Journal of Research in Innovative Teaching - National University

such persons is hardly better than calling for a friend’s help in the TV game show Who Wants to
Be a Millionaire This narrows significantly a pool of possible candidates for synchronous
assistance.
The second case is much more probable and therefore deserves more attention to prevent
it. Such prevention could be achieved by individualizing the exam assignments. Thus, each
student may be given an individual code, with each assigned problem being dependent on this
code. Such a measure, although efficient, would, however, make understanding the problem
difficult for some students. Also, it would make grading much more complicated for the
instructor.
Having two or three versions of the exam and changing them during the exam day could
be more realistic. Such change would not affect the exams that were already opened.
Unfortunately, the eCollege platform does not allow quick replacement of an exam. It can be
only modified question by question, which is possible but takes some time. Actually, it is
possible to create a bank of tests, but each of them needs to be assigned an equal number of
grade points, which will cause confusion in the gradebook.
Class Mean GPA as a Measure of Efficiency
This integral characteristic is an important tool of assessing both the class performance and the
instructor’s grading policy. However, this measure must be used with caution, as we can see
from Table 1.
This table presents the grade list for a class of 25 students. The total scores are listed in
Column 2, and the letter grades are entered in Column 3. Column 4 contains the numerical
equivalents of the letter grades. The average of Column 2 is 80.1, which would result in a “B”
grade for an individual student. The average of Column 4 is 2.4, which, in turn, is equivalent to a
“C” for and individual. This disparity comes, evidently, from the differences of scales. (Indeed,
the commonly used grade correlation table contains the classes 90 – 100, 80 – 89, 70 – 79, 60 –
69, and 0 – 59; the last class being much wider than the rest of them.) Nevertheless, such
disparity, if any, results in a grade discrepancy not exceeding one level (e.g., B vs. C etc.).
Another kind of discrepancy has a purely formal nature. If a poorly performing student
withdraws from the class, his/her record will be removed from the grade list. If such a student
remains on the roster and gets a “D” or an “F,” this grade must be taken into account, and then
the average score or GPA drops. Thus, if we remove the F’s (Rows 1 and 2) from the grade list,
the averages of Columns 2 and 4 will rise to 82.7 and 2.7 respectively. That means the students
who withdraw from a class before it is too late may affect the average GPA and even cause
apparent grade inflation. In our opinion, the average GPA should be calculated with a “0” for
each “W” in the grade roster.
Using Microsoft Excel and Graphing Calculators
A modern statistics course must include work with large data sets. This is not difficult with a
popular and widely known application like Microsoft Excel, which possesses the necessary
statistical functions. It is possible to assign small projects, at least in descriptive statistics.
Perhaps, constructing confidence intervals may be feasible too if time allows. (The issue of time
is critical in a short course.) Assignments of such kind would be easy to individualize in order to
prevent plagiarism.
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