wasn't enough to just write down a bunch of math, which they could easily find on Chegg or somewhere else on the internet; they actually had to articulate the reasoning involved. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the write-ups from some of my students.

There were some problems, however. The main thing was assessment. I developed a rubric, but then it would sometimes end up resulting in a grade I didn't feel accurately reflected the quality of the work. Over time, I've modified the rubric, but I've never been happy with the results. This semester, I'm considering just giving them scores of "satisfactory," "needs revision," and "not submitted," and record audio feedback on what I thought they did well, what could use improvement, etc. I'm still thinking about how to translate these results into a letter grade that I have to assign at the end of the semester.

Anyway, I would love to hear any comments or idea, tips, and about anyone's (student or faculty) experiences with these types of assessments.

vela,

Like you, I too had to adjust quite a bit of my assessment while conducting online or remote classes. The problem of "cheating" is certainly an issue with online exams. As with you, I had to de-emphasize exams, making them less than 50% of the total grade.

My assessment comes in different forms. Since most of the classes that I have taught during the past couple of years had been the General Physics courses, they had lab components. I upped the percentage of the grade from labs (up to 25%) after I was introduced to Pivot Interactives. I find them to be the best solution to "virtual experiments" because of two things: (i) other than actually performing the experiment itself, the students had do their own measurements of a real observation (data had all the errors of a typical experimental data), and (ii) I could modify the instruction to include a large portion of the material. It made it easier to test their knowledge of the topic by asking specific questions that I would have done in an exam. And they certainly could not look those up on Chegg or any other online websites since this often depended upon what they were observing.

Another form of assessment came from weekly discussion forum. This, I will admit, took a lot of effort and a lot of planning ahead, but sometime, there were happy coincidences. For example, it was the week that we were about to start a lesson on magnetism when the news reported on the testimony of that nurse in Florida claiming that the vaccine caused her to become magnetized. I immediately scrapped my planned topic for that week and instead, used the news report to ask the students to analyze scientifically every single claim made. They were to write their discussion post based only on the physics and not to make any kind of moral, social, or political judgement. And oh, the kicker was, this was a physics class for bio, pre-med, and life-science majors, so they knew a bit about physiology. It was as if they stars aligned and dropped this topic right on our laps at the right time.

Unlike the instructor in the video, I did not "ungrade". Rather, I emphasized some things that I did not normally do in f2f classes, and de-emphasized other things that normally would be a huge part of f2f classes. I had extensive training and got certified by the school as an online instructor, meaning that I could teach the courses that are exclusively online, so a lot of the ideas, techniques, and philosophy of teaching remotely came from what I acquired from that training. I learned that there are many different ways to student engagement in remote classes, and a variety of methodologies to assess their achievements (Bloom Taxonomy galore!). What I had mentioned above are only some of the things that I have done. Since most of my classes during the pandemic were synchronous, we also did a lot of graded "activities" as part of the online lessons.

BTW, my technique in combating rampant cheating during the exams for online classes is this: (i) all my questions are original and came out of my head (ii) my exams have strict time limits and only open over a specific window of time, usually during the published class time for synchronous classes. Let's say that I designed an exam that should take them 90 minutes. I will open the exam for a specific 2 hour window, say from 1 pm to 3 pm, and they can take the exam at any time in that time period, but they have only 90 minutes from the moment they start, with a hard stop at 3:00 pm no matter when they start.

Now, I have told them that they should treat the exams as if they were closed book exams, even though I specified that they were open book (restricted to only using the text, class notes, and everything from our LMS page). I also warned them that if they continuously needed to keep referring to their notes and text, they would run out of time. In other words, if they had to run to Chegg each time, there was no chance that they'd finish the exam. Texting each other for help to solve the questions also won't work all the time because I had a bank of questions that randomly assigned different questions to different students.

The result so far seems optimistic. Other than Spring 2020 semester when all hell broke loose, the percentage of A's, B's, C's, and D's in my classes haven't showed significant differences than my previous f2f classes (I got trained as an online instructor over Summer 2020 and started implementing what I learned in Fall 2020). I'm still refining and modifying my courses each semester, and just when I thought I was getting the hang of it, we've moved back to mostly f2f classes.

Zz.

 

[swampwiz]

I'm curious if anyone has tried "ungrading" in their STEM courses and if so, how it worked out. The idea is to get away from the using points to determine a student's grade and use different types of assessment that better motivate students to learn.

https://www.jessestommel.com/why-i-dont-grade/

https://www.chemedx.org/blog/ungrading-what-it-and-why-should-we-use-it

My interest arises from my experiences since classes went remote because of the pandemic. Like many other instructors, I saw the mysterious increase in performance by many students on exams (as well as obvious signs of cheating in some cases). To reduce the incentive to cheat, I replaced most of these high-stakes assignments with low-stakes weekly problems, where students had to write up a solution where they had to identify the relevant physical concepts, explain their problem-solving strategy, and finally solve the problem. It wasn't enough to just write down a bunch of math, which they could easily find on Chegg or somewhere else on the internet; they actually had to articulate the reasoning involved. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the write-ups from some of my students.

