Should I argue with my professor on this?

[Borek]

I don't have this exam on me because i took it two days ago and we got our results back. We didn't get the physical copy.

You said you did the question with your brother.

 

[Valjeanie]

If you've learned enough in the course or in pre-requisite courses to 'theoretically' solve the problems on that test; as in, you've been taught the foundational assumptions and have been made aware of the tools needed to solve such problems, I consider those problems 'fair.' Though not always pedagogically worthwhile, of course.

Say in the case where someone's Calculus I course was asked to derive Green's theorem. If those guys hadn't been taught what the thing called 'Green's theorem' states, it's not a fair question. If instead of 'derive Green's theorem,' they're told to derive a relationship between a line integral around a simple closed curve C and a double integral over the plane region D bounded by C, which happens to be called 'Green's theorem,' then that's okay. Or maybe 'prove this theorem: <theorem written explicitly>." As long as they can speak the problem's language, meaning they've been taught the notation and so on, it's a legit problem.

If they haven't been taught those things, the test isn't testing the material covered in the course. Pedagogically this seems like a bad decision, but if a professor makes it clear that his or her tests are designed not to test what is covered in the course but rather to test any random ****, then it's also okay in this situation. But that strategy seems a bit strange.

To the people who think the OP's situation is all right: is it an OK test with you even if the students haven't been taught the foundations and the notations? Is it okay to ask questions on a Physics I test where v is not << c, without first teaching the postulates of special relativity? Maybe the really bright students can condense Einstein's Annus Mirabilis down into a single testing period and still have time left over to answer the questions?

The only students able to answer those sorts of questions will be those who've happened to pick up the material elsewhere. It turns into a dumb diagnostic. Just ask hard questions that can be solved by a really bright student who knows the explicit course material well enough.

 

[DrummingAtom]

The particulars in this discussion may be moot, but the general philosophies are important. I think most university students encounter this intellectual hurdle at some point. I had a tough time with it as a young student. The things is most first year undergraduate classes consist of people who did pretty well in high school. So if every exam consisted of material that was only covered in the lecture notes, you would end up with marks similar to what everyone came in with in high school. Your class average would be around 85%. Just like in high school the guys who put in an extra hour of studying would do just as well as those who spent every night in the library, using course material as a base to build from, trying to challenge themselves, figuring out how what they were learning was used in senior classes. In the end how would THAT be fair?

I agree with the "general philosophies" part. Although, what the OP is arguing is that this test was flat out unfair and without ever seeing this evidence no one can say if it was or wasn't. The OP is talking about rounding up classmates and storming the castle! At this point, some concrete examples are needed.

You said you did the question with your brother.

Hahaha, what the hell... This thread is getting absolutely ridiculous.

 

[atyy]

Welcome to college. You should give your professor a gift and say good things about them in their student evaluation because they are doing what a college professor should do.

You are not in high school any more. The rules are different. Most of the material on college tests will not be material that is directly covered in the courses and this is a good thing. Learn to get used to this, because this is going to be the way things are for now on, not just in college but in life.

The good news is that it probably won't damage your grades. You'll get a grade that seems really bad, but because things are curved, if you answer three questions out of five and most other people answer two, then you'll end up with a good grade.

I hope MIT isn't like this.

 

[cdotter]

Competition for what?

Competition for everything. Grade inflation is rampant. GPA is looked at closely when applying to graduate school, medical school, law school, dental school, pharmacy school, etc.

 

[twofish-quant]

Also there are two possibilities...

1) no one in the class got the question right. If that's the case there's no point in arguing that the question is unfair, because you didn't get hurt by the question being there,

2) some people in the class got the question right. If that's the case, you'll find it hard to argue that the question is unfair, because some of the people in the class got the question.

 

[Jack21222]

I wish I had more exam questions like the one the OP is complaining about.

My Physics 2 professor did something like this on the second midterm. He took a fairly complex test question from his circuit analysis class and made it worth something like 30% of the exam grade. It involved a symbol which we hadn't learned at the time, but he explained what it meant.

Of course, nobody in the class got it right, but he just wanted to test our understanding of the material, to see how we'd attack the problem. I enjoyed the challenge.

