So, uh, then this happened, about 6 or 7 weeks into the semester:

https://twitter.com/sbagley/status/653973040879939584

I'm not gonna sugarcoat this one: please pardon my French when I say that I got fuckin' buried in rewrites. I was getting super burned out with all the grading I had to do (in addition to, y'know, all the other normal teaching stuff) and it was having a legitimate negative impact on how I felt about my job. “Unsustainable” is a gross understatement.

I got some good advice from people which you can see in the @replies to that tweet. In the end, I came up with a couple of ideas that I thought I could implement mid-semester without inciting a massive student revolt complete with torches and pitchforks. I decided to survey my students to see what they thought of the ideas I came up with, and to see if they had any ideas that could work better than whatever I thought of. I also threw in a couple of questions to see how they felt about the labs and my grading scheme in general.

The responses I got were actually pretty insightful, and I took to Twitter to get some help thinking about them. Here's the first tweet of my 15-tweet rampage, if you want to follow along and see the (really good) feedback I got. I'll highlight a couple of tweets in particular. A student came up with a really good idea that I liked more the more I thought about it:

https://twitter.com/sbagley/status/657631141336358912

(Ignore the tweet labeled (5/n). I don't know how to get it to not show up. What you should be looking at is the (6/n) one.)

This is the idea I ended up going with. I like this idea for three reasons in particular:

  1. Pragmatically, I'm pretty sure it's going to reduce my grading workload, which was kinda the point. Certainly it's going to add to my workload to create solutions, but (a) I'd rather create one solution key than write the same comment on 15-20 student writeups, and (b) because I'm using the CLEAR Calculus labs, some solutions are already available and will just need slight modifications.
  2. It allows me another opportunity to model expert thinking and expert writing in mathematics, and in a form that students are going to be motivated to pay attention to.
  3. It makes students practice metacognition by examining and explaining what they did wrong, and that's going to be super beneficial for their learning. (And actually, this has been a reasonably easy sell, because we already did a couple of exam rewrites this way; I told students, hey, I think you learned a lot from these rewrites, don't you?, and they mostly agreed.)

I'll also add that I'm open to further rewrites after the second one, but I'm going to make students meet with me before a third resubmission, because if they're still getting something majorly wrong after looking at the answer key, there's a big problem that I need to help them solve.

So – on to solution writing, and I'll update as events warrant.