Week 6 Assignments
St. Martin's, chapter 7
O'Malley:
1) The three objections is paragraph 5, 8, and 9 are:
Paragraph 5: “It might be argued that students are adults who have to learn how to manage their own lives, but learning history or physics is more complicated than learning to drive a car or balance a checkbook. Students need coaching and practice in learning”.
Paragraph 8: “Some believe that such exams take up too much of the limited class time available to cover the material in the course. Most courses meet 150 minutes a week — three times a week for 50 minutes each time. A 20-minute weekly exam might take 30 minutes to administer, and that is one-fifth of each week’s class time”.
Paragraph 9: “Another objection professors have to frequent exams is that they take too much time to read and grade. In a 20-minute essay exam, a well-prepared student can easily write two pages. A…show more content… From personal experience, being unable to complete the material is a primary concern for teachers. O’Malley very systematically describes exactly how long each exam will take. Although frequent, the exams are short and do not take up as much time as presumed. Immediately after the excerpt posted above he states that one-fifth of each class week’s class time is worth it for a significant improvement in the student’s study habits. O’Malley’s longest counter argument is in chapter 8. He spends a lot of time and detail with this possible objection. He respects the fact that the teacher’s time is valuable and spends a good portion of his essay showing so. O’Malley does something similar to paragraph 8 in that he calculates the estimated amount of time it would take to grade such exams. He also returns with multiple replies to the objection. It is clear he respects the teachers for their time and effort and is doing his best to find a middle ground between the student’s stressful lives and the busy lives of a