Test Time

I gave my first exam last week and all 158 enrolled students showed up (plus 1 extra student who appears to have dropped the class before the test, but came and took it anyway.) I considered this a miracle, since it never happened when I taught large classes at BYU. There, the students go to a testing center (a large room with hundreds of desks where proctors roam up and down the aisles all day) anytime during a 2 or 3 day period to take the test. If it is scantron test, it is graded when they leave and they get a printout with their score. Invariably, someone would show up to my office after the test ended and tell me they forgot to go take it.

Now I am dealing with the complaints (generally revolving around the fact that I didn't give partial credit for incorrect answers). Some of them are pretty inventive, but I won't reprint them here, because I don't want to get dooced (definition: to get fired from your job for blogging about sensitive work details).

Anyway, teaching is pretty fun. Sometimes students come during my office hours just to shoot the breeze. In most of my lectures, I spend most of the time working out problems on the board with them, which I like (and which they seem to like better than powerpoint slides). Semesters seem so much longer than quarters, though. I've been teaching for 5 weeks already and at Stanford, they are just starting fall quarter this week. Five weeks down, eleven to go.