Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

Fifth day of the thirteenth week of the third term, mechanics lecture classes. As I said last time, I wasn’t able to proctor this because of the graphics software seminar we attended. In fact I only made the exam Monday evening at home and had it sent off by my cousin to the secretary to print out and give to my two co-teachers that she was able to get to proctor the exams. After all, it is considered as official substitution.

Since my fellow lecturer in the mechanics subject also agreed to grant exemptions, I also had to compute for their pre-final grades. The thing was, because the last exam would occur on the day before the finals for the same subject, I did not have enough time to check their last exam then tell them whether they don’t need to take the finals or not. So, the scenario became just like with Trigonometric Applications last term, where the last two exams were part of the exemption, which was what one of the high rating students, Ana, expected.

No wonder she no longer took down notes during our last few lectures.

Anyway, this time I revised two previous practices that I performed. First of all, I included those who got an overall standing of 3.0 among those who may not take the last two exams, lowered from my 3.5 cut-off last term.

Second, I also used the average of the percentages of the four quizzes and exams for computing their standing, instead of just the sums of their raw scores. Of course, across the board, this was higher for most if not all of them than the latter. SO more people were given the option of skipping the last two tests.

Of course, there were still some students who had the illusion (I still don’t know from where) that if they didn’t get the highest grade, that insisting on taking the tests, no matter how low their scores would be, would only serve to boost up their grades.

I have already talked about this several times before in this journal, so I would not drag it out again. But now I am tempted to give exemptions to only those who get a grade of 4.0 if this keeps up.

Anyway, their exams I took from my college book which was at home, because some of the students borrowed my other books in school, not knowing that if I did not possess the book, then I couldn’t base my questions from there – yet another advantage of having their own reference material with them from the start instead of only asking to be lent one during the desperate eleventh hour.

For the first class, their questions were as follows: one about a block on a horizontal surface connected by a rope to a hanging mass, which was the same as in their Coefficient of Friction experiment; a block on an inclined plane sliding down; and one similar to the first scenario except there is an additional mass on top of the first mass moving horizontally (again shades of their experiment) and the whole system is moving with constant velocity.

The thing was, unlike in the examples I gave them, and similar to their last quiz, there were three to four bullets per problem, that they were more or less supposed to solve in order. So easier than what we have been doing in class, they did not have to manipulate several equations by substituting them into one another until only one unknown and all other given values are in the equation.

But the bell has already rung. So I’ll have to continue this next time. For now, class dismissed.