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

Last Monday at 8am we had the final exam for the Mathematical Methods 1 classes. There were two less questions that in the comprehensive exam, where I took out one of the redundant questions of polynomial division where one of them was required to be solved by synthetic division. I also took out one of the questions that asked for a specific term in a binomial expansion when another question asked for complete expansion.

Other than that eleven on the non-word problem questions were still the same, relying on the fact that the students would have studied those types of questions given that the type of exam was announced to be exactly alike, and that they could get higher this time around.

From what I have seen of the preliminary results though, the word problems were the obstacle that made the students think they have done worse in this exam than in the previous one, since that is what they didn’t practice on.

That was the reason why I didn’t put any word problems in the comprehensive test in the first place: because letting the students make the conversion from sentences to equations adds another layer of difficulty to the problem, when in fact they could probably be well versed in solving straight from the equations themselves.

And just because they couldn’t solve any word problems doesn’t mean they can’t answer the same questions if the equations were given to them.

An alternative would have been to put word problems and similarly solved equations in the test, but that would have doubled the number of items at least for that part of the exam, and I believe the students already didn’t need the intimidation given by having thirty plus problem solving questions in a two-hour exam.

Maybe next time I’ll borrow a page from the book of my co-teacher Mr. Aguilar, who will give a student a hint for getting past an initial and relatively difficult part of a problem with several steps, in exchange for a deduction in the number of points the student will receive on that problem.

There were some students who arrived late for the exam. Some of them had already told me that they have an exam in their marketing subject at the same time.

A third one, on the other hand, gave the excuse that they though they had a speech scheduled for their English class at that time, and that our exam started an hour and a half later than it actually did.

I would have excused the student if he were a transferee for whom this was his first term of studying in the college, but it wasn’t. In fact, he was one who had, since the previous term, been announcing his plans of running for Student Council, and would have been expected to lead by example and know beforehand the schedules of his final exams.

I told him I could not give him the finals at that time because some of his classmates had already left the room.

I’ll have to stop my story at that point and continue tomorrow, though. I just heard the bell. Class dismissed for now.