A disappointing semester

The semester ended last week. The results are profoundly depressing.

The Bad
I might as well get the bad news out of the way first. The developmental class — college students taking mathematics that my fourth-grade son is acing — fared the worst. Out of 15 students at the end of the semester, only one passed, and that with a C. Because this class is a prerequisite for other classes, I count a C as a minimum passing grade here; if you want to count D's as passing grades, five students passed. The ones who failed didn't even come close to passing; the mean average for the class was 38.9%. I note sadly that this was a class in which I had a lot of hope only three months ago.

The single highest guarantor of failure was attendance; every one of the students with a failing grade had an attendance grade lower than 80%. That could mean anything from missing more 20% of the classes and showing up to the rest on time, to arriving at every class at least 5 minutes after I did.

The College is aware that irregular attendance is a signal of impending failure. Student Support has set up a webpage so that faculty can easily report absences, and they can folow up to check on these students. The College encouraged professors at the beginning of the semester to make use of the webpage, hinting that part of the problem with student attendance was that professors weren't making use of the tools they had to encourage attendance.

In my opinion, it's arguable that university-age students aren't attending because the college isn't mothering them sufficiently. By this point, the tree has hardened into a form, and is no longer a sapling. Nevertheless, the information was helpful inasmuch as before that faculty meeting, I had no idea such a webpage existed. (New faculty orientation was that useless.)

In any case, whatever the pressure Student Support applied, it worked rarely. At first, I reliably inundated SS with reports on student absences. There were a handful of successes; some students would show up for one or two classes. One or two told me in advance that they had to miss a class, and asked me please not to report them to SS for it. I directed them to the syllabus, where I distinguish between excused (documented) absences, and unexcused absences.

Most of the truants showed up just as irregularly as before. One case both annoyed and entertained me; the Dean of Students called me to inquire whether a student was attending my class. I told him that no, the student hadn't been attending my class, and I had in fact been reporting this reliably to Student Support for several weeks now. I expressed my disappointment that he should call me and ask. He paitently explained that he really had no way of knowing this, since SS is not under his purview. I thought that, since he was Dean of Students, he would naturally know what went on in Student Support. D'oh!

The Ugly
I refer to Statistics as "the ugly" only because when I started teaching it last semester, I found it immensely uninteresting. I've since gotten to enjoy it.

The situation there is much better. I taught two sections of statistics, with 30 students between the two sections by the end of the semester. In this case, there were only 4 F's, and 10 D's. Between the two classes, half the students managed to pass with a C or higher, and for most of the rest, D is also passing, because Statistics is a terminal course. They only have to maintain a 2.0 average to graduate; receiving a D in Statistics is easily offset by a B or A in another course. That said, a D in Statistics is nothing to crow about, either.

The Good
The fourth (and final) section was Differential Equations. These are math majors, so one would assume that they are both able and interested. The results correspond to the assumption inasmuch as everyone passed.

That said, no one passed spectacularly, and I didn't feel that any of them put the amount of effort into the class that it required. My impression was that they all put a lot of effort into other classes and/or activities, and dealt with DiffEqs as an afterthought. I don't say this based simply on dissatisfaction with their tests and project — although their less-than-stellar performance is a factor. I say this based on the fact that I saw them getting help frequently in other professor's offices, and rarely in mine. In addition, the quality of their work was generally low. It's one thing to have difficulty with the class — one should expect that in a 400-level mathematics course. It's another matter entirely to have difficulty, and to do little or nothing to overcome the difficulty.

I told the students several times during the semester that I deliberately assigned difficult problems to make them think, and that I expected that they would need to come to me for help on such occasions. That rarely happened. They acquired a habit of posponing their assignments until the last minute. Unsurprisingly, their performance on their class project was abysmal, with the exception of one student who started work on it early. The project was one of those occasions where I was stunned at how some of the best students at our university can do such an unwise thing as procrastinate a major assignment until one or two days before it is due. Grades would (and should) have been higher, but for this project.

I'll be teaching a class in late May and June called Discrete Mathematics for Middle Grades Teachers. I'll be dealing with a completely different kind of student in this case; this should be fun. :-)

There's more to announce on this, and I'll write something about it later today.