Grading Exams

 
I've written about the difficulties of grading exams and about the fact that it's almost impossible to get the perfect distribution. We have our tricks. Now, Daniel J. Solove of Concurring Opinions has let the cat out of the bag by revealing one of our most garded secrets—the staircase technique. He spills the beans in A Guide to Grading Exams.

You'd think there ought to be a movement to drum him out of the teacher's union, but no, instead his article is advertised in The 98th Carnival of Education. What is this world coming to?

Fathers of Stem Cell Research

 
The Toronto Star reports that James Till and Ernest McCulloch were named to the Order of Ontario.

Till and McCulloch, Professors in the Department of Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto, discovered stem cells in the early 1960's. They are members of the Royal Academy of Sciences, members of the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame, and winners of the Lasker Prize and the Gairdner Award.

When will they get their well-deserved Nobel Prize?

Don't Mess with Professors!!!

This guy is my hero! One of these days I'm gonna do the same thing when a student talks on the phone in class.

Teaching and New Technology

 

"Academic Matters" is a journal of higher education published by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA). The Winter 2006 issue contains several articles on a subject that's dear to my heart—the role of new technolgy in university teaching.

I'm old enough to remember when television was going to revolutionize university teaching. Back in the 1960's all new lecture theaters were constructed with multiple TV sets dangling from the ceiling. The new technology was going to change lectures forever. No longer would Professors be standing at the front of the lecture room. Instead, they would prepare their lectures in a TV studio and students would watch them on the small screen. Only the best Professors from all over the world would be giving the introductory lectures in biology and physics.

When I arrived at the University of Toronto in 1978 there was a huge TV studio on the main floor of this building. Two years later it was gone. What happened?

Computers were the new technology. By the end of the 1980's we were teaching students how to access remote databases and how to communicate by email. We set up our first course newsgroup in 1989. A few years later (1995) we created class websites and by 2000 everyone was using powerpoint. Today there are entire courses given electronically (e-learning) and podcasts are all the rage in some circles.

Does any of this improve education? I doubt it. There are still Professors who write on the blackboard and don't know the first thing about Dreamweaver (ugh!) or XML. There's no evidence that students in their class are suffering.

This is the issue that's explored in the latest edition of Academic Matters.

But when all is said and done, how much has information and communications technology changed university life? What has been its effect on faculty and students? Has it made a meaningful difference in the quality and quantity of learning that takes place on campuses?

Heather Kanuka is a Professor at Athabaska University, a school that has specialized in e-learning. She cautions that there is little empirical data to support the grandiose claims of e-learning [Has e-learning delivered on its promise?]. There's no evidence that it is as effective as standard lectures, and there's no evidence that it is even cost-effective. Peter Sawchuck (University of Toronto) cautions us to keep e-learning in its proper place [Curbing our enthusiasm: the underbelly of educational technology.

There are three other articles. They all express skepticism about the claims of the new technology. None of the articles are written by Luddites who don't know how to use the new technology and that's what make them so interesting.

Psiphon Web censorship bypass tool

The University of Toronto announces the release of Psiphon, a software tool that bypasses internet censorship.

Psiphon is a downloadable program (available at http://psiphon.civisec.org/) that essentially lets someone turn a home computer into a server. Once psiphon is installed, the operator of the host computer sends a unique web address to friends or family members living in one of the 40 countries worldwide where Internet use is censored. Those in the censored country can then connect to the “server” and use it as a “host computer” to surf the Net and gain access to websites censored or blocked in their own country.

“Their connection is encrypted, so no one can eavesdrop on it,” [Professor Ronald] Deibert said. “It’s an encrypted communication link between two computers. So authorities wouldn’t be able to spot what websites are being visited by the user at risk.”

This means they'll be able to read Sandwalk and Pharyngula!
            
 

Recording Lectures

Every time I give a lecture there’s a bunch of recorders in front of me. Following the lecture, there’s an active trade in lecture recordings on our student newsgroups.

