[Englecturers] Re: Timed Tests

[englecturers at lists.ucr.edu]

Hey All,

I think that Dan is exactly right about the principal use of timed writing.
I bend over backwards to design strange, artificial writing assignments in
my 1-series courses, but there are always students who cheat.  This quarter
a colleague had something like a 20% plagiarism rate.  I'm assuming that
I'll need to spend at least 20 hours checking for cheaters this finals'
week, but I doubt I'll get half of them.  I just don't have the energy.

The other reason for testing is to police coursework.  Forty percent of my
students don't* own books (any books, as far as I can tell) for the course.
Seventy-five percent don't read the assignments.  Of the industrious
quarter, fewer than half have a working understanding of the material.  I
just don't think that Marx, Friedman, King, and Woolf should be beyond
university students.  Therefore, my students shall have to survive a final,
the difficulty of which shall be in proportion to the absence of student
effort course discussions.

I hope though, we can test for good reasons and not for an idealistic
program of qualified instant writers.  I'm willing to bet that at most five
percent of faculty in English (ladder and lecturer) could pass a test of
original timed writing in a language other than English, if that test
required a level of writing equivalent to the Subject A's level.

This would be an interesting experiment.  Any takers?

---  
--- Benjamin Harder

ps: *I know that the proper verb here is "doesn't" because "percent" is
taken as a singular collective noun, but that just seems dumb to me.  I
prefer the notion of a gaggle of individuals, even in statistics.  So I
made a noun-verb agreement error.  Sue me.