Replacing Midterm Exams with Multi-Attempt Quizzes
This past semester forced me to implement two changes to my Quantum Mechanics II class that I had debating implementing back in January, but decided against to minimize the number of changes. However, midway through the semester, some UMass international students at began to have their visas and statuses revoked. The first student to fall victim to this abuse of government power was a physics undergraduate. This information broke on a Wednesday, and my sole midterm examination was scheduled for the following Tuesday.
I felt that going ahead with the midterm under such circumstances was neither fair nor appropriate without a conversation with the students. Moreover, I felt that I could not delay the midterm by another week because of holidays and snow days had already resulted in the midterm being later than I would have liked. After a discussion with the 12 students in the class, one of the students, who had taken a class from Bill Leonard in our engineering department, proposed the very “mastery model” that I had already considered implementing semester.
The implementation I ultimately decided upon was one similar to one Jennifer Ross, now at Syracuse University, had implemented in her 500-level Optics course here at UMass Amherst several years ago: students have the opportunity to take multiple assessments on every given topic in the form of short two-or-three question quizzes. After seeing their results, students can then elect to take another quiz on the same topic. Only the highest score is kept. Due to the complexities of creating quizzes for QM II, I was forced to restrict the number of attempts to three on each set of topics:
- Fundamentals of Angular Momentum (Review from QM I).
- Group Theory.
- Parity and Translations.
- Angular Momentum Addition and Rotation Theory.
- Identical Particles and the Periodic Table.
We ended with perturbation theory at the end of the semester and, given the newness of this entire procedure and the limited time for retakes, I did not offer a quiz on this topic.
End-of-Semester Presentations
In addition to replacing the midterm exams with quizzes, I also replaced the end-of-semester final exam with a presentation. For those who may not be familiar, the textbook, Griffiths and Schroeter’s Quantum Mechanics 3rd Edition, follows a format where concepts such as parity are introduced and then applied to interesting physical systems such as crystals. For this final assignment, students worked in pairs and had 25 minutes to present one of these application topics. To make sure that everyone was prepared, and that the topic could be covered in such a small amount of time, there were reading expectations in advance. Students were also expected to ask questions during other students’ presentations. In addition, all teams were told to expect two questions from me that they must be able to answer.
Review
The changes represented a good first attempt. Unfortunately, few students completed the end-of-semester evaluation so I got little feedback from them. My summary of the pros and cons can be found in the table below:
| Pros | Things to change next time |
| 1. Students have both the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and the incentive to do so. 2. Makeups are not an issue. 3. The end-of-semester presentations are AI proof: students are allowed to use it in preparation though told that AI sometimes gets this level material quite wrong. Moreover, as an instructor I can clearly identify when students rely on AI as they are unable to answer questions. | 1. Many students waited too long to complete the quizzes and thus did not have time to retake, after additional studying, as many times as they otherwise would have. 2. While I did have a rubric, it was clear that many students were unclear on exactly what was expected. 3. Having only a single presentation meant that the opportunity to learn and improve did not exist. |
Things to do differently next time
- Do it from the beginning!
- Have two rounds of presentation: one about midway through and the other at the end so that students can improve their presentation skills too.
- Have a timeline for the quizzes so that students cannot get too far behind.
- Consult with Bill Leonard, Jennifer Ross, and other experts more deeply for a more considered approach.