The Semester Goes Out Not With a Bang, But With a Whimper

I was just commenting to the Unknown Wife how this semester was ending going so well compared to previous ones - my student managed investment fund presentation was done a day earlier than usual, my principles class was ahead of schedule, and my exams were at the beginning of exam period rather than near the end.

I should have known - never say things like that. Even in jest.

It angers Academia - the patron goddess of all professors (also known as "she who makes professors' work go pear-shaped at the worst possible time")

So, what happens? I was cutting and pasting items from the grades spreadsheet for my principles class (it has four components, all on separate tabs of the worksheet). Somehow, I not only deleted the grades for all three exams, I copied the sheet to a file name that overwrote the backup (I always save the spreadsheet to a new file name after each update). After searching for over an hour, I finally found an email backup copy I'd made that had everything but the final exam grades.

The morals of the story:

1. Make multiple backups of your grading spreadsheet (and anything else of critical importance) every time you change it.
2. Never, ever say "things are going well this semester". It angers Academia (and she is a vindictive "rhymes with witch").
   

On a more pleasant note, a couple of bright spots this week:

1. looks like I'll have a paper submitted within a couple of days. It won't get looked at by the journal editor for a couple of weeks due to the holiday, but it'll be off my desk. Since (as my coauthor says) "if we don't submit this one soon, we'd better start saving for its college education", that's a good feeling.
2. A coauthor informed me that she had a revise and resubmit that requires her to do some tests that she could do herself, but would rather outsource. Since I can easily do it with a week's work or so, she asked me to be a coauthor. So, for a bit of work, it looks like I will likely have another hit.
3. We've been making do at the Unknown Household with a seven-year old TV (an old cathode-ray model). We just got our new TV stand (a very nice corner model) and will shortly be getting a new 46 inch flat panel model. Ah, the Kingdom of Thingdom has a new subject.
   

In any event, here's wishing a Merry Christmas (or whatever else you choose to celebrate this time of year) to all my readers (all three of them).

It's finally feeling like Christmas in the Unknown Household - we've got Christmas songs playing on the radio, Winnie the Pooh (the Unknown Son's (a.k.a. Knucklehead's) recent fascination) on TV, and I'm in the middle of making up a quadruple batch of pumpkin soup on the stove A double batch will be for our neighborhood party tonight and another is for the big family get-together at our place on Christmas Day. So the place sounds and smells like Christmas.







mythe Goddess made me save my grade spreadsheet to the wrong name

Stuck In Grading

Ah, all classes are done, and my finals have been taken. Unfortunately, I had a rather large group in my principles class, and they had a long final - 73 students and a final with 25 multiple choice questions(concepts and definitions) and 21 problems. I'm currently on problem 11, so I still have about 730 "student-problems) to grade (about 5-6 hours of work).

Then the grumbling by the students starts. I've already had one email me to complain that "my tests didn't assess the students' learning properly" - within a day of the exam.

But even with all that, this still beats any other job I can imagine.

Stick A Fork In Me - I'm Done!

Just handed in grades for the semester. As usual, there was a pretty broad range of performance, and many of the usual cast of characters (the names change every semester, but the acts never do):

• The obviously extremely bright student who doesn't take proper care on his assignments and does them at the last minute. This results in a low score on 20% of the total grade, which along with his poor attendance (class participation is another 20% of the grade) makes it difficult to do well in the class. Then on the exam he gets one of the highest grades in the class (Final Grade: "B", when he was clearly capable of an "A").
• The not-so bright kid who is more passionate about finance than any student I've seen in the last five years. He ends up getting one of the highest grades in the class on the exam (Final Grade: "A", when I thought at the start that he'd probably be lucky to get a "B-").
  
• The charming one who tries to be my buddy, but doesn't do the hard work necessary to grasp the material on more than a surface level (Final Grade: "C"). Then he can't understand why he got such a poor grade (I guess math is also not his strong point).
  
• The student who failed the class last semester and retakes it this semester. She "Gets Religion" and works her tail off this time around (Final Grade: "B-"
• The student who failed the class last semester and retakes it this semester. He learns nothing from the experience and approaches it the same way he did last time, with the same results (Final Grade: "D+").

So, it was the usual mixed bag, with some surprising performances on both ends of the distribution. Either way, I can now put paid to this school year, and start on a couple of research projects that need my attention.

Now, all I have to do is get out of town before the emails and calls start coming in. I need to figure out how to put an autoresponse on my email that says "Dr. XXX is currently out of the office. He is recuperating from the stress of grading your papers on a dry (no alcohol permitted) campus. He will be back in a couple of weeks after recuperating and getting all the sand out of his swim trunks."

No, I'm Not Changing Your Grade

I just handed in grades for one of my classes. Not 20 minutes later, I got an email from a student asking why I couldn't give her a "B" because she "tried really hard and worked harder than most of the class". She's let me know repeatedly that she "really needs a "B". I considered sending her this cartoon:


But that would be wrong. Funny, maybe. Satisfying, definitely. But definitely wrong.

HT: Marginal Revolution.

All Hail The Mighty Excel For Grading

As a finance guy, I'm pretty good with Microsoft Excel. MOst of my immediate peers use it for grading. But if you do, here are a few functions that you might find useful:

1) The IF function is useful if you have two different weighting schemes. For example, to give the poorly performing students incentives to push hard in studying for the final, I often tell the students that I will grade them using two different weightings on their grades - in one I put greater weight on the exams and quizzes that take place throughout the cours, and in the other I put more weight on the final (I assign them the higher of the two grades).

Use the syntax =IF(Scheme1>=Scheme2, Scheme1, Scheme2) where Scheme1 and Scheme2 reference the cells containg the scores under the two weighting schemes, and you'll get the higher of the two cells.

2) The LARGE function is very helpful when you want to pick N out of K scores (for example, if you calculate the average of quizzes after trhrowing out the lowest N scores). The Syntax LARGE(A1:J1,2), will identify the 2nd highest score out of the 10 elements soted in the array from A1 to J1. To calculate the average of the 8 largest scores in the cells from A1 to J12, I'd use the following syntax:

=(SUM(A1:J1) - LARGE(A1:J1,10) - LARGE(A1:J1,9)) / 8

In other words, I calculate the sum of all ten, then subtract the two lowest scores,and then divide by eight (make sure you keep track of the parentheses).

Tis The Season To Be Phlegmmy

Unknown Son has had intermittent fevers for the last couple of weeks - one day he has one, the next he doesn't. Finally, we took him to his pediatrician.

Turns out he has a mild case of pneumonia. So, it's back on antibiotics (nasty tasting stuff, there) for a couple of weeks.

The good news it that I have yet another excuse to avoid grading my last few projects - I have to be home with my son.

Of course, I could have just taken the projects home with me, but that wouldn't be any fun...

On the bright side, I've just about finished reviewing the Quantitative Methods section of CFA Level 2. Good thing, since I teach it in a few weeks.