Do Over Redux

I recently gave the second exam in my principles class so my students have been coming in to explain the right answers to the questions they got wrong. Two things have struck me this time around.

First, the good: As we go over the questions, I regularly quip to the students “You’re doing a lot better today [than you did on the exam].” They laugh, and several have said something along the lines of “I really had to learn it this time around.” These are the better students, not necessarily in terms of grades but in terms of their seriousness towards the course.

Now, the not so good, but still something to learn from. I’ve had a number of weaker students, not students who can’t do the work, but ones who didn’t work very hard and as a result did very poorly on this exam, come in unprepared to explain the right answers.

Okay, this has happened before, but one thing I saw this time which was new for me, was that as I tried to walk them through the problems they revealed a lack of understanding of some very basic things, e.g. what the Keynesian consumption function looks like, things that any student should know. What I thought was that they must have crammed for these very basic concepts, and forgotten them in the short time since the exam. What’s surprising is that these concepts are to most students like riding a bike: once learned, you always remember them. It’s hard to imagine, but I guess these students never truly learned them. Or rather, they didn’t try to learn them until the last minute when they only had time to pack things into (very) short term memory. A little genuine effort earlier on could have made a huge difference.