 

[atyy]

A hard question on a test is just a gimmick. Are real world problems solved within such tight time limits? No. They are very difficult, and take a long time to solve. If they have to be solved in a short time, sometimes you will be lucky and think quickly and solve it. Most of the time, you will fail catastrophically unless you are well prepared in advance.

 

[cdotter]

Also there are two possibilities...

1) no one in the class got the question right. If that's the case there's no point in arguing that the question is unfair, because you didn't get hurt by the question being there,

2) some people in the class got the question right. If that's the case, you'll find it hard to argue that the question is unfair, because some of the people in the class got the question.

Unless "some people" in the class had been exposed to the material before, outside of class.

 

[twofish-quant]

Unless "some people" in the class had been exposed to the material before, outside of class.

Yes, but that's a different issue. I do know of one situation in which a complaint against a prof was generally considered valid because he was lazy and used the exact same questions that was found on previous tests, and that was unfair because people that had copies of previous tests got an advantage over people that didn't.

But that prof was generally incompetent at teaching anyway. I think he ended up with the lowest instructor rating in the history of course evaluations, and there was a strong rumor that he was being intentionally incompetent because he hated teaching and wanted to make sure that no one ever put him in front of an undergraduate course ever again, which is what happened.

 

[twofish-quant]

Competition for everything. Grade inflation is rampant. GPA is looked at closely when applying to graduate school, medical school, law school, dental school, pharmacy school, etc.

First of all, GPA is a factor, but it's not the deciding one in grad school admissions...

Second, if you have a competition and you boost every one's grade by 50%, you just end up with grade inflation and it doesn't help anyone get in.

Third, if you do have a student that can walk on water and derive things that are not in the book, then a test in which that student gets extra points for figuring out something that's not in the book is quite good, don't you think?

Fourth, why do you want to get into medical school, law school, dental school, pharmacy school etc...

For me, I wanted to get into physics grad school because I am an intellectual masochist that loves getting problems that I have difficulty solving.

 

[twofish-quant]

most of the responses in this thread seem ridiculous to me. yes in college there is a certain amount of self studying you need to do on your own and yes you are meant to be challenged further than a regurgitation of material but there is a limit.

For science and math courses designed to train people to be scientists, there isn't a limit.

We are just talking about different philosophies. For people that are doing remedial high school algebra in which the point of the class is to teach skills that they should have learned in high school, you teach the class differently. But we aren't talking about that sort of class.

keep going up until you get to the dean if you have to until this is resolved. good luck. also if you want sometimes it is effective to just go straight to the highest person you can(like the dean of the school in this case)

Before you do that, you have to figure out what the culture of the school is. There's a good chance that if you go to the Dean or the President, the professor will get a note saying "Good job, keep doing what you are doing."

 

[TMFKAN64]

I think you should *definitely* argue with your professor. Even tenured faculty could use a good laugh from time to time...

Life is unfair. Deal.

 

[twofish-quant]

How does training physicists differ from training hockey players, though? They are both trained with the aim of excelling at the highest level, and both require not just throwing the hardest thing you can at them, but a well thought out approach.

The technique of throwing the hardest problem that you can at someone is a well thought out approach. A lot of what you learn in school isn't the material but the culture and the ideology. What's a fair question?

One common question is "what do top schools look for?" and one important answer is "students that enjoy getting tough questions that weren't in the textbook." My undergraduate school structures admissions intentionally to look for students that *want* questions that weren't covered in class, and this is the general admissions philosophy of graduate schools.

In fact, when my firm does hiring interviews, we get a little nervous with people that have 4.0/4.0 GPA's because there is the worry that those people will react badly if something happens and they don't score 98%.

It is a culture shock, you do need to adjust to it, but if you can't adjust to this sort of thing, then I don't see you getting a Ph.D.

They matter, they matter to employers and to grad schools.

See above for what employers and grad schools look for. Undergrad admissions is a totally different beast than work and grad schools. For the more interesting jobs, employers *HATE* hiring people that can't deal with unexpected questions.

And even if they were just a motivation method, getting low grades due to the test being just ridiculously hard is more of demotivation than a motivation.

Depends on the student, and depends on the school. The more important things that you learn in college are in the "hidden curriculum." One thing that most colleges have to deal with is how to handle students that got 90% in high school and are now just struggling to get a 50%.

