Have an ‘effective’ summer!

With any luck, by now your exams are long since marked and your grades are all submitted.  My guess is that you’ve spent the last two weeks catching your breath after the eight months of insanity that typically accompanies the fall and winter teaching terms.  And no doubt as summer approaches, you’ll be hearing this question from all of your family and friends, “So, are you off for the summer now?”

Probably that question irks you as much as it does me – since summer typically means just dropping down to a 40 hour work week (and that actually feels like a rest!)  Here’s a much more relevant question about your summer – one you should be asking yourself actually, “How can I use the summer months most effectively?”

Early in my career I developed the following (bad) summer routine:

May: “I’m exhausted!” – Shell shocked from months of working evenings and weekends, I would collapse both physically and mentally.  I would still go to work every day but I wouldn’t tackle any major goals; instead I would get sidetracked on tons of little jobs that took little mental energy and that (probably) could be left undone forever (e.g. back-tracking through the 3000 emails I never had time to answer, clearing through piles of clutter to find my desk, sorting through pounds of mail that I had ignored for the last few months…)

June:  “It’s conference season!” – I would normally blow a week, at least, attending a conference or two.  Helping my grad students to prepare the papers, presentations and posters for these conferences would eat up the rest of the month.

July: “It’s time for summer vacation!” – or more precisely – it’s time for another “working vacation” since one or more of my students would always be writing up their thesis in July and I’d have to read/review/revise for them every couple of days. (After all, I’ve got to get them done and out the door by August 31 right?)

August: “Back to school!” – spurred on by those annoying back-to-school ads that start on August 1 (aimed at cheering up frazzled parents) I would frantically try to get all the materials ready for the fall term.

By the end of the summer I would be inadequately rested (having worked during much of my vacation) and totally stressed (because I had journal papers to write up and I never managed to get to them).  So, about ten years ago I decided to change my summer routine. These were not huge changes – just a few small tweaks to ensure that I would end the summer with a sense of accomplishment.  Here’s what I do differently now…

1. I forcibly limit the post-teaching ‘collapse” to a few days not a few weeks – this is not really that hard as it turns out – it’s just a matter of keeping the momentum going. Also, instead of doing less productive things like sorting through old emails and filing paper as my mental break, I spend a week updating all of my course materials while the good ideas are still fresh in my mind. (Incidentally, I do this right after the fall term, as well – before taking any time off for Christmas.)
2. I then push on into May, stepping back up in intensity a bit to work on writing up one or two journal papers.  I usually work at home instead of going into the office during this time – since I actually get much more done at home.   My goal is to get at least one journal paper submitted by May 31, preferably two.
3. I now only attend conferences in alternate years – so I save myself the mental and physical fatigue associated with travelling and attending these events.  I do send students every year though since conference papers are very important to their success in scholarship competitions and it is extremely enriching and motivating for them.  So, I still spend most of June helping the grad students to prepare their papers, presentations and posters, but with the extra time I have saved by not attending all of the conferences myself, I squeeze in some more work on another journal paper.  This effort might sometimes push into early July.
4. I try to take all of my vacation in in one big chunk in the last two weeks of July and the first two weeks of August. (It normally takes me a week or two just to ‘wind down’ and so breaking it up just isn’t as restful.)   At this point I have one or two papers submitted, all of the students’ conference papers and posters are done, and I’ve even had some time in early July to help those students who are writing a thesis. Once on vacation, I don’t work; in particular, I try not to check my work email and I ask people not to call me unless there is an emergency. (Really – it’s okay to be unavailable when you’re on vacation!)  It really helps to go away somewhere, preferably somewhere without internet access. It also helps if your grad students take some vacation then, too.
5. In the last two weeks of August, it’s time to start prepping for classes. Two weeks is plenty of time for this, since I was so efficient in updating things back in May while the topics were fresh in my mind.

That’s it!  I end the summer with one or two papers submitted, I am fully rested, and I am all ready for fall classes.  Most especially – I am not stressed because I know I’ve had a very effective (and productive) summer.

Hopefully some of these ideas will prove useful to you.  Perhaps you have some even better strategies for using the summer months effectively yourself?  Please comment and share your ideas!

Thanks for reading – I hope you have a terrific (and effective!) summer.

Chasing the rabbit – how much is enough?

A question that frequently haunted me when I was a new professor was, “How much is enough?”  More specifically it was a series of questions,

“How much research money is enough?”

“How many graduate students are enough?”

“How many evenings and weekends of work are enough?”

And the biggie…

“How many journal papers per year are enough?”

In most ‘normal’ jobs, I suspect, a person gets some guidance from the boss in terms of how much is ‘enough’.  If you’re doing a great job, they’ll tell you in your annual review; they might even give you a tidy little (or big) bonus to thank you for giving 200% all year.  However, if you’re a young academic who’s been wondering “how much is enough” – here’s a news flash for you; over my 24 years in academia, I have never, ever, been told that I was doing ‘enough’.

