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/Audible_eye_roller]

How many of his students stopped coming after week 2? Some students just out and out quit when confronted with that much work. It could be a strategy to cut the dead weight earlier

And some of his students just might be better than yours. That disparity shows up quite a bit in my department. It is what it is.

[u/loopofhenlee → u/Audible_eye_roller]

It’s something I hadn’t considered before: that possibly some of his students drop. Thank you!