O: Hey guys!
Since we weren’t given a topic for this blog, I thought we’d continue my previous blog about tests. I am currently in biomedical materials and we just had our second and last test before the final. I was feeling a bit overwhelmed studying for it because it was 6 chapters, 300 pages in the textbook, and 10 lectures. There was so much material that I was struggling to decide what topics were more important than others, and where to devote my time. This is very different from last spring when I was in physics 1 and we had 6 tests and no final, essentially a test every 2 weeks. In this physics class, it was 1 or 2 chapters per test and I found it way easier to study for. In astronomy, our first exam was about things on Earth, the second was about the physics of space, this third was about the first half of our solar system, and the last exam will cover the outer portion of the SS. My question to you all is, how does the professor decide what all their tests will cover? Is it just saying looking at all the material and deciding certain topics go together? Could Dr. G just have walked us through the SS and tested us when we ‘passed’ different planets?
J: Hi guys. Continuing on Oscar’s thread about tests, I’ve noticed that recent classes require much more self-studying than older testes. Dr. G often points out things in class saying “I expect you to know x,y,z” for the test. We’ve talked about this in the pedagogy class before, but is your opinion on tests where students can just study from notes to pass versus ones where students have to self-study from the textbook as well?
On another note, what about our homework assignments? One homework in particular I am excited for is the “A Day on Another World” homework. It seems that many of our homework assignments require much more than just spewing back information, although sometimes I feel like they can get a bit repetitive, such as in the case of the sunrise assignment from a while back. What kinds of homework assignments do you prefer, and how do you think they have affected your learning of astronomy?
Hope this gives us something to talk about!
