Two down

Before I talk about the two exams that we've given out already I thought I'd take a moment to ask all of the lovely students to stop walking by my office door. I know that our floor is relatively quiet as the faculty of optometry is small but that doesn't give you the freedom to "date" in front of our door.

I realize that you're not really supposed to date. I realize that it is a big deal to walk back and forth down our hall with your girl or boy (or who you hope/wish will/could be your girl or boy). After I see you for the fifth time it kind of gets old. I could keep time with your passing. Every 23 seconds there you go again. You see it wasn't so bad when it was just a few of you sporadically but some others have seen what you do and apparently thought that our floor was magical. You see now that it is exam time I not only have to put up with you and your keep-at-least-50-cm-between-us-at-all-times-romantic-walk-down-the-hall but now I have to put up with students pacing in the hall muttering to themselves.

You hopeful couples I could deal with to some extent but the single students walking up and down reading their notes aloud. That's too much. I'm going to snap. I don't know who told you that our floor was the floor to date or study on but its not. Please stop. I beg of you.

As those of you who have been following along at home know I gave my first exam to the students on Monday. They did fine. I purposefully kept it short to make sure they would be able to understand the questions and finish on time. They had 45 minutes to do it. After 10 minutes the first student handed their exam in after 20 minutes they were all done. I made it too short and too easy (Mean 94.23% Median 100% Max 100% Min 83.33%)

Swell on the other hand, brutalized them with her contact lens exam. The 45 minute exam took 90 minutes and she still had to tell some of them that they needed to stop. With my VERY generous grading the average was somewhere around 80% with some pretty low scores. I did some analysis of her questions and on one question only 2 people got it right. Normally one would throw that question out as there must have been something wrong with it. Not Swell she's keeping it in (in fairness it was well written the students just forgot a step so most of them got it wrong. We know that they were taught the step because they had to make use of it in other questions where everyone got it right.)

So now hopefully they like me better. I have two more tests for this group of students. These tests are longer, and harder. The first exam was for a useless 1 credit class so I didn't care much that it was an easy exam.

The students are bright just on the lazy side. They are young. We need to motivate them to practice more of the skills we're teaching them. They have limited equipment so it is difficult to find the time to allow all of them to practice. For the week we're gone the only thing I'm asking for them to do is a series of practice eye exams. Hopefully Swell's exam also motivated them that they need to put in a little more study time as well. We'll see how the next two go.

Oh. Not only did Swell hurt her students today with the exam she tore my paper apart and made me cry. She's really quite mean these days.