Gradedown! Post 2

Just took care of the peer reviews and one of the hebdomadals, leaving me with

• 1 alterna-essay
• 51 hebdomadals
• 66 exam essays

Here are some interesting things I noticed about the IDs on the final exam:

1. If you were an economist -- and maybe some of you are, actually -- If I were an economist, I would have expected students to approach IDs beginning with the passages about which they felt most confident and proceeding on to passages and texts about which they felt less confident. If a student was only sure about, say, four texts, s/he would take an educated stab at a fifth text. If this hypothesis were right, ID grades would begin high and get lower as the student proceeded. What I noticed, though, was that for most students grades went in the opposite direction -- except in cases where you had to guess at a passage, you more or less improved as you got more practice writing out IDs. What this tells me is that practice really pays -- maybe next semester I will more strenuously urge students to work through several full IDs in the days before the exam.

2. Something I hadn't thought of before: Tristen (306) used the IDs not merely to talk through the thematic problems of the texts but to connect those texts to thematic problems in other texts. It was really smart work, I think, saying that texts could be identified not merely in isolation but also as parts of a larger discourse. That was pretty cool, and I urge all of you to steal Tristen's idea if you take ID-based exams in the future.

3. Whether or not you guys liked a text had little bearing on how well you identified it. This is strange to me -- it's an axiom in literary instruction that getting students to like literature is the entire battle: once they like a text, they will have little trouble working with it. Yet though Disgrace was the massive favorite -- at least according to Friday's quiz-poll -- the average ID score for passage #3 was 4.8/6; IDs of Endgame (passage #4), the second-least-favorite text according to Friday's poll, averaged exactly the same score. While Heart of Darkness had no votes as favorite text and 2 as least favorite, the average grade for HoD IDs (passage #8) was a massive 5.3/6. Here's the breakdown, organized by passage number:

1. Arcadia (3 votes as favorite; 1 vote as least favorite): 7 answers; mean score 4.3
2. The Waste Land (2 votes as favorite; 3 votes as least favorite): 20 answers; mean score 4.8
3. Disgrace (8 votes as favorite): 30 answers, mean grade 4.8
4. Endgame (5 votes as least favorite): 12 answers; mean grade 4.8
5. "Araby" (2 votes as favorite; 1 vote as least favorite): 31 answers; mean grade 4.7
6. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1 vote as least favorite): 25 answers; mean grade 4.8
7. Middlemarch (6 votes as favorite; 7 votes as least favorite): 8 answers, mean grade 4.1
8. Heart of Darkness (2 votes as least favorite): 22 answers; mean grade 5.3
9. To the Lighthouse (2 votes as favorite; 5 votes as least favorite): 10 answers; mean grade 4.6

I promise to get back to grading later tonight... well, whether I promise or not clearly it has to get done. I will probably regale you with a later post articulating some thoughts about peer review (the numbers here are interesting). A little bit later -- maybe after I finish grading; maybe as a reward for getting through some of the exam essays -- I'll write a little bit about next steps for you guys: continuing education, and all that.