But you're trying to educate as many people as you can, and you can always motivate the motivated with other means and get the same results, whereas if you screw up the latter category of students, there's no way you can get that back.

But in college, we are not trying to educate as many people as possible. That's high school. Not everyone is going to be a physicist, and not everyone wants to be a physicist. If we were talking about a class that teaches basic calculus to non-scientists, then the rules are different.

But if you want to be a top scientist, then this is the type of curriculum that you are going to be in for, and if you can't adjust to it, then you really need to reconsider whether or not you want to be a top scientist.

Is the philosophy you're trying to convey here a household idea in most of US universities or was it just that way with MIT?

It's how MIT works. Also you see this sort of philosophy in the military service academies (West Point). I've been told that this is also how things work in the Grand Ecoles in France.

Most people can't stand this sort of intense pressure, a few people just crave this sort of thing. That's why there are so few Ph.D.'s out there.

I have to keep asking the question "How bad you want to be good?"

If someone lasts for 6 seconds, others for 5 and then some only 4, then that is just too small of a difference to really make that distinction and the error in that assessment is just to great for you to be able to take the result seriously./QUOTE]

The big test is whether you show up at the boxing ring after you've been hit.

 

[Chunkysalsa]

I'm curious as to what the question is.

I mean in my opinion, if the question is challenging and requires some higher level of thought but is still based on the things you learned or went over, then its a good thought provoking exercise. If however its completely unrelated then I find that question pretty pointless and I guess you can call it unfair. For example if you are taking a test on say Newton's laws and there's a question about circuits, then that's pretty stupid. If the question is a super hard higher level question that is based on say Newton's laws then I say that's a fun question.


I wish my teachers would do this more, honestly ( of course allowing a change in grading policy to accommodate, no body wants an impossible to answer test graded normally).

This is actually how I study. I jump headfirst into a problem not knowing anything, then slowly I learn the workings and wordings of the question, the formula needed and the concepts behind why I need it. Makes it stick in my brain better. Also the same reason that most of the equations given, I try to derive at least once myself.

 

[deluks917]

I think its worth looking at the tests where you are expected to get all the questions as well. For example failing the written mathematics preliminary exam twice at Rutgers results in dismissal from the phd program. The exams are here: http://www.math.rutgers.edu/grad/phd_requirements/written_qual.html" .

I didn't think they looked like a piece of cake (I'm an undergrad) but neither did they seem impossible. I was able to solve a few of them. It might be worth taking a look (also a good source of manageable - the grad students only have 30 minutes you have as long as it takes-but difficult problems if you are an undergrad.)

 

[atyy]

It's how MIT works.

Just your experience - or an actual institute wide philosophy? I find this very hard to believe.

I mean, it seems the professors want as many students to do as well as possible on the finals.

American Journal of Physics, Vol. 77, No. 8, pp. 746–753, August 2009
"For the future, this study suggests that efforts to improve end-of-term test scores in “Introductory Mechanics” at MIT should concentrate on improving interactive instructional activities. Improving interactive electronic homework, especially for conceptual material, and finding recitation and tutorial formats that are more interactive would both seem to offer rewards."

Also, if you do your homework at MIT, you do better on the exams.

Physical Review Special Topics - Physics Education Research, Article Number: 010104, Jan 27, 2010
"Submissions to an online homework tutor were analyzed to determine whether they were copied. The fraction of copied submissions increased rapidly over the semester, as each weekly deadline approached and for problems later in each assignment. The majority of students, who copied less than 10% of their problems, worked steadily over the three days prior to the deadline, whereas repetitive copiers (those who copied >30% of their submitted problems) exerted little effort early. Importantly, copying homework problems that require an analytic answer correlates with a 2(sigma) decline over the semester in relative score for similar problems on exams but does not significantly correlate with the amount of conceptual learning as measured by pretesting and post-testing. An anonymous survey containing questions used in many previous studies of self-reported academic dishonesty showed similar to 1/3 less copying than actually was detected. The observed patterns of copying, free response questions on the survey, and interview data suggest that time pressure on students who do not start their homework in a timely fashion is the proximate cause of copying. Several measures of initial ability in math or physics correlated with copying weakly or not at all. Changes in course format and instructional practices that previous self-reported academic dishonesty surveys and/or the observed copying patterns suggested would reduce copying have been accompanied by more than a factor of 4 reduction of copying from similar to 11% of all electronic problems to less than 3%. As expected (since repetitive copiers have approximately three times the chance of failing), this was accompanied by a reduction in the overall course failure rate. Survey results indicate that students copy almost twice as much written homework as online homework and show that students nationally admit to more academic dishonesty than MIT students."

