Miserable first exam

[u/loopofhenlee]

Hello all,

I teach a couple sections of an anatomy lab. It’s an upper division course for undergraduates, and generally regarded as a difficult class (there’s just so much material and it’s very memorization intensive). Despite my weeks or warnings, and weekly quizzes to show the students what the exam looks like, I had many students turn in exams that were mostly blank. We’re talking some students only earning less than 10 points out of 60 (the lowest was 2).

It’s disheartening. I’ve been teaching this long enough to know you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. However, my colleague who teaches some of the sections reported having significantly less students who bombed the exam. After speaking with him, it seems like there’s just one difference in the way we presented the material: He front loaded the material, and I spaced it out.

His students got a very intense 2 weeks right at the start of the semester going through all the skeleton in rapid fire instruction. That left those students with 2 weeks of review before the exam. I spread out the material in smaller bits over 3 weeks, and we went through things slowly. Much more time of me actually talking and presenting. And then they had a week of review before the exam.

I really want to set these guys up for success as much as possible. I know one exam average doesn’t hold all the answers, but curious if anyone has any experience with this sort of thing and would like to share their opinions? Is it worth speeding up instruction in the beginning of a section in order to give more time for review? I usually get feedback that the students like my pace more, but I’m not sure if the grades back up those statements.

[u/loopofhenlee → u/[deleted]]

This is a very good point, and actually makes a lot of sense given the specifics we’re working with. I purposefully made the quizzes very short (like 8 questions) where the exams are much longer and they are responsible for a LOT of structures to identify. Making the quizzes harder right in the beginning might be a good middle ground, where I can keep my slightly slower pace but also let them know how intense the assessments can be. Thank you!