Tag Archives: midterm

February 21, 2012, 11:00 am

Conducting Your Midterm Evaluations Publicly with Google Docs

Although the recent weather down here in Atlanta suggests that we’re nearing May and the semester’s end, it turns out that we’re only getting close to midterms. The middle of the semester is a great time to take stock of how your courses are going. One approach is to conduct a mid-semester self evaluation, asking yourself what’s going well and what you can do to improve the rest of the semester.

While knowing thyself is useful, it’s also useful to know what your students are thinking. That’s why we at ProfHacker have written about giving midterm evaluations to students every year since our blog was born: Billie covered the Small Group Instructional Diagnosis as a midterm model in 2009; Amy asked her students to evaluate their own performance in 2010; and George provided four simple questions for a midterm evaluation in 2011. (Guys, I’ve got 2012 covered. Holler!)

It turns out…

October 31, 2011, 11:00 am

Five Questions for Midterm Season

By Natalie Houston

Depending on when your fall academic term started, you’re either in the middle of midterm season or just barely recovering from it. Students are a bit more tired, perhaps a bit less enthusiastic than they were six weeks ago; the sniffles, coughs, and sneezes of fall have descended upon the university; and faculty committee work, grant deadlines, and academic conferences all seem to coincide in late October and early November. Plus, of course, there’s grading.

Here at ProfHacker, we’ve written before about planning your courses at the beginning of the term and about reflecting on your courses at the semester’s close. But if you can spare 15 minutes now, while you’re in the thick of the semester, to jot down some ideas about how things are going in your courses, you’ll have valuable insight when planning the course for the next time. When you’re filled with pre-semester enthusiasm or…