 

[kramer733]

What the... I don't even know what to say. (that's a lie haha..) Ok but seriously, what most people have said is right. Enjoy the challenge of solving a new problem you have never encoutnered before. I mean you do have all the skills to do it. It's just a matter of thinking out of the box.

I personally love the problems that you can't find from textbooks. The questions from math contests are amazing because you've never encoutnered them before. I feel as though all the tools I've gained from class are training me for using them on math contests. It's because I've never encountered it before and it gets me really excited.

I'm not really one to self study and go on to new things (i'm still in high school doing calculus and vectors now) but there's a satisfaction when you can't get the question right away and have to really really think.

 

[anubis01]

I think the OP didn't properly explain his situation.

I had a similar case in Cal III where the professor wrote a midterm/exam that had practically nothing to do with what was done in class and essentially consisted of proofs. Now I'm not talking the simple kind of proofs like derive the jacobian matrix but trying to prove the theorem for a differentiable function (The one with the limit). Now in my professors case, he taught pure math at the third and fourth year level, so when he tried to teach Cal 3, a second year applied course from a purist perspective, it didn't go well. He also didn't teach the last chapter involving Greens, Stokes theorem etc, which is prerequisite for Electricity and Magnetism .

The university already took notice when we did horrible on the midterm, but the final class average was a D, with no bell curve. However, because this was a second year course, which was essential for Engineers and Physicists the university decided to provide the class either chance to rewrite the exam with a new professor or to retake the course entirely while dropping the other one off the transcript (Something that is never, ever done). I took the latter route and got an A.

My point is OP, individually you can complain but it will probably amount to nothing, if on the other hand if the class mark is so collectively low then it is possible that some action might be taken. None the less though it was still a pretty big disruption in my academic career, and I did have to pay to retake the course, but that's just how it works sometimes so you should be prepared for that.

 

[iRaid]

Why would a problem on an exam come out of your book or from your professor? They're supposed to be hard lol

 

[flyingpig]

I think the OP didn't properly explain his situation.

I had a similar case in Cal III where the professor wrote a midterm/exam that had practically nothing to do with what was done in class and essentially consisted of proofs. Now I'm not talking the simple kind of proofs like derive the jacobian matrix but trying to prove the theorem for a differentiable function (The one with the limit). Now in my professors case, he taught pure math at the third and fourth year level, so when he tried to teach Cal 3, a second year applied course from a purist perspective, it didn't go well. He also didn't teach the last chapter involving Greens, Stokes theorem etc, which is prerequisite for Electricity and Magnetism .

The university already took notice when we did horrible on the midterm, but the final class average was a D, with no bell curve. However, because this was a second year course, which was essential for Engineers and Physicists the university decided to provide the class either chance to rewrite the exam with a new professor or to retake the course entirely while dropping the other one off the transcript (Something that is never, ever done). I took the latter route and got an A.

My point is OP, individually you can complain but it will probably amount to nothing, if on the other hand if the class mark is so collectively low then it is possible that some action might be taken. None the less though it was still a pretty big disruption in my academic career, and I did have to pay to retake the course, but that's just how it works sometimes so you should be prepared for that.

So if everyone fails and the department decides no curve because the professors decide to "challenge the students", then isn't that a sophisticated form of robbery?

 

[flyingpig]

Guys, it wasn't just one question. There was two other one. The exam had 6 questions and 1 m/c page

Most people bombed the 5 questions and tried their best efforts through the m/c page.

I made it through one question and the m/c page...the other ones I tried, I might get partial credit for it.

The question was something about finding an isotope or an element from an unknown compound based on a mass spectroscopy with % stuff, there were two different % thing, I don't remember what is it called. It was two different %.

The other one was too specific to remember, it was a mixing problem including %.

One of them was about "relative energy" which no one knew what it meant...I decided to guess that they meant the energy in a shell or something.

