Conscientious Teaching

I stand by the principal to not compromise in academic integrity. In other words, I don’t pass a student who could not demonstrate the minimum knowledge required (which is ultimately measured by his examination score). As a result, failure rate in my classes were consistently high throughout the years, at the level 30% ~ 50%. (In the USM standard, 39 marks or below out of 100 is considered partial failure, whereas a complete failure if under 24 marks). However, mostly the distribution curves were healthy (in bell shapes), despite the average is peaked at the low side (C or C-). (The only exception is a second year statistical mechanics course where the distribution displays a M shape. I reckon that was because the course was a rather difficult subject, and a large population of the class simply could not follow the highly demanding mathematics and the abstract language used in statistical mechanics.) In a way the high failure rate in my class reflects my reluctance to compromise in the evaluation standard. This is to be contrasted in the light of the fact that many courses never fail a single student, a situation which is rather contrived. Students should be evaluated based on how much they understand, not how much they can memorise. Exam questions should be designed in such a way to really sort out those who know and those who know nothing. Hence I make effort to ensure that the exams I set are objective measuring tool that manage to discriminate the students based on their levels of the knowledge gained in the courses. Often I reiterate in the class that I never fail any one. The person who fails them is the students themselves.

According to my observation, many students practice only rote learning, at least in the physics school. On the other hand many professors and lecturers, mainly for their own interest, routinely recycle past year questions in the final exams. Some design poor quality exam questions. As a result, students who know next to nothing pass and even score in the exams by blindly memorising past year solutions or the lecture notes. It’s the lectures who “allow” such the rote learning practice to permeate as norm among the students, and I don’t call this “conscientious”. Should every lecturer practise conscientious teaching, students would start to change their learning attitude and avoid cutting corners. Conscientious teaching leads to real quality learning, which is what learning and teaching knowledge is all about.