Derek Bruff

Here’s part two of my report from the the NAIRTL 5th Annual Conference & Galway Symposium on Higher Education, hosted at the National University of Ireland at Galway, June 9-10, 2011. (See part one for highlights from the first half of the conference.) The conference theme was “student engagement,” and it was certainly a strong [...]

You may recall my post from a few weeks ago, “Tough Questions about Grading Standards.” In that post I tried to reconcile the feedback on my fall course from my department (the grading standards in my course should be comparable to other first-year math courses) with the feedback from my students (my grading standards were [...]

Yesterday I blogged about the challenge of setting appropriate grading standards in my first-year cryptography course. Today, I’d like to follow up by reflecting on some student course evaluation comments about the learning goals of the course. Grading standards and learning goals are, of course, tightly coupled! One challenge of this course was that it [...]

I’ve spent some time today reading carefully through my end-of-course student evaluations for my fall cryptography seminar. Our course evals are online here, which means that many course evaluations receive only a 60 or 65% response rate from students. However, I asked my students to bring their laptops to class on the last day and [...]

Last week I facilitated a faculty workshop titled “Assessment of Student Learning: Grading Effectively and Efficiently,” just in time for the start of classes. Below are my slides from the workshop, and if you head over to the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching blog, you can find a few thoughts from participants about the challenges of [...]