Instructions: you must attend at least three labs out of a choice of six. You should write up each lab you attend in your lab notebook. Notebooks will be collected at the end of the lab sequence (week XX), all labs will be graded, and the best three marks will contribute to your module total.
I take a register in each lab class (for my own interest). 95% of students attended at least three lab classes. The module is for second year (out of three) students in the major, so they all should know 'how to do college' and 'how classes in the Experimental Rodentology department work'. Normally we expect them to write up ALL the labs, so this module is a little 'softer' than normal (for perfectly reasonable reduce-my-marking-load reasons).
I marked the lab notebooks yesterday. 40% of students had only one or two lab write-ups in their notebooks. 80% of students had at least one 'mysterious entry' which had no date, title or aim. Sometimes the notes were so minimal even I, who devised and taught all the labs, couldn't work out WHICH class the notes had been taken in. One student had meticulously copied the instruction handbook into their notebook for three classes. No new material, e.g. no data recorded etc., but all the instructions were beautifully hand-written using several different colours of pens to highlight key words etc.
Like Hiram, I am baffled. I am also GRUMPY.
"WHY DO THEY DO THIS???"
ReplyDeleteBecause they are stupid and lazy?
In the case of your student who copied the lab instructions: because copying (and memorizing) is easier than reasoning, not that they're aces at the former.
Is this a case of one-term amnesia? That they simply forgot everything they learned in the previous year? (I'm seeing more and more of this as students simply refuse to believe that something they learned in a different context is required in a new one.)
ReplyDeleteFrod is right. They're lazy and the consequences for NOT doing work have not been enacted on them, ever, not in high school, and not so far in college.
ReplyDeleteWe cause this. Not each individually, but as a whole. There has to be a change.
What ^WW said.
DeleteLazy. They don't have to work to pass in HS, and they think the same applies in college.
Rude shock when it doesn't, but in these days of enrollment/budget pressures, it's getting harder to hold the line and actually fail them when they fail. It's posts like this that make me glad I'm finally tenured.