Feedback loop

So, tomorrow is the final for Data Mining. I'm not terribly worried about it, but if I was even a little worried about it, I'd be a lot worried about it. Simply put, we've had no substantive feedback.

We've taken two exams, submitted three assignments, and presented a paper. We've got the first exam and assignment back. That is outrageous. The whole point of grading is to give feedback so students can adjust. There simply has been no opportunity to do that in this course.

Unfortunately, this appears to be a social norm at UMSL. I generally don't take pot shots at a school to which I'm attaching myself, but this really needs to be called out. I've now taken four classes at UMSL and the average time from when an assignment or test is collected to when feedback is given is around 3-4 weeks. That's pretty useless. By the time you're four weeks behind, you're dead.

I'm not really sure how to lodge the complaint. The course evaluation is the obvious place but, again, this appears to be a problem of culture, not just one or two profs being delinquent. I never put it to the test, but I'm quite sure that if I had sat on grading for four weeks at Mount Union, I would have had a personal and not particularly pleasant conversation with the dean. Of course, Mount Union also charges ten times as much for tuition, so the students have a legitimate gripe if they're getting anything less than stellar service.

However, just because the courses are state subsidized doesn't mean that grading isn't important. I think this point is particularly salient in a Data Mining class where all the machine learning algorithms we're studying are predicated on fast and accurate feedback.

Grading sucks. It's by far the least fun part of teaching. It's also vitally important. Every job has things that you simply have to do whether you like it or not. This is one of them.