Blogging while they take the exam.
Most of the internet use looks reasonable. Google calculator, of course.
One student has googled “how long is 20 million seconds” which is one way to attack the five minute rule problem. But s/he can’t use the page that came up. Now searching on that page for “how much is 18 million seconds”. That page is still up, but I don’t know whether the student is still looking at it. — Now googling for “how much paper is used annually”. I do wonder why he doesn’t just do the arithmetic the question asks for. Now he’s looking for “number of cars in the US”. On Yahoo answers for emissions data. Then to fueleconomy.gov, selecting a year and make … Later search “how much greenhouse gas does the average car omit” leads to several pages he’s already seen.
Several students have web pages open showing car emissions.
“The Daily Green” on paper emissions
“1.6 million tons of green house gases”
“How much carbon does a car emit” followed by frantic surfing
I see one student who found the car talk page I used in my answer.
A student is typing her answers in Word. She has a calculator open at the same time- to multiply 540,000 * 100. In her text she says “add two zeros”. (She should be adding one zero, so she will be off by a factor of 10 in the end. I wonder if she will notice.)
“How much does 1 ream of paper weigh?” with further drill down from a page he found. Then he queries for the same thing in slightly different words.
“Number of cars in the US” – then passes over many sites that might work. Selects a few to look at. Scrambling around.
“Living without a cell phone wall street” – clearly looking for the original article, ignoring my instructions to do that only when asked.
“How many residents have cell phones” – WHY DO THEY DO THIS? I MUST BE DOING SOMETHING WRONG – or else they are conditioned to go to the net INSTEAD OF READING OR THINKING.
Several students finished the exam early (that’s a first).
I predict that more than half the class will get the last question wrong – not computing correctly the old value given the percent increase and the new value.
To the class: if you read this blog and learn something from it that helps you when you redo the exam, please let me know.
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