Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

Yesterday morning there were already two students out of the five who presented their oral reports, although only one of the two who scheduled it the day before showed up, thirty minutes late for the 830am set time.

But at least he was able to finish. This is the student who got a low grade in their English speech class because of his shyness, despite being very good in written tests. I still will have to tell them they have to overcome that inhibition if they want to do good in their thesis defense, and not only on the day itself, but through practice this early.

The second oral reporter was the one who was absent during the class session his classmates reported, and who gave an excuse letter slash medical certificate. He presented the best report of the day despite writing everything down on the whiteboard behind him, probably because of his technical background from high school, just like me.

After that I went back to making my Trigonometry quiz for 1120am. I used one sheet of paper to print out two sets of questions, both using half a sheet each.

There were only three parts of the test. The first part was to list down the identities they needed to use to solve the next parts. This I set at one point each or eight points total.

The second part had three questions on conversion and simplification, which I gave nine points per number, knowing that there will be various degrees of the students' opinion about a simplified expression.

The third part had three equations for verification, that I put at six points per item - two thirds the weight of the previous part. This is better than the original split that I had in mind, ten and five points, or one being twice as difficult as the other.
For these I just used several of the intermediate steps from the examples I gave them last Friday.

In fact, for all of the questions, I used part of the same expressions. It had to be converted to tangent in one exam, then cotangent in the next.

As for the verification, the left side of all the equations used were the same for both exams. Only the right side of each equation was different.

I thought that the students would have an easy time with the exam given that there were so few items, but they still used up all of the period before they submitted their paper.

Dudley, for one thing, was only able to answer the first part, in other words, eight points out of fifty.

He sat at the end of one of the rows where only every other row was occupied. So I spent most of the time at the back of the room, even calling students over if they had any questions.

But that's all I have time for today. I'll continue with this next time, as well as the afternoon oral reports.

Class dismissed for today.