You probably already know that the AP Physics exam recently underwent dramatic and fundamental changes. And students still studying for the old style of exam suffered. In fact, the College Board reported that more than 60 percent of those taking the Physics I exam in May 2015 did not receive a score high enough to earn college credit—up from 40 percent in 2014.
If you’re like many introductory physics instructors, you likely use an online homework system. These systems have evolved tremendously over the past decade, and now allow instructors to highly customize “assignments settings.” For example, instructors control how many attempts each student has and whether hints and feedback are available. While flexibility can be good, it can also cause problems. Parameters that are too strict can lead to frustrated and demotivated students. As problems mount, they eat into your busy schedule as you take the time to field student questions and concerns.
Expert TA’s online homework system offers the most symbolic questions on the market, and they are graded as more than simply right or wrong. This partial credit grading, along with sophisticated feedback provided to students, leads to usage data that is examined in an offline service called Expert TA Analytics.
In higher education, chances are you’ve heard or dealt with issues of academic integrity. Some claim that cheating is now such a significant issue that they can no longer assign value to homework. It is true that the availability of solutions and the ease at which students can share answers online have drastically altered the way instructors must approach class assignments.
In our experience, college professors work tirelessly to look out for the best interests of their students. They are well aware of the ever-increasing expense of a college education, and therefore are highly cost-conscious when choosing a textbook for their class. According to OpenStax College, the average student is now paying $1,200 each year just for textbooks. We have a longstanding partnership with OpenStax College, whose mission is to improve student access to quality learning materials, and we share their concern about the financial burden students face every semester.
How can you tell whether a student really understands the class material? Education researchers agree that assessing this is difficult and that the best and most trusted measure is still an exam that is hand-graded by the instructor. On the vast majority of these exams, students are asked to show all of their work, and the instructor typically cares as much about seeing a student’s process as he does about seeing a correct final answer.
The following article from Education Week outlines an important issue that we all need to keep our eyes on. The number of students taking the AP Physics exam doubled this past year, representing the largest single-year growth for any AP course in the history of the exams. This is encouraging in some ways; it is good to see more students active in STEM classes. Less encouraging? The percentage of students who earned a score that qualifies for college credit (3 or higher) dropped over twenty points: from 59.7% in 2014 to 39.2% in 2015*. We want more students taking the exams, but we also want them to do well. This will require everyone re-examining how these students are being prepared.
Big data is all the talk these days, regardless of what sector you are in; but just collecting data doesn’t provide insight. The real challenge is in the analysis of that collected information, and often this analysis is left to the end user. Given the size and complexity of these data sets, thoughtful analysis is not always done.
I am thrilled to introduce the upcoming release of the Expert TA corporate blog. Opening up this direct line of communication is the next step on our path to help committed physics professionals provide students with an excellent education.
Local firm pushes for more access to science, technology, engineering and mathematics training in high schools.
