Friday, February 1, 2013

A semester of extremes

Fall 2012 was an odd semester.  My female classes were really good.  Excellent attendance, they actually paid attention... In one class there were no D's or F's.  I don't think that has happened in 10+ years of teaching.  The class GPA of 3.3 is high enough that I could actually get in trouble for being too generous.

On the other hand, I had two low scoring male classes.  19 out of 40 received a D or an F.  The overall GPA was 1.9 - a record low.

And I also had a somewhat heartbreaking score:  A student who came to every class on time and failed so badly I couldn't find a way to give him a D.  He never spoke to me so I don't know what happened but here it is almost because of language ability.  Trying to take a college class with a working vocabulary of 500 words is just very unfortunate.

2 comments:

  1. AnonymousFebruary 2, 2013 at 8:54 PM

    I hope you get accused of being sexist.

    ~Matt

    ReplyDelete
  2. SteveFebruary 3, 2013 at 2:29 PM

    I have never had such a disparity. Women usually score higher because they do something radical called studying... but 3.3 vs. 1.9? For a class average that is an unbelievable difference.

    I'm not worried on the sexist charge because, well, I have no reason to be worried. And right now my one male section next semester is at 40 students and the other male section has 7. So the obvious perception is that I am either a good teacher or easy. Since most here don't care about good teaching I'm going to say that they think I'm easy. If I am really lucky some will drop.
    Steve

    ReplyDelete

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