Course development

Things generally worked very well in VT26 except that the workload on teachers and TAs for grading the TEN1 assignment has become overwhelming. There are two reasons for this: 1) the increased number of students, 2) concerns over the use of AI in written work and data analysis leading us to include one-on-one oral exams with each student, where they discussed with the course responsible teacher to check their understanding and intellectual ownership of the contents of the lab report. While these interviews were extremely useful in calibrating the grades given to students for TEN1, and very revealing in terms of how many students used AI and how they used it, the workload on teachers was unreasonable and we still have ongoing concerns about student reliance on AI tools, particularly for computational analytical work. Before VT27 we will consider in discussion with other teachers the continued feasibility of using a lab report for our final exam. We will likely move towards a traditional timed exam for TEN1 that includes data analysis questions, turning the current lab report into a P/F assignment as part of LAB1. In the course evaluation several students raised concerns about the course schedule, stating that the time to do the final analysis for TEN1 was too short. Amending this would require bringing the student pitch session, field trip, and wet lab sessions forwards by a whole week, which puts a lot of pressure on course weeks 1-2, when many students have not even yet registered for the course - we do not consider this to be feasible, but we think that the submission timeline will be more relaxed when the lab report is a P/F aspect of LAB1. Several students raised issues in the evaluation and throughout the course about unfortunate clashes with other courses in the same period. We will try to work on this for next year by discussing with the leaders of other courses already when the draft schedule is proposed.

Things have worked very well in VT25 so we do not plan to make any major changes for VT26. The new workshops were especially successful, and the high rate of achievement on TEN1 suggests that the grading criteria were well explained. We have a Canvas Quiz that tests student comprehension of the lab protocol before the wet lab sessions, and we will add some questions about lab safety into that quiz.

Things have worked very well in VT25 so we do not plan to make any major changes for VT26. We have a Canvas Quiz that tests student comprehension of the lab protocol before the wet lab sessions, and we may add some questions about lab safety into that quiz.