IF YOU WANT TO:
Giving two midterms, and after the first exam, distributing copies of five sample answers to one of your essay questions.
A political science professor who does this tells the students that one of the five answers received an "A," one a "B," and so on. "Students are asked to decide which response received which grade," he explains. Their guesses are tallied on the board and compared with the actual grade each response received. I then ask students why they gave an `A' to what was actually a `C' response, or a `D' to a `B' response. Finally, I explain what I am looking for in a response to an essay exam and why I assigned each sample response the grade I did.
"I am much more interested in helping students learn how to do well in the course than I am in grading them," he explains. "As a result of this discussion, student improvement of the second midterm is often quite remarkable. I am convinced that the value of spending a small amount of class time this way far outweighs any loss of coverage of additional content."
A variation is to use sample responses from a previous semester before the midterm. It is likely to be somewhat less effective, however, because the students will not have the same vested interest in the essay questions and answers.
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