Image by Anduze traveller via FlickrDear Students of Basket Weaving 100:in response to numerous requests, I am posting a statistical analysis of the results of the first quiz:
- 17 of you have not yet bought the text. (The bookstore told me this actually, though your quiz results bear it out.)
- 23 have bought the text but have not opened it/ left it at a friend's/ read the wrong chapters.
- 43 of you have skipped more than half the lectures.
- 18 have skipped all the lectures after the first one, where you signed your name so I couldn't deregister you from the class. I am not sure why you bothered since I haven't seen you since. It can't have been your lifelong interest in baskets.
- 8 of you skipped the quiz. I expect I will get weepy emails from most of you shortly, and the rest of you eventually. Let me be clear. I do not care if your dog died, your alarm clock caught fire, the bus didn't come, or your roommate hid the key to your bicycle lock. I especially do not care that you didn't bother to read the syllabus or come to any of the three lectures in which I warned you about the coming quiz.
- 12 of you cannot spell the main word in the textbook title. 5 of you cannot spell your name correctly on a Scantron form. 3 of you apparently do not have a name.
- 62 of you have varying degrees of acquaintance with the subject matter. Congratulations!
To the rest of you, better luck next time.
Doesn't it just break your heart?
ReplyDeleteIt would but my heart has withered and slowly being compressed into a hate diamond. Maybe I can sell it and retire on the proceeds because my 401k sure won't do the job.
ReplyDeleteI can't help it, even with colleagues I like, but... Every time I hear a professor telling undergrads that the prof KNOWS not everyone has bought the textbook yet because the bookstore told them so, I always mentally wonder if that professor has no idea that there is such a thing called the internet.
ReplyDelete@Monkey: Inter-what?
ReplyDeleteSeriously, I assumed Merely Academic knew that. I suspect she's at a remote Canadian SLAC where all the students actually get their books in the campus bookstore. But maybe not.
The pie chart is a little hard to read due to its small size and similar colors.
ReplyDelete:B
In fact I have no idea what the bookstore thinks or how many copies of the text they've sold. (Canada doesn't have SLACs incidentally.) I just made that up. I have some idea how many of them bought the WRONG textbook, though, because they keep coming up to me after class asking if they can just go ahead and use this other textbook they bought instead. Uh, no.
ReplyDeleteSchmitty - cry me a river. The pie chart is meaningless. I made the numbers up too.
You hurt my FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELINGSSSS!
ReplyDeleteNo, seriously, I was looking for a way to make my post same less blatantly whiny, but all I could come up with was a beaver-tooth smiley. :B
How could you have that many students who turned in the test without their real name? And there are some sections of the graph that have the same color and I can't decipher which response matches which slice.
ReplyDelete@Schmitty - is that what that was? My best guess was "wearing sunglasses on chin".
ReplyDelete@Reg - clearly you have never administered a Scantron. re: the colours, please see my response to Schmitty (above). I should have obeyed my first impulse and pasted in a random chart off the web somewhere.
@Reg and Schmitty: just read the captions and chuckle. Worked for me.
ReplyDeleteSince there are undoubtedly overlaps among the categories, I doubt that a pie chart is an appropriate way to represent the data at all. I'm no statistician, but I suspect you'd need something elaborate like a Venn diagram with circles of size proportional to the groups represented. However, given the apparent comprehension level of Merely's snowflakes, the pie chart seems entirely adequate. Remember, the students who actually did the work and got a decent grade on the quiz are unlikely to be scrutinizing the statistical analysis of why so many (other) people failed.