first week of school...

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so the first week of school has gone by, and now i have a better idea of how this semester may go.

i'm taking three classes:

one with the classy (hungarian) professor i mentioned last year, who will probably be my advisor for the phd thesis. the course is a seminar/reading course, which means we'll be reading a lot of research papers.

another is operator theory, and surprisingly enough, the professor is a white guy who teaches the course completely in american english, so it has been a "normal" class thus far.

the last of the three courses is the greek class i mentioned that i wanted to take last semester. the class is pretty easy, as the aim of the course is reading comprehension, but completely unconcerned about forming sentences of our own (which is what i want anyways).


the next entry will talk about what i teach this semester (God willing)...



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the results of the course...

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After all is said and done, here are the results of how the students did in the course:


6 students got A's.

5 students got B's.

4 students got C's.

5 students got D's.

4 students got F's.

A pretty evenly spread grade distribution.

The grading of the final exam was excruciating; the total possible points were 140, but the highest score was 126; as a result, I made the exam to be out of 120.

This enabled some of the border line students to attain a D, which yielded the above grade results.


All in all, it was a good experience, but I'm definitely not planning to teach again the next summer, as I covet my time more than the pay given.


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exam 4 results...

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so after the punches were pulled,
here are the results:


4 students got scores in the 90's.

4 students got scores in the 80's.

5 students got scores in the 70's.

6 students got scores in the 60's.

4 students got scores in the 50's.


Finally, a bell curve like result, although it is slightly shifted down.

Monday was the last day that covered new material, and the last two days as well as today has been review.

The final exam is tomorrow; hopefully, the process of grading and giving out grades will not be too painful.

We'll see how it goes...


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pulling the punches...

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currently i'm grading exam4, and it's so bad that i'm retracting my draconian grading methodology of giving severely limited partial credit; now, i'm grading the exam like i'm santa claus...


...put a red fuzzy cap on me, and call me saint someone...


i'll post the stats later...

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the result of exam 3...

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in my excitement of internet at home, the results of exam 3 that everyone has been anticipating has been delayed...

so the stats:

4 students got scores in the 90's.

4 students got scores in the 80's.

3 students got scores in the 70's.

3 students got scores in the 60's.

2 students got scores in the 50's

8 students got scores lower than the 50's.


There is a mild tapering of the scores from top down, but as the reader can easily see, it is definitely bottom heavy, as 10 students failed the exam.

Since the drop date, one student dropped the class, and the others decided to stay; there seems to be a renewed diligence by the failing students, but I'm not sure how much influence this extra burst of effort will affect their outcome of their grades.

I'll be administering the 4th exam tomorrow; my hope and prayer is that everyone, including the failing students, will attain scores in the 60's and above. Perhaps I'm being too optimistic...


...we'll see how it goes...


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