I shudder to think about the fourth week at my university, which starts tomorrow. I have one section of class that has an average below 60% simply because almost a quarter of the students haven't been in class for most of the first three weeks (and not, as the whiny members of the class insist because I'm just so hard that no one can earn even a C. The average of people who have only missed one class is 75%). If that was a non-blow-off performance, will there be anyone in that class this week?
I've done this when handing back exams and noticing low attendance. I wrote the average for students who picked up their exams right away and the average for those who didn't pick them up after 2 classes. It was 15% different. Why not plot a simple graph with attendance vs grade in class?
The short answer is that I usually do the plot later in the class because I've never before had so many people miss so much class early on. However, you're right that perhaps what I ought to do as I make up the test for Friday is use that as my graph reading exercise instead of my more usual examples and see who can draw the relevant conclusions.
Polly, the whole situation sounds awful. And the "helpful" calls from those higher in the food chain... ugh. Don't you just love how they remind you that it's entirely up to you how to proceed... and then make all sorts of "suggestions" about what you should do.
So tempting to "suggest" that the "Helpful" people come teach the class since they're so darn knowledgeable about all of it. I'm quite certain you can do their jobs a lot easier than they can do yours.
The department chair does teach the other two sections of this statistics class, so I'm sure he does know how to do it. I was too stunned to ask at the time, but I'm pretty sure it must have been a wave of complaints to both the chair and associate dean since they have been laid back almost to the point of being comatose on other things. When I say friendly, I mean they were friendly and I didn't feel any pressure--except the fact that this is the first week teaching at a new school and it would be best not to have all my students immediately drop so that I lose a section of pay.
Yes, I, too, am giving tests at the end of this fourth week of school on which I expect to have a lot of failures and whining about the failures, despite my best efforts to prepare the students for the tests also known as homework, reading, quizzes, and in-class work.