I have mixed feeling about this. On the one hand, I understand why students would want to take advantage of cheap technology to make a permanent record of my words of wisdom. :-)

On the other hand, my words aren’t always wise and I don’t want students to memorize everything I say without checking it against the textbook and other sources. Lecture recordings should be supplements to learning and not the only source. (Don’t get me started about podcasts!)

This point was brought home in one of the threads on our student forums. The students in one of our biochemistry courses had just finished a midterm exam. One of the multiple choice questions was about cholesterol. For those of you who haven’t committed the structure of cholesterol to memory—I am one—I’m including a picture. The description in the textbook (it happens to be my textbook) is ....

Steroids are a third class of lipids found in the membranes of eukaryotes, and, very rarely, in bacteria. Steroids, along with lipid vitamins and terpenes, are classified as isoprenoids because their structures are related to the five carbon molecule isoprene. Steroids contain four fused rings: three six-carbon rings designated A, B, and C and a five-carbon D ring.

I then go on to describe cholesterol, an important steroid.

Choice “C” in the multiple choice question referred to the 4-ring structure of cholesterol. It was a correct choice and the students were supposed to choose another response, which happened to be an obvious incorrect choice. Cholesterol certainly has four rings, so what’s the problem?

The day after the exam, students started complaining on the newsgroup. Apparently Prof. X (no, it wasn’t me, this isn’t my course) said in lecture that cholesterol has only three rings and students have the recording to prove it! Several students demanded that they be given a mark for choosing response C. The complaints quickly escalated with some highly indignant students demanding an extra mark on the exam. According to their logic, it is unfair for students to be penalized because the Professor made a mistake in the lecture.

Other students chimed in. They pointed out that the Professor’s notes referred to four rings and the textbook clearly shows four rings; A, B, C, and D. They suggested that their fellow students have a responsibility to study from the notes and textbook as well as the recording. If there was a discrepancy, then it was up to the student to resolve it, including asking the Professor if necessary.

One of the best responses was from student “YYZ,” who has given me permission to quote him.

I’m saying you can’t only listen to the lecture and that’s it. You have to analyze what he says, look at the slides, think over if things make sense, etc. Studying isn’t mindlessly memorizing words coming out of a professors mouth ...

By Jove, I think he’s got it! It’s refreshing to see that some students understand how to study and it’s refreshing to see them take on the whiners. That’s how things are going to change in the universities. Professors are the enemy and nothing they say has any credibility (at least in the first two years). Responsible students have to speak up.

World AIDS Day

The Faculty of Medicine and the University of Toronto are hosting a series of events this week in association with World AIDS Day (Friday, Dec. 1). Check the flyers around the campus for events near you. There will be a student presentation in my class on Wednesday prior to the symposium on Promoting Evidence-based ART in Resource-poor Settings.

Light a Candle

 
Light a candle and Bristol-Myers Squibb will donate $1, up to a total of $100,000, to the national AIDs fund (USA). I'm usually not a fan of big PHARMA but .... why not?

Biochemistry Major

How many universities have a biochemistry major? My students want to know if most universites have such a program. We know that it's common in Canadian universities. What about the rest of the world?

Peer Marking

Today's Toronto Star has an interesting article on Peer Marking Gets a Negative Grade.

Students in one of our first year psychology classes were asked to submit a short writing assignment to an online evaluation program called "peerScholar." The site, which was developed by teachers at our Scarborough campus, is set up to allow papers to be graded anonomously by fellow students.

University of Toronto Teaching Assistants, represented by their union (CUPE local 3902), objected. They say this is a blatent attempt to do away with TA's in favor of a computer program. The students in the class also expressed some concern, according to the newspaper article. Apparently, students see the peer evaluation system as "inaccurate" and "unfair."

