I recently applied for a faculty position at a community college. Yesterday I looked at their academic calendar, and each semester has the usual stuff listed - registration, classes begin, last day to drop, finals week, etc. But also, halfway through each semester, there is a week labeled “midterm exams.”
I’ve been a student at eight different colleges and universities during my life, and worked at three others, in three states (all on the West Coast, if it matters). I’ve never heard of such a thing. Everywhere I’ve studied/worked, the number of exams given, and when they are given, is up to the individual instructor. The most common model I experienced as a student was to have two exams during the quarter, roughly 1/3 and 2/3 of the way through. I myself prefer to give three exams, to narrow down the amount of material that needs to be studied for each (students seem to prefer this). If I was teaching in the semester system, I’d probably give four or five exams over the course of the term. And, I base the timing of tests on when a particular unit is finished, not “Exam 1 must be done on Day 6, as that is 1/4 of the way through the term.”
I realize policies will vary from college to college, but is this “midterm week” thing common? Does this mean this college requires that a single midterm be given, and it must be done during that week?
I’m on the east coast and have always had midterm week. Not all teachers have midterm exams at that point, but that’s when midterm grades went out. So if you were failing a course you got notification around that time.
At my alma mater (Georgia Tech, for those not familiar with college mascots) it was an unofficial but very real thing. The college had drop day for the semester about halfway through the semester, and a policy that at least some significant coursework must be returned to the student before drop day (presumably so they could know if they were hopeless lost or doing fine before the dropped the course). The end result was that a lot of professors just scheduled a midterm exam for the week before drop day, so we had an unofficial midterm week.
Now, it wasn’t mandatory, and many professors had a class structure that handled it differently (maybe two projects before, two projects after, or even a class with no exams :eek:), but it was certainly a thing. I don’t know if the college you’re looking at has a policy “Thou must givest thine students a midterm, a single midterm, and it must be the appointed week” or if it’s more “this is a good timeframe for a midterm if you’re into that thing”, but it wouldn’t surprise me either way.
EDIT: much like partypooper, our professors had to give us a satisfactory or unsatisfactory in the course, which generally amount to “if this person would fail even with a generous curve, they get a U”. I think that only applied to freshman/sophomore level classes, though.
At my alma mater (on the east coast), freshman and sophomore level courses (i.e. 100 and 200 level courses) had mandatory midterm grades. The instructor actually had to fill out a form (or possibly an online equivalent) and formally assign you a midterm grade as of a specified cutoff “midterm” date. The point, of course, was to let those without a lot of college experience get advance, formal warning of problems. Iirc there wasn’t any requirement that there be a specific midterm exam, and the midterm grades didn’t go on your official transcript. If you got a C- on your midterm report card/grade report but managed to bring your average up to a B by the end of the course, your transcript would just have a B on it.
Most instructors, regardless of the presence or absence of specific midterm grades, provided enough feedback by the middle of the course so that you could tell if you were doing reasonably well.
Only one place I taught or was a student at had it and it was purely a fiction in the mind of the students. There was nothing in the faculty handbook about it. Not a thing. It specifically said that the number (if any) and timing of exams was solely up to the Prof.
But the students thought the World Was Coming To An End! when I did the midterm after the halfway point. E.g., for a 10 week quarter I’d schedule it during the 6th week. Otherwise it’s a test on less than half the material (especially if you factor in getting the results back before the drop date).
Having a late drop date just reinforced this. Everywhere else had a much shorter drop window so midterm date wasn’t even thought of.
Logic, rules. These were lost on students who “knew” what the rules were. Not only that, but there were certain that this was the Official System everywhere! Grrr.
Here at Siena there are midterm grades, but I think it’s up to the instructor to decide what goes into them, and there’s no actual time set for them (though the grades do have to be posted by a certain date).
To be fair, it’s a pretty crappy thing for a professor to do to a student. And by “it”, I mean have a huge majority of the grade come well after the time when a student can drop the class.
I can’t tell if that’s what you did (since I don’t know what your class was set up as or when drop day was). But I did have a few classes where all that would be given back to students before drop day was some trivial assignment worth 5% of their grade, only to find that the 25% project, 30% midterm, and 40% final were murderous in difficulty. I swear some professors delighted in failing their students, and they were the ones that did stuff like backload their classes with hefty projects well after the drop day.
University of Wisconsin system. No official mid terms, at least not in the technical courses.
We had exams all the damn time! Difficult ones, too.
A pure midterm-plus-final would be useless for learning in the tech courses. There were too many concepts, and they built on the previous material. Without feedback from tests you could get seriously lost very fast. Imagine calc or diffy-q with only two exams. No one except geniusses would pass.
No midterm weeks where I was at, but my university was on the quarter system, if that matters. I seem to remember two tests and a final being a common format, but some teachers did a mid-term and a final, and some had more frequent tests leading up to a final. There was no consistency to it that I saw.
At my university, some classes have a single midterm at the midpoint, some have a pair of midterms at around the one-third and two-thirds marks. It’s considered somewhat unlucky to have all of one’s midterms crammed into one week.
A. It wasn’t a surprise, the midterm date was listed on the syllabus.
B. Students at places with earlier drop dates wouldn’t think this was crappy at all.
Like I said, it was purely a student fiction. (Good grief, entire departments like English would pretty much not have midterms at all.)
Having a late drop date was quite unusual in my experience. Some places the drop date was 2 weeks in. No one would expect significant feedback by then.
I always thought of a late drop date as encouraging poor decision making by students. Too many students took advantage of the late drop date to drop classes that they were merely unhappy about, rather than for serious performance reasons. The result was taking 5+ years to graduate and a lot of extra tuition. You can tell in a short time if a prof is horrible (in the pre-post it all on the Internet days) and switch classes. (The drop and add date should be the same and early because of this.)
If you’re halfway thru a class, you’re in the class. Deal with it.
Yes, this is why I’m concerned. I teach math, at the community college level. There are very few math or science majors in my classes. Most students are there because they have to get to a certain level of math for their degree or transfer requirements, then they’re done with math forever. I don’t make the class easy, but I don’t see any reason to make it excessively hard. I give three tests during the quarter, then the final at the end, so that a) there is less to study for each exam, and b) screwing up on one exam isn’t devastating to the student’s grade.
In the semester system, only a midterm and a final would be brutal.
In my limited experience, I’ve never heard of such a thing. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a “midterm break” or a mention of “midterm grades” on a college’s academic calendar, but I’ve never heard of college-wide “midterm exams”; and for reasons already mentioned it strikes me as an odd and impractical idea.
FWIW, when I was in college, I frequently heard my fellow students mention midterm exams, but I don’t think I myself ever had one in the strict sense of a single exam halfway through the course, over the course’s content up to that point.
Obviously the way to find out is to ask someone at the college. If and when you do so, I hope you’ll share the answer you get with the rest of us.
They’ve asked me for a couple of things, so I know they’re looking at my resume, but they haven’t offered an interview yet. If they do, I figure this question would be a good one for the “do you have any questions for us?” part.
Nope, no university or college I’ve taught at had that. I’ve taught classes with the midterm/final format and with multiple exams and final format, depending on the needs of the class material.
(I find it funny to hear midterm used synonymously with exam, as in “I give three midterms”.)
Even if the midterm is officially required, you could probably get around it by offering weekly etc quizzes in addition to an official midterm.
