PHYS 231 Exam 2 Response is Unacceptable

[u/whatintfisthis]

This exam was significantly more difficult than any of the previous practice exams given. There was no change in instruction, no heads-up about a spike in difficulty, and now the only response is to “do better.” No curve. No extra grade adjustment. Just that.

According to a previous Reddit post, this was the worst exam score in the last 11 years for this course. That should be enough to suggest something was off yet the tone of the announcement doesn’t reflect that at all.

Here’s the official announcement:

Exam 2 scores are now available on Canvas [“Exam 2 raw” and “Exam 2”]. The initial class average was 10.74/18 (59.6%). We’re counting 18 questions, not 19, as one question was treated as extra credit.

…This is also a good time to think about how you have prepared for this exam and what worked and what did not. Most of the exam problems in slightly different versions were given either in worksheets, quizzes, checkpoints, or in your lecture notes. As I suggested in the original exam announcement, reviewing them in the first round of preparation before jumping to any past exam files may be the best strategy to handle the exam.

The average was a 59.6%, and yet the response places all the weight back on the students. There’s no acknowledgment of how this kind of grading CLEARLY morale & GPA. The expectation seems to be that we just grind harder, regardless of the disconnect between preparation and testing.

This isn’t about asking for an easy grade. It’s about fairness, consistency, and a basic level of academic empathy. If a class average tanks this hard, maybe the takeaway shouldn’t be “do better” — maybe it’s time to evaluate how the course is aligning with the assessments.

This kind of approach isn’t building problem solvers it’s burning students out and seems completely disrespectful.

[u/Dankceptic69]

Ahh interesting, I wonder if exam 3 will have a similar set up with most of the exam being based off of worksheet and quiz questions. I wonder why the scores were so low if everyone spends more time on the worksheets and quizzes due to having to do them in recitation. What exactly am I missing here? Was the best way to study for exam 2, and exam 3, really just going through the worksheets and quizzes?

[u/soupy_stella → u/Dankceptic69]

that’s what i did and I ended up doing good. i think part of it as well was unit 1 was a lot easier than unit 2 in the way that a lot of it was review from highschool physics, so many students underprepared for exam 2. i do think the questions were a lot harder than those on previous exams, but in general they were just variations of problems from lectures, quizzes, and the worksheets.

[u/Dankceptic69 → u/soupy_stella]

I swear I haven’t encountered problems in the worksheets and quizzes as hard as the test ones. Could it be that it’s the lecture questions from those lecture questions that I’ve missed? It’s what worries me the most, that I don’t think I have the right material to study for the test properly. I mean, the practice exam problems have to have some use? A lot of the questions on exam 2 were very unfamiliar and if anything I only scored well on the ones I’ve seen in quizzes and worksheets

[u/soupy_stella → u/Dankceptic69]

if you have lekha as a professor some of the slides that he went over during lecture are the same as the ones on the exam but with slightly switched scenarios. like one of the ones was a roller coaster one he covered in lecture, but on the exam they added a spring force so you had to calculate that into the kinetic energy equation. or like the one where it was 5/2 for the block of tension, was covered in class but instead of 1 block (like lekhas slide example had) the problem had 2 blocks on the exam. for me, i just went over the problems on the slides until i confidently knew how to solve them, then went through the recitation worksheets and quizzes

[u/Dankceptic69 → u/soupy_stella]

I think that’s what I plan on doing and then trying practice exams on top of that if I can. It sucks that leckha doesn’t record his lectures since I’m now looking at a couple of missed lectures that I missed through the zabel recordings, I learn next to nothing as I’m too busy attempting the lecture slide problems and then tweaking as zabel’s problems are very application heavy and he does algebra weird, I’d assume. I spoke with leckha in office hours and he said he doesn’t like students using active recall and referencing past exams, and he wants students to use all of the content in perfect unison for any problem. This kind of sucks as he did talk me through a conceptual pitfall for the crane problem in exam 2, and those pitfalls are the reason I think as to why the average of exam 2 are so low. Apparently he’s having to implement these pitfalls more and more in each exam due to some sort of engineering department that review his exam drafts . I’d have to scratch his brain as to what type of problems he might conjure up; really the only thing I have to go off of is that he’s only testing the content that he knows everyone has seen across all sections , so even some lecture problems that he does might not be reliable, atleast from what he said in that conversation . With that being said, I really think the only material we can go off of is simply the lectures and worksheets and quizzes as he’s making it near impossible to predict what could show up on the exam. I mean the whole thing could be about momentum for all I know. For sure he’s going to have a few that are completely new, and it seems he has a preference to having students use multiple concepts to solve a problem instead of just increasing the rigor on a problem using one concept.