= Finding the energy of electron emitannce (using the bohr model equation
= Finding the wavelengths of energy
= Stoichometry problems involving empirical formula and limiting reagent (to be fair, this was on the exam which was created by our professor, the other 5 questions was from the other professor, which is funny because everyone in his class also did as bad as we did...)
= Electron configuration problems

Now out of all of those problems only the stoichometry problem was on the exam as a Free-Response question. The other "main topic" we were suppose to be focussing on was on a m/c which weigh like 10%...

Now I have the docx of the exams from the PAST, (some of them have been removed today...I don't know why), if anyone can tell me how to upload it or something, please tell me because the download the document you need be a student at my college (a username and a password). Once you see the content of the past midterms, you will understand.

 

[anubis01]

So if everyone fails and the department decides no curve because the professors decide to "challenge the students", then isn't that a sophisticated form of robbery?

It was actually the professors decision not to offer a bell curve and the department also offered the option to take a new 100% final, written by a different professor. I only choose the former because I needed to replace my E&M course, which I couldn't take due to not passing the prerequisite course (Cal 3).

Edit*

Regardless, I doubt showing us your past finals is going to provide you with any peace, just try and take some time off to relax, and understand that just one bad mark isn't the end of everything.

 

[fasterthanjoao]

Guys, it wasn't just one question. There was two other one. The exam had 6 questions and 1 m/c page

Most people bombed the 5 questions and tried their best efforts through the m/c page.

I made it through one question and the m/c page...the other ones I tried, I might get partial credit for it.

This will happen to you in many more college courses. Lots of people agree with twofish and though I probably didn't when I was a student, I do now. The point of questions like that isn't to get them 100% correct - it's to test the students way of thinking. When I mark questions like that, I don't expect anyone to get it right. If they do, great. But the point is to check their methodology - how did they think it should be approached? Did they recognise either key formulae or concepts? At university level, a lot of university is about showing the examiner that you can recognise opportunities to use physics when it's put in front of you. You need to find a way to show any understanding at all.

There is also another thing you keep saying that is bothering me: "it wasn't even in the book" - why was there only one book you looked at..? You should be looking at lots more than just the recommended material. Those recommended lists are just the starting point. You also need to get out of the high school mentality where you expect to be able to answer everything 100% if you studied well. Always read over-and-above at university level, but also always expect things to come up that you haven't seen, or things to come up that you don't immediately recognise the physics. You just need to learn how to break these questions down, and try to convey some sort of understanding.

Like I said at the start, this will happen to you a lot but your comparison of small-child vs lion is just stupid. You're saying that the question might be something from a year or two ahead of your education? It isn't as far away from your abilities as you think.

I remember I had an exam just like you're describing in my final year. It was something that wasn't in the notes, or in the main recommended text - after an initial panic I just knuckled down and tried to imagine the physics that would solve the problem. I wrote down my thoughts for the examiner, such that they could understand my thinking - they will give marks if you can show you're thinking like a physicist.

 

[Borek]

Many years ago my Mom told me about an oral exam she had to take during her studies (she had Ph.D. in E.E.). For some reason she wasn't prepared well, but she did her best using whatever she knew. At the end examiner said to her "you don't have many soldiers, but you use them well".

 

[QuarkCharmer]

This will happen to you in many more college courses

This is true. There will always be that professor that "does not believe in A's".
I have a 4.0 in every course except for English Comp II. Yes, English-freaking-Comp! The majority of the assignments/tests were essay-type, opinion essays, and unless your "opinion" agreed with that of the professor (which you would not know until after the assignment) you were not getting an A. I went through the schools databases reading many a critical analysis on the readings hoping to write what the professor wanted to hear and the best I could muster was a B. It was a miserable class, and the professor had his own very specific opinions on the readings that were contrary to what all of the online/db/etc sources said.

It was frustrating, knowing that one mans "superiority complex" is what cut my 4.0 down, but the community here re-assured me that it's not the end of the world, and chances are, it will happen again.

 

[chiro]

I'm going to side with two-fish and others on this one. If you want to go to graduate school and be a professional in your field, then like two-fish said it is great practice.

The truth is that people don't get paid or rewarded for solving problems that have been solved: they get paid/rewarded for problems that have not been solved.

This whole pop psychology idea of making people feel great about themselves does a lot more damage than people realize. You no doubt could find other people to side with you and say that what happened is unfair, but do you really want people like that around you?