There were some problems, however. The main thing was assessment. I developed a rubric, but then it would sometimes end up resulting in a grade I didn't feel accurately reflected the quality of the work. Over time, I've modified the rubric, but I've never been happy with the results. This semester, I'm considering just giving them scores of "satisfactory," "needs revision," and "not submitted," and record audio feedback on what I thought they did well, what could use improvement, etc. I'm still thinking about how to translate these results into a letter grade that I have to assign at the end of the semester.

Anyway, I would love to hear any comments or idea, tips, and about anyone's (student or faculty) experiences with these types of assessments.

After I had set the curve on a Mechanism Design test, the instructor undergraded by letting everyone else take the exam again.

 

[symbolipoint]

to all of the above. I also think that the main reason teachers don't read essays written in cursive is that cursive is no longer how students communicate there, they're, their thoughts and desires. Instagram has replaced the billet-doux. I also point out that people, who put their trust in spellcheckers and unquestioningly accept their suggestions, are inviting trouble. My wife, a Russian historian, once showed me a student essay in which the author maintained that " $\dots~$ the surfs and pheasants rose in rebellion." Perplexed? Click on the spoiler.

Spoiler

$\dots~$ the serfs and peasants rose in rebellion.

I had to actually read the Spoiler to become aware that I did not even notice the spelling mistakes in the passage; I still made the correct reading and understood, not even realizing I read through those spelling mistakes. On the other hand, if I had been the author of that passage, I WOULD HAVE spelled 'serf' and 'peasant' correctly without any struggle.

 

[DaveE]

the surfs and pheasants

Like this? Doesn't seem too revolting to me.

 

[Dr Transport]

vela,

Like you, I too had to adjust quite a bit of my assessment while conducting online or remote classes. The problem of "cheating" is certainly an issue with online exams. As with you, I had to de-emphasize exams, making them less than 50% of the total grade.

...

BTW, my technique in combating rampant cheating during the exams for online classes is this: (i) all my questions are original and came out of my head (ii) my exams have strict time limits and only open over a specific window of time, usually during the published class time for synchronous classes. Let's say that I designed an exam that should take them 90 minutes. I will open the exam for a specific 2 hour window, say from 1 pm to 3 pm, and they can take the exam at any time in that time period, but they have only 90 minutes from the moment they start, with a hard stop at 3:00 pm no matter when they start.

Two interesting points here, I'm sorry I did not see them before.

The university where I am an adjunct does not allow for homework to be more than 25% of the total grade, so they are wed to midterms/quizzes/final exams. So this semester, in my graduate class, I assigned homework, but will not grade it nor collect it, unless they want a bump in their grades at the end of the semester. They can hand in ALL the homework assigned for a partial letter score upgrade, i.e. B- to B. I told them it must be neat and not just what is online on chegg or what they find in a solutions manual. I won't be giving any grade adjustments, I assigned over 500 problems and I know they are not doing the homework from the test scores.

In addition, I make two versions of the exam and they are alternating when I hand them out. It is blatant copying, I can say and even my grader has noticed that they copy on the quizzes. I did the paperwork to turn them in and that was a nightmare, but you have to do what you have to do. I will say that about 1/3 of the class will fail because they are simply not prepared for this level of class. (I'm basically teaching a sophomore level differential equations class to engineering graduate students, 90% of which are international students who, from our experience, have doctored transcripts. It takes a semester to figure out the ones who do not have valid credentials and throw them out. My department eliminated 50% of their 1st year grad students last year because of faked transcripts.)

As for making up exams, the one time I did use book problems on an online exam via zoom call, the grades went up from a 50% average to a 85%, so cheating is rampant. I am changing texts next semester, the first thing I did was looked for the solutions manual online (not chegg) and when I was satisfied I didn't see it after 10 minutes of searching, I decided on the new text.

Because I have huge classes, (next semester I have 2 sections of a grauate class with 25 students limits and they will be full), I've decided to forgo the weekly quizzes and just give 4 midterms. They will be difficult to say the least and not from the text. I could get away with a single exam but there is no testing center to send them to where I can ensure that they can't cheat.

 

[gmax137]

... international students who, from our experience, have doctored transcripts. It takes a semester to figure out the ones who do not have valid credentials and throw them out. My department eliminated 50% of their 1st year grad students last year because of faked transcripts.)

[TANGENT]
Wow.
I'm trying to square this with the dozens and dozens of threads here on PF from aspiring grad students who ask what they can do to prop up their "measly" 3.2 GPA. Seems like a lost cause if there are others faking transcripts.
[/TANGENT]

 

[gleem]

I will say that about 1/3 of the class will fail because they are simply not prepared for this level of class.

It's hard to imagine 1/3 of grad students failing a course.

 

[symbolipoint]

Dr. Transport, gmax137, gleem, others,
about all the cheating and the remedies you have been trying, what more can you do? What else are you ALLOWED to do?

 

[DaveE]

It's hard to imagine 1/3 of grad students failing a course.

I saw the result many years ago in interviewing EE candidates. It was pretty common for people to have taken classes and have no idea how to do the basic stuff they said they could, that should have been easy. I had zero interest in their grades, that meant nothing compared to asking for solutions to problems. I didn't care how or where they learned the material. Grad school is also a place where knowledge has to actually be applied, not just collected on a transcript.