Wow. Just…wow. Strout and I just finished another round of grading, for CG1 and CS4 projects, and…wow. The only way to describe it is depressing.
I’ve been working on CG1, since it requires all of the students’ work be built on machines that we don’t have available at school (read: Windows, OS X, Linux, anything but Solaris), and dashiell (my Mandrake server) is the testbed. After a day of piecing together, building, and testing about 30 submissions, I was met with some amazing results:
Average Score: 70.27
Median: 72
Mode: 100 (would have been 40, but there was one more 100 than 40)
Standard Deviation: 29.74
For those statistics ninjas out there, that is an incredibly high standard deviation. Basically, it means that although the average score is around the correct place, the range of scores actually fall far outside of the C range. In fact, there were only two Cs. Here’s the letter breakdown:
A – 13
B – 1
C – 2
D – 0
F – 14
That’s right. 14 / 30 people failed. “Why such low scores?” you ask. The last two parts of this six-part assignment were worth a total of 60 points, and those 14 people submitted code that didn’t work for the last two parts. In fact, 11 / 14 submitted code that didn’t even include the requisite functions for the last two parts, so their code wouldn’t even link.
Sean’s side of the grading wasn’t too much better, from the sounds of it. Apparently Winter quarter is an “off” quarter. All I can say is that this round of grading, combined with the first submissions of the CG1 project and CS4 project, would be enough for me to quit teaching. Good thing teaching isn’t anywhere in my future.