If you want to be good in your field, then you will have to fail, and fail many many times. Failing doesn't guarantee success, in fact nothing does, but it does build character that can really amplify your chances of success.

I would think about what your real motivations are for becoming a professional in your field if that is what you want to do. I'm sure other professionals in various fields on this forum can back up the sentiment that they are not only paid to solve problems that have "already been solved", but problems that are "unsolved" to some degree.

 

[Annonymous111]

I don't think that there is any confusion.

One thing that you have to be aware of it may be pointless to raise this issue with the professor because he or she may have a teaching and testing philosophy that is similar to mine, and may think that adding questions out of nowhere is a good thing to do. At that point you'll have to escalate, but you may find that everyone in the chain of command from the department head to the dean to the president of the university backs the professor because they've decided that this is the best way to teach.

At that point, you have to make some decisions about what you really want to do with your future. The reason I think that this is a good way of teaching is that my experience is that this is how you create great physicists and mathematicians, and you'll have to decide if you really want to be a physicist if this is the sort of thing that you have to learn to live with.

Going from high school rules to college rules is often a culture shock for students...

Dude I think you don't understand the flyingpig. Let's compare this to daily life. Suppose you had a test on English and you were asked to write Russian to prove you know English? What does that test? I bet even the most profficient English speaker wouldn't have any clue how to write Russian if they didn't already know how to. IN fact this is obvious!

An exam should be challenging but not so challenging that you don't even have sufficient background to understand all the material if you've got a solid understanding of the course. If flyingpig made a correct comparison, then what I'm seeing is that his prof. is like asking him a question on calculus when he only knows how to add and subtract. Even a human calculator of arithemtic, however extraordinary, cannot work out what an integral means and evaluate it in a 3 hour exam. The questions need to be so that you can actually understand them and have enough background to answer them. It shouldn't be such that you need to develop a new theory in a three hour exam.

 

[Annonymous111]

Though I feel for you flyingpig, the point is this: Even if you had no idea what the question meant, even if it was written in a new language that only one person in the world speaks, even if every other person in the class knows the answer and you don't, you should be hungry to get the answer! Find a book and research the question once you get the exam back. If you couldn't answer it and didn't even know what it meant, go learn! If you want to go to grad. school, you should be hungry to learn things. Take out a book and learn everything that was asked in an exam. Then you'll have learned something. Even if you get rejected from every grad. school on Earth, knowledge is more important than what grad. schools think of you. And besides, even if you get a tonne of F's, you can explain to grad. schools that the exams were unfair. Let's see what grad. schools think of that. On the other hand, even if you get a tonne of F's, and you explain to grad. schools that you enjoyed the challenge and really absorbed a lot of information, they'll think much higher of you. Write lots of expository articles on advanced topics to prove it to grad. schools. Even if you're rejected, you'll learn. I always say, knowledge is power. You can do research on your own. You don't need to go to grad. school. Do research get a nobel prize and then no-one will give a damn that you haven't gone to grad. school. That's what can happen if you quit whining and start working.

 

[flyingpig]

Though I feel for you flyingpig, the point is this: Even if you had no idea what the question meant, even if it was written in a new language that only one person in the world speaks, even if every other person in the class knows the answer and you don't, you should be hungry to get the answer! Find a book and research the question once you get the exam back. If you couldn't answer it and didn't even know what it meant, go learn! If you want to go to grad. school, you should be hungry to learn things. Take out a book and learn everything that was asked in an exam. Then you'll have learned something. Even if you get rejected from every grad. school on Earth, knowledge is more important than what grad. schools think of you. And besides, even if you get a tonne of F's, you can explain to grad. schools that the exams were unfair. Let's see what grad. schools think of that. On the other hand, even if you get a tonne of F's, and you explain to grad. schools that you enjoyed the challenge and really absorbed a lot of information, they'll think much higher of you. Write lots of expository articles on advanced topics to prove it to grad. schools. Even if you're rejected, you'll learn. I always say, knowledge is power. You can do research on your own. You don't need to go to grad. school. Do research get a nobel prize and then no-one will give a damn that you haven't gone to grad. school. That's what can happen if you quit whining and start working.

For some reason, we are not allowed to get the exam back. But class average was 40%... and no scaling.