I’ve seen quite a few ‘bosses’ circulate through our Department Chair’s office over the past couple of decades and all (except one) have taken the same approach to the annual performance review.  They invariably open the interview by handing, or showing, me a sheet of paper that gives me the stats on what the best and brightest are achieving.  First, I get the details of how the ‘best’ Full Professors (i.e. those in my own category) are doing: with millions of dollars in funding, 10 to 20 graduate students (or more!), 10 or more journal papers a year, and major awards from some national academy or medals from wherever…  Then, just to rub it in, I’m told that the Associate Professors are doing equally well; in fact, there’s often a report that some rising start in the Assistant Professor universe is achieving these lofty stats, as well.  Then we move on to who has gotten prestigious research chairs, after which I’m told who is going to be getting one of these prestigious chairs in the coming year.  Finally, we open the binder to look at my annual report…

When I was younger, and much more naïve, I would go into these  annual meetings with my 2 to 4 journal papers, my few hundred thousand in funding, my 6 to 8 graduate students, my 4.9 out of 5 teaching rating, and an award or two, expecting at least a “thank-you.”  Instead my boss would take out a sharp needle (in the form of that stupid stats sheet) and use it to burst my balloon.  I would leave feeling inadequate, useless, unsuccessful, depressed…  Then I served on a national grant selection committee and learned some far more interesting stats.  The vast majority of professors in my discipline had only 6 to 8 graduate students (many had 4 or less); few had more than a couple hundred thousand dollars per year in research funding (many had less), and most had very few journal papers – in fact, in my field, those that were getting 3 papers out every two years were considered to be pretty steady performers.  (Yes! 1.5 papers per year!)  Now that was a decade ago – I am sure the average stats are different (undoubtedly bigger and better) today.  But the lesson it taught me still applies – academia is basically the same as dog racing.

In dog racing, the poor little hounds are forced to run around a track chasing a fake rabbit.  None of them ever catches this rabbit – and even if they did – so what?  It’s a fake rabbit.  These poor dogs spend most of their time cooped up in small cages, they have no normal social interactions, no time to just play, have fun, or to enjoy a loving family.  They are slaves to their owners, forced to run pell-mell after that stupid fake rabbit.  If other dogs get out ahead of them in this pursuit, they’re treated like a failure – it doesn’t matter that the faster dogs never actually catch the rabbit either.  After all – what would be the profit in that?  The rabbit’s speed is set so that it always stays just out of reach of all of the dogs.  If the dogs get faster and better, the rabbit’s speed gets a boost as well – expectations invariably increase as accomplishments improve.  And eventually, when the dogs can no longer run competitively – they are cast aside, discarded as useless chattel.

We academics are just like those racing dogs, and the high expectations of us (funding, students, papers, awards, chairs, etc.) represent our rabbit – a moving target that will forever be out of reach.  No one is EVER going to tell us how much is enough, any more than they would let those poor dogs catch that rabbit, because then the horrible truth would be exposed – the whole thing is a sham, designed just to get us to compete (until we collapse with exhaustion).  That stupid little stats sheet we are shown at the beginning of every annual appraisal is analogous to the stats sheet for the dog races.  “See?  There are other dogs that can run faster than you!  You need to pick up the pace.”  No one ever mentions the fact that these faster dogs are not catching the rabbit either.  No one is ever going to tell you that you’re doing enough, or even how much is enough.  Infinity is enough, but we’ll all collapse long before that.  In the meantime, we spend the majority of our lives cooped up in small boxes, we have no normal social interactions, no time to just play, have fun, or enjoy a loving family – sound familiar?

Why am I telling you all of this?  It’s to let you know that only you can decide “how much is enough.”  To stay ‘under the radar’ in my world, I’ve found that I need at least 4 to 6 grad students, 2 to 3 journal papers a year (in good journals), a couple hundred thousand a year in research funding, and 4.6 out of 5 (preferably 4.8) for teaching ratings (and yes, you should care about this – undergraduates are important, too!)  Once you reach that level – then you have a decision to make – do you want a life or do you want to be a “star” in your profession?  If you choose the latter, go buy yourself a dog collar and start chasing the fake rabbit.  I wish you well; please give my condolences to your family.  Don’t get me wrong – I love my job… to the point that I’ve operated well above the radar myself at times – but it does take its toll on your loved ones and your health.  So make sure you are doing it because you want to – not because you feel it’s expected of you, or in the hopes that you’ll get thanked for it later.

(In the meantime, now that you have a small inkling of the cruelty they are forced to endure, consider adopting a poor discarded racing dog from a rescue organization and start boycotting the cruel exploitation of animals.)

