::A Geek in Korea::

I’ve been strapped for time. Last week I had made a quiz by scrounging together workbook material and hand made materials from what I had covered in my classes. I had dutifully weighed all the materials, was sure to cover it in class, and then went about creating a quiz that was way too long. It seems I did way too much work for what I accomplished. I got the work done, but it wasn’t the best way of getting the task completed by a long shot.

One of my coworkers was asking me how I was getting along after my first month. I told him that while I was doing well, the pace of the classes was increasing and there wasn’t very much time left to get everything done. He asked me what was coming up, and I told him that I needed to do both a written examination and a group speaking project. Everyone else had written mid-term examinations and are doing speaking finals. Those are much easier to grade because there isn’t any work to bring home. I’ve got double the work and I have just as many students and classes as everyone else. CRAP.

He told me that there was a test generating program provided by the books that I could use to simply make an examination for me. All I had to do was give it a series of parameters and it would pull out questions and number them. There were specific questions in a database by unit, topic, and section ready to be used. It would also produce multiple copies of the exam with shuffled questions which prevents some cheating.

This was so mind blowing that I almost thought he was joking, then he showed me the program. Why was I not told about this?! I’ve got a lot of work to do, and this will help me save all the time it would have taken to draft the test. Most of the work in testing is after it is given. For every page of work I give, the more I have to check.

He suggested printing off tests, then having a page “answer sheet” that the students must write on. Not only does this save paper when you can reuse tests, it also saves time. You don’t need to flip through multiple pages to grade, and you can see how they did at a glance. That was another thing I had learned from my trial quiz earlier last week. Three pages of tests with three different pages to check made for a mountain of papers to carry. Had I not given the quiz, I wouldn’t have known any of this. Even in a situation that could be viewed as failure to one degree or another, I learn more and continue to improve my teaching.

Every time I ask for advice I get great stuff like this to aid me with my classes. I’m like a sponge, constantly asking about stuff and getting helpful and well tested answers to my queries. I thought I knew what I was doing to one degree or another, but the people around me have been so helpful getting me up to speed that I really and in their debt for their help. Next semester I’ll totally restructure my class to make it work more smoothly with all the information I’ve learned. As important as my classes are now, I still feel it’s sort of a “trial run” at teaching high level students.