The First Test

Apparently creating and giving your first test as a professor is some kind of rite of passage that I didn't know about. It is extremely disheartening when your students get questions wrong. I think this is even more so in the case of a small class like mine. I heard them talk about it and understand it in class! Why can't they reproduce it on the test?? Then there's all the "Am I a bad teacher?" "Did I make the test too hard?" "Should I rethink my format and style?" The answer to all of the above is obviously no. I guess the grades weren't too horrible - the average was a 72, high 89, and low 50. I'm ok with having a few people get failing grades, but I don't like that nobody got above a 90. How did even the good students not get some of these things? I realize that the first test always has lower scores, and looking back on my TA years I can now recognize that any professor I worked for would have been happy with those grades. They would just scale the final grade assignments according to a curve. But I was really aiming not to have a curve. I think the students like being able to calculate what their grade is, and plus with only 25 students I'm not sure how smooth of a curve I would get.

After some advice from you facebook friends out there I decided to give them a chance to improve their scores a bit. Rather than just giving everyone 3 points, for example, I made them write corrections to some of the questions that they got wrong. I put a cap on the amount they could do, so basically they really were just all getting the same added amount. And the trick was that I didn't tell them in advance - I sprung it on them right when I returned the tests. But I told them that they could use my lecture notes (I put them online) and any notes that they took. Hopefully this went over well with them. I haven't graded the corrections yet, so we'll see how successful I think this exercise is.