I first heard about this experiment last year when I went to a presentation by one of the authors. What impressed me was the possibility of teaching students how to critically evaluate the work of their fellow students. I was also interested in giving students some direct experience in how their grades are determined. There's no better way to learn how the system works than grading a fellow student. We did it when I was in school. As a matter of fact, I took a university course where our entire grade was based on a group discussion at the end of term where we assigned grades for each other, by consensus. But that was the 60's.

The peerScholar project seemed like a good way of introducing more participation into a course and I was/am seriously thinking of using it in my course. Here's a desrciption of how it works in the PSYA01 class. There's more information on the peerScholar discussion page. I think it's unifortunate that the authors put so much emphasis on saving money by avoiding TA's. While I recognize that's a legitimate concern, I think that peer evaluation is an important goal by itself.

I've seen the data on fairness and accuracy and it's very impressive. Students tend to be a little too hard on their colleagues but that's easy to compensate for. By the second evaluation they've become much better. If the practice were more common, the students would get much better at it. As it is, the grade assigned by the students is at least as good as that assigned by a TA. It tends to deviate more from the grade assigned by the Professors, but then so do the TA's grades.

On-line Access to Scientific Journals

One of our students (Sabina) recently posted this comment to our university newsgroups [BIOME].

However, we are VERY fortunate at [the University of Toronto] because we can download any full PDF of an article from almost all possible journals imaginable for free with just our UTorID from the Gerstein off-site access which leads into PubMed, so, we don’t even need a subscription to anything (unless you really enjoy having all those shiny pages at your disposal). So we don’t need to worry about costs for an individual article, most people that need them are associated with an institution that will already have a subscription.

This reminded me how lucky we are to enjoy such open access. Our library currently subscribes to 31,000 journals that allow faculty and students to download articles/abstracts as PDF files. What this means for teachers is that we can assign an article from the scientific literature knowing that every student can print it out at home or on one of the university computers in the "information commons." They can even print it out on a color printer—an important consideration in my field where many of the journal images are in color.


How much does this service cost the university? I asked our librarians for an estimate and they told me it costs several million dollars (<$2,000,000) per year.

Just how lucky are we? I know that some of my friends at other universities don't have access to the same journals we get. I presume that everyone can get articles from Nature and Science but what about the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) or the Journal of Molecular Evolution?

Some Buildings Look Better at Night

 

This is the new Leslie L. Dan Pharmacy Building at the University of Toronto. It's right next to where I work so I pass it every day. I think the building is quite unattractive during the day but the nighttime view is spectacular. I took this photo last night.

The colored pods hold lecture theaters.

University Rankings: Toronto Drops to #3

The Macleans annual issue on ranking universities is now on the newsstands. The new rankings have the University of Toronto at #3 behind McGill and Queen's. Toronto was #1 for the past 12 years.

This year the rankings are controversial because 26 universities, including the University of Toronto, refused to cooperate with Macleans. Other major universities that joined with Toronto are:

Queen's University (#2)
University of British Columbia (#4),
University of Western Ontario (#5)
University of Alberta (#6)
Université de Montréal (#7)
University of Ottawa (#8)
McMaster University (#12)
University of Calgary (#13)
Dalhousie University (#14)
University of Manitoba (#15)

Last summer, these schools declared that they would not cooperate. They cited
problems with the methodology and claimed that the rankings were unfair. President David Naylor of the University of Toronto also noted that responding to the Macleans questionaire was time-consuming because it required compiling data in a different format than what the university normally does. Professor Naylor wondered why a public university should be devoting so much time and effort to helping a for-profit company.

I was waiting for Macleans to hit the newsstands before blogging about this because I was hoping that the University of Toronto would still be #1 and I could complain about the rankings without making it look like sour grapes. Oh well, at least my university is on record as objecting to the unfairness of the rankings when it was still in first place.

The main problem seems to be the huge emphasis on things over which universites have very little control. The importance of student surveys, and surveys of the business community are also causes for concern. Read David Naylor's report, University Report Cards, Ratings, Rankings, and Performance Measures, for a serious discussion about the flaws in rankings such as Macleans.