I don’t know about LSU, but where I teach, a lot of teachers make their first exams extras hard so that students are induced to drop out.
The benefit to the teacher is obvious: a smaller class size; fewer papers to grade; you’ve winnowed out the troublemakers and are left with serious students.
“I don’t know about LSU, but where I teach, a lot of teachers make their first exams extras hard so that students are induced to drop out.”
As Lord Acton once noted, “All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
No power in our society is less controlled than the power of teachers to grade students. Teachers should be accountable for their actions just like everyone else.
The problem I have, at the community college, not the University I teach at, is the school has open enrollment. At least 1/3 of the kids there are not college material. I have had students who were functionally illiterate, actually could not read or write. Most of them figured out pretty early in the semester that they would not be able to get through the class.
One semester, I had 3 kids, out of an initial 20, show up for the final. And it wasn’t just me. For some reason, many instructors had the same problem.
When I teach anything other than the Intro class, I do give tests and they usually are pretty challenging.
Just finished teaching a SQL and DB design class. The students wanted part of the final to be a take-home. I warned them that a take-home test has to be tough. It was. I made them use the skills they had been taught in ways we hadn’t covered in class. And one question had an intentional error that they had to find a work-around for. Basically, welcome to the real world.
One kid complained about the exam, but at least 5 others told me how much they enjoyed it because it made them think. Outside of the Intro classes, I like to challenge my students. Most of them come to appreciate that.