Expert TA Blog

Higher education is constantly evolving through the use of the World Wide Web.  A classroom is no longer limited to a physical location.  In the same way, homework is no longer limited to a piece of paper.  There are countless advantages to internet technology aiding the teaching and learning processes, but there are also challenges as a result.  One of biggest challenges deals with academic integrity.  For students assigned online physics homework, there are many public-facing websites where textbook solutions are freely shared and available.  Most of these sites will pay for ad placement targeting students on Facebook and social media sites.  Sites like Chegg.com have optimized search engines to act as a catalog for all printed textbook questions, so it only takes a student a few seconds to find a solution to their homework problem.  This becomes a distraction at the detriment of the student who no longer gets the practice they need to be successful.

Our goal at Expert TA is to improve the learning experience for both educators and students. Whenever we have a chance to associate with someone working toward the same end, we are delighted. And with that in mind, we want to shine a light on a partner with whom we feel so grateful to work. You probably have heard of Rice University-based OpenStax — a nonprofit that is revolutionizing the education world by offering free, peer-reviewed textbooks to students in a variety of subjects.

Authors:

Jeremy Morton, Ph.D., CEO and Founder, The Expert TA
David Pritchard, Ph.D., Professor of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Although many people claim that cheating on college campuses has drastically increased, a report by the Boston Globe shows that the rate of students who admit to cheating has actually remained steady since the first study was done in 1963. We believe that most students today, like those in the 1960s, want to walk away from a class having learned the material and knowing they earned their grade.

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.

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.