It’s done! It’s over, but yet the real challenge begins. As a recent high school graduate from the class of 2008, it’s now time to prepare for the real world. Knowing that I would be attending a fall semester at ASU studying Material Science had begun to renew my excitement in going back to school and learning, or so it seemed. As registration began I found out that I had to take a college Calculus placement test and score 60% or higher to pass. Having to take such a test brought back memories of recent high school calculus classes.
It was my last high school calculus test, the final. My grade was sitting at an 89%, all I had to do was score higher than a 90% to bump my grade up to an A. Could I do it? It was by far the easiest test we had taken all year, I felt confident, I knew most of the problems. I even double checked my answers which I rarely do. By the next day the test results had come in, and I had managed to obtain an 87%. Disappointed, but satisfied as the year was over, I began to look over my test. Of course, every multiple choice question I missed was do to a minor flaw in my work. I simply forgot the negative sign which I carried through every step until the last. Or I forgot to derive the + 3x at the end of the equation making my answer 21 instead of 24. It was simple mistakes like these that made me wonder how great teaching methods are.
From this past experience I began to wonder, “is this ASU calculus exam going to be multiple choice?” Of course it is, why wouldn’t it be? Isn’t that the best way to take a test? I couldn’t disagree more. Although I am just one person, I know many who would agree there is another method with reason.
Learning calculus doesn’t come easy for everyone, and it shouldn’t. Calculus is an advanced math that most students only begin to see as a senior in high school or into college. Out of my class, only a few students picked it up well enough to remember each step throughout the high school year and be able to successfully solve a problem and answer the multiple choice question correctly. For the others… well lets just say they tried really hard to understand the concepts. The value of watching my classmates sit down and try to think through a problem and get the correct answer was work ethic well valued. Students you would not expect to see excel in such a subject could break it down well enough to slowly work through the problem. There was just one thing that was stopping these students from seeing there full potential, and that was multiple choice tests. To see a score of 60% was very discouraging to these students when they missed the problem by only a little bit. There had to be something that could be done about this.
After some thinking I proposed to my teacher new calculus teaching methods that couldn’t hurt and may even help more. Why not teach the problems by example like he already was doing, but for homework, give out the problems and the answers to the problem and grade each student by their work. It was obvious from going over tests each student could solve each problem 80-90% correct each time but then get confused and stuck on one part and ultimately not end with the correct final answer. Also, because this method would provide each student with the final answer, when he/she isn’t getting that answer there is more motive for him/her to go back and look for mistakes and correct them instead of just thinking he/she did the problem right and leaving it with a wrong answer. Near the end of the school year my teacher decided to give it a try. He made worksheets with a number of problems with their answers listed. For grading he simply gave points out for the amount of correct work done between the problem and answer. Wherever there was a mistake he would fix it and show any skipped parts in red pen. Before our quizzes these worksheets were easy to go over and pick out critical steps you may have needed.
Even though this method was only picked up by my teacher near the end of the school year the results were obvious. It proved to increase nearly the entire classes grades in worksheets, quizzes, and tests. Students began spending more time per problem when they realized they didn’t end with the right answer because they wanted to know why and how to get the right answer. Some students commented saying, “it makes you think more instead of remembering the steps and doing the problem like its a routine.”
Each teaching method has its pros and cons and can be argued in numerous ways, but ultimately the method described above is a method with reason. Some of the brightest students I know have never scored high on a mulitple choice test. So why not make it fair?
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