You can lead a horse to water ...

I was all set to post today about a couple of those "What is the world coming to?" things I spotted around the blogosphere, but I'll save those for another day. Maybe tomorrow. Today, though, I need to vent.

As you may remember, I mentioned that the test I gave earlier this week was the worst I'd ever graded. Due to the extraordinarily poor performance, I decided to give them a quiz the next class period. I picked 5 multiple choice questions from the test, tweaked them slightly (e.g., changed a price floor to a price ceiling, changed the numbers, ...), and handed it out at the beginning of class. In the previous class (the day I handed back their tests), I had told the students we'd be doing this and that they should look over their tests and try to figure out why they'd missed the questions they did. [I marked the wrong answers on the test, but I didn't indicate the right answers.] Oh, I also let them use their books, notes, etc. on the quiz. I had two goals:

1) To get them to look over the material again and see just how they'd screwed up.
2) To give them an opportunity to earn a few points to boost their poor grades.

Neither goal was met.

The first question on the quiz involved determining the opportunity cost of producing one more tank, in terms of foregone car production. There was a little table at the top and all they had to do was see how much car production went down when tank production increased by 1. Some students missed the question on the test because they fell for option e -- opportunity cost is not measurable because there is no currency specified. I included that to make sure they understand opportunity can be found independent of dollar amounts.

So if you were a student who missed that on the test, wouldn't you think that the correct answer might be one of the other four (the ones involving actual numbers of cars)? I'd think so, but several students missed it on the quiz because they picked choice e AGAIN! Even after being told that was not the right answer, they picked it yet again. True, the numbers were slightly different, but if "not measurable because there is no currency specified" was not right the first time, wouldn't you realize it wasn't right the next time? Well you would IF YOU'D LOOKED OVER YOUR TEST! That's what kills me, the total lack of give a damn in this group.

Wait, it gets better! One slacker dude came in late. I tried to flag him down, but he just toodled back to his seat. I then gave up and just had the other students pass a quiz back to him. Shortly after I'd done that, though, I got to looking for the answer key I'd been working on and I couldn't find it. I'd answered the first 4 questions and I'd worked out the numbers for the 5th one, I just hadn't used the numbers to find and circle the right answer. Hence, I was pretty sure that I'd just given 80% of the answers to this slacker guy and I'd done the heavy lifting for the other 20%. The only thing I was hoping was that at least he'd miss that last one and not get 100%.

When he turned in his quiz I immediately looked at question 5 and sure enough, there were my computations. As I'd suspected, though, he wasn't able to figure out the final answer even with help. The biggest surprise came, though, when I looked at the other 4 questions. THIS GENIUS SCRATCHED THROUGH ONE OF THE RIGHT ANSWERS I'D GIVEN HIM AND CHOSE A WRONG ANSWER INSTEAD!!! I can honestly say I was amazed. What do you do with folks like that?

ARGH!