Professors at Syracuse U. Cancel Midterm Exams Because Students are Stressed
“I’ve been teaching for a long time, and I do really feel the sense that everyone is more stressed this semester”
The stress is being attributed to the pandemic and online classes. If only real life worked like this.
Campus Reform reports:
Syracuse University professors cancel midterms because students are stressed
Professors at Syracuse University are canceling or redesigning midterm exams this semester.
The change comes due to the challenges of online learning and the current Covid-19 pandemic, which some professors believe has placed mounting stress on students who are still adjusting to online learning.
Many Syracuse faculty members saw canceling or redesigning midterms as a way to create an online testing strategy that could facilitate students’ balancing of academic integrity.
Others took it as an opportunity to alleviate stress and anxiety for students.
The Daily Orange, the student newspaper of Syracuse, interviewed Julie Hasenwinkel, a biomedical and chemical engineering professor who decided to cut her classes’ midterm exams.
When classes were in-person, Hasenwinkel usually gave two midterm exams and a final exam in her upper-level class. However, this year, she decided to call them off and in lieu of them, assigned weekly 20-minute quizzes that students complete during class.
“[The quizzes were] an adaptation that I made so that we didn’t have to manage long exams with some students online and some students in the classroom,” Hasenwinkel told The Daily Orange.
She also plans to cancel her final exam this fall as well, opting to have her students present their semester-long research projects.
Hasenwinkel believes that redesigning her course’s testing schedule was a practical choice, especially since it has alleviated some of the burdens that her students are struggling with this semester.
“I’ve been teaching for a long time, and I do really feel the sense that everyone is more stressed this semester,” she said. “It’s palpable in the classroom, and for students and faculty.”
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Comments
So, what exactly are students getting in return for their tuition? Certainly not the education they are paying for.
They’re getting coddling and enabling.
Coddled? Yes.
But, at least in the English department they’re doing it properly. They are saying, as they pat the students on the back and hold them, “There their they’re….”
But they can’t write it or read it……..
University paper mills with degrees not worth anything but wiping!
It’s good that they are (finally) testing different strategies for online learning. It’s only about 20 years late.
On the other hand, coddling the students is not a good strategy. I know they don’t like to work but that’s no excuse for reducing the work. The goal is for them to learn, not for them to avoid “stress.”
Life is stressful. Learn to deal with it.
This generation has not been catalyzed to cope early enough in life. Their coping skills are very deficient and it’s coming home to roost during the pandemic. Many are melting badly.
And the ones that the systems were redesigned to help, going all-out for equity, are melting the worst. Rescue needed, until equity is achieved!
Ran across a wonderful meme recently that explains the naked truth about government-enforced equity…
It’s not entirely truthful. Equality does provide the means for the short one to get extra boxes. The problem is that no one wants to work for them.
That’s the Democrat Party plan all right.
I, for one, plan to be too stressed to pay my 2020 taxes.
The article reads as though giving the test, instead of gauging the students’ mastery of the material, is the object of the test.