Why I will never pursue cheating again
Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2011 8:32 pm
Giving the same (or slightly modified) assignments year after year is just asking for plagiarism. What did he expect? When I TA'ed a class, we changed everything from year to year, but used questions of similar levels of difficulty.
Grading consistency is a problem, but can be dealt with. Usually, when a question was "too hard" on a test and became a grading nightmare, it was because the questions weren't well presented or broken into simpler pieces that can be graded somewhat separately. I quickly learned to write homework and test questions with parts that follow the line of reasoning necessary to solve the problem at large. I also tried giving a similar question on the test to a homework problem that required the same steps, but didn't outline them on the test and that seemed to work as well.