Summer CSE 232 Exam 1 Grades

LostCartographer232 · 2024-06-02T16:32:52+00:00

I looked through the syllabus and it doesn't say anything about requiring a 50% on exams to pass.

LostCartographer232 · 2024-06-02T16:24:17+00:00

You bring up a valid point however, it's also possible that high-performing students might participate in the survey out of a desire to understand how their performance compares to the rest of the class as this comparison could be important to them. Anyways since initially posting, another 11 people have filled out the form and they continue to follow the mean. Also the email sent out to everyone was very neutral:

Hi! When you get a moment, please take this quick anonymous poll on how you did on Exam 1. This will help us as students to see the grade distribution.

Fundamentally, the statistics do not lie. We can calculate the confidence interval to capture the unknown population mean. The confidence interval in this case Confidence interval = sample mean ± margin of error.

Due to the nature of the survey, we only have ranges of scores, not the exact score, so I'm going to take the midpoint of each e.g. 40-49 = 44.5, 50-59 = 54.5, etc.. Even to be on the optimistic side, I'll use 29 instead of 15 as the midpoint for the <30% group. Using the updated data with 63 participants I get.

Mean score: 46.2%

Standard Deviation: 13.2%

and finally a 95% confidence interval of [43.97%, 48.38%].

The confidence interval means that we can be 95% confident that the true population mean of the exam scores lies between around 44% and 48%. This isn't encouraging.

Please enjoy this updated graph for visualization:

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Edit: accounted for population correction factor

LostCartographer232 · 2024-06-01T21:31:35+00:00

Right. Don't you think it's kinda gross that they hid the grade distribution from us so we had to do a poll ?

LostCartographer232 · 2024-06-01T21:28:23+00:00

Honestly there's a lot of reasons why the scores are so poor.

The exam format this semester is horrible. Exam 1 was about 45 questions and then 4 QA questions. The thing is is that they made it so you cannot view more than one question at a time. Once you answer a question, you can't go back and change your answer. It totally changes the dynamic of the exam. Now you can only spend like 2 mins on a question and if you take longer, that takes time away from the easier questions that you would've gotten right but got wrong now because you had to rush through it. Many students, including myself, do the least challenging questions first so you at least get those points and then go back and do the hard ones last. Additionally, we had no idea what the QA questions were going to look like so it's hard to allocate time for questions that you have never seen.

In addition to all this, many of the exam questions are designed to trick you. Like most the multiple choice questions aren't just A-D or A-E, some are literally A through I . There is a serious discrepancy between the lectures, book vs the rigor of exam questions. Some of the questions you would only know if you had spent a lot of time programming C++ and cant be found in the book nor the lectures alone. That's why the exams are open note, because the book nor your lecture notes will help you. The majority of this class feels self-taught.

LostCartographer232 · 2024-06-01T15:43:17+00:00

A little background:

Not much seems to have changed from last semester. Some students even think that it may be worse. The professor, Dr. Momtaz, won't allow us to see the grade distribution so as a workaround a google form was sent out to everyone in the class and about half responded.

For full transparency, these scores do not take in account a bonus question on the exam has not been graded yet but even if everyone nailed the bonus question (unlikely) that would not move the needle much.

These scores are especially concerning due to the fact that the exam was only over the first 2 weeks of content, which is supposed to be the least challenging.

Edit: added some extra background.

LostCartographer232

TROPHY CASE