Tips for Setting Effective Exams

I don’t know about you, by my least favorite job as a professor is marking exams.  I’m always keen to give students as much credit as possible for their knowledge, but sometimes finding a correct answer can be like finding a needle in a haystack.  Consequently, it’s wildly time consuming, not to mention discouraging and frustrating. Setting an effective exam can be a challenge, as well – it’s not too informative if the exam is so easy that everyone aces it.  On the other hand, if everyone fails, you’ll be left wondering whether you’re a terrible teacher, they’re terrible students, or it’s just a terrible exam.

Over the past 23 years I’ve given my share of all types of exams – from WAY too easy to brutally difficult, and everything in between.  I’ve learned to do some things well and managed to do some things terribly wrong.  I’ve kept lots of notes on what worked and what didn’t, and I thought I’d come up with some pretty good methods.  However, I recently attended a seminar on setting effective exams and I got some new and cool ideas from that, as well.  So I guess that means I’ll be learning new things about this until I retire.  Nevertheless, I think I might be able to save you some time and energy by telling you what I’ve learned so far.

First, let me tell you what my goals are in setting exams – since these are the driving factors in how I set them.  If you have more, or different, goals then keep that in mind as you look at my suggestions later on.  I generally have three goals in setting exams.

1. Get an accurate assessment of how much each student actually knows.
2. Make the grading entirely objective so that I can mark all students consistently.
3. Minimize the time wasted while marking the exam.

I’m sure we’d all agree that item 1 is the most important in this list – however, I generally focus a lot more on items 2 and 3.  The reason is that I discovered early on that if I got ‘cute’ at all in setting exam questions – no one would get any them.  I’d just have a lot of blank sheets to mark.  Although the seminar I went to recently was geared primarily towards designing effective multiple choice questions (which I cannot use in my exams) it still gave me some great ideas on how to improve my ‘problem-solving’ exams to ensure that they were also effective in assessing students accurately. Apparently the trick is to have a mix of questions types – straightforward, moderate, and difficult – which is obvious, I know, but the important thing is to then check and make sure there is consistency in terms of who does well on each type.  For example, those who did the best overall on the exam should also be the ones who did the best on the difficult questions, and so on down the line.  This is obviously going to be a trial and error process which requires some data gathering to document how students do on the individual questions, not just on the exam overall, something I’ll admit I’ve never thought to do! Nevertheless, if you can document this type of information for each category of question, you can begin to see what’s working and what isn’t, and use this info to design more effective exam questions.

As it turns out, goals 2 and 3 are actually the easy ones to achieve; it just means spending time up front in setting the exam.  I can set an exam in an hour or less, but it’s going to take me 30 to 45 minutes to mark each one after.  In a class of 80 to 100 students, that’s one to two weeks of marking afterward!  Also, chances are that I’ll not be consistent in grading those exams – no matter how much time I spend on it.  In contrast, if I spend a whole day setting the exam, including developing a marking key to assign specific marks to each of the intermediate answers, then I can mark that exam in about 10 to 15 minutes per student (which means only about 2 to 3 days of marking).  At this point, the main thing eating up my time is shuffling through the booklets trying to find the actual answers.  I learned early on not to use question sheets and blank exam booklets – the students tend to attack the questions in what seems (to me) to be an entirely random order.  It’s absolutely insane how much time you can waste flipping back and forth through a booklet looking for answers when they’ve got them all mixed up.  Some even split up their answers!  I can control that a bit by making my own exam booklets, so that the students actually write right on the question sheets.  However, although they’ve been taught from first year to document their work clearly and neatly, what I see on most exams presents a challenge comparable to deciphering hieroglyphics.  Finding the actual answers amidst all of the extraneous meanderings can take forever!

Here’s where that recent seminar gave me a great idea.  For my next exam I am going to include a summary answer sheet, analogous to the sheet students fill out when answering multiple choice questions.  The students will be required to enter all of their intermediate and final answers to all questions on this one sheet (both numbers and words).  For the students who get the questions right, I will not have to look any further than this single page.  For those who do not, I can investigate the details inside the exam booklet; however, I will warn them that the only way to get full marks for a question is to have the correct answers on the summary sheet.  I expect that I should be able to cut my marking time in half by employing this “answer-sheet” and it will help me to facilitate my documentation of how students do on the individual questions more readily, as well.  (I’ll let you know if it really pans out that way. )

I am also one of those professors who likes to give students ‘part-marks’ – especially if they make a little boo-boo at the start of a question that gets carried through.  I always develop a spreadsheet solution for each question so that I can quickly enter any incorrect intermediate answer and see if they calculated everything else correctly.  Again, time spent up front helps me to save time while marking, while still giving students the fairest assessment possible.

Well – that’s it – my suggestion for setting exams to achieve the three goals I’ve listed above.  Hope you found a tidbit or two in there to help you out.  If you have some suggestions or feedback to offer – why not use the comment feature below to share them?

Thanks for visiting my blog!