Comments on: for Chuck (from Nate’s Blog)

By: Administrator

Administrator — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 00:07:33 +0000

My antenna go up whenever I receive homework assignments done on tractor-feed paper. Then I start looking for things like hyphenations over-and-above what I am expecting them to do, or wraparounds of entire words.

I sometimes get “perfect braille” where I would expect even an experienced braillist to make an error…

If that happens, I usually put a message up on the announcement board… something to the effect of, “your final exam is coming… I look forward to seeing the same quality of transcriptions on your final that I have seen all trimester.”

This year, for the first time, my students must pass the final exam to pass the course. In the past, they could have squeaked through by accumulating enough points for all of the other activities. Now, they will receive an Incomplete if they do not pass the final, and will have to take a comparable one within a month.

Raising the bar…

no easy solutions here…

By: Charles Farnsworth

Charles Farnsworth — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 22:13:36 +0000

Hi Sheila,

I concur with you completely in the need for a final exam for demonstration of braille proficiency as it would be very easy for a student to use Duxbury translation software and an embosser to produce and then submit braille assignments that would probably look no different than hard-copies generated manually on a braillewriter.

By: Charles Farnsworth

Charles Farnsworth — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 22:08:18 +0000

I am fascinated by your putting boxing, pilot training and surgery into the same category as braille instruction. While practicing as an teacher of students who are visually impaired I was fascinated and exhilarated by the variations in eye conditions encountered among my student caseloads. I got straight A’s in my on-line functional vision graduate course examinations and enjoyed it immensely but found in the field that I needed to be able to use bits and pieces of this information and often acquire more data over a period of observation and collaboration with other professionals to formulate solutions to problems faced by my students in their use of residual vision. The latter process was pretty much self-taught and I don’t know what final exam could have prepared me for it.

By: sheila

sheila — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 14:11:11 +0000

Well… we could use a webcam to observe participants taking a final exam online with Perky Duck … it would probably take some creative maneuvering to have the head of one person appear simultaneously with the hands of another.

(only kidding… my morning attempt to think out of the box after watching the Yankees until after 1 AM).

By: Nate

Nate — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 14:04:00 +0000

This is one of the exceptions to my No Final Exams rule. There are a number of instances where skill training needs to culminate in a demonstration of that skill. Braille, boxing, surgery, and pilot training are a few I can think of.

When we deal with “knowledge” or “attitude” based domains — or when we mix courses to include all three components — then the utility of a “performance based” final is more limited because the answers are less well defined.