Using Exams for Teaching Concepts in Probability and Statistics. Teacher's Corner.
We include a question at the end of the first midterm asking the student to guess his or her total score on the other questions of the exam. As an incentive, the student receives 5 points extra credit if the guess is within 10 points of the actual score (which is on a scale of 0 to 125). When the students complete their exams, we keep track of the order in which they are handed in, so that we can later check to see if students who finish the exam early are more or less accurate in their self-assessments than the students who take the full hour. When grading the exams, we do not look at the guessed score until all the other questions are graded. We then record the guessed grade, actual grade, and order of finish for each student. We have three reasons for including the self-evaluation question. First, it forces the students to check their work before turning in the exam. Second, it teaches them that subjective predictions can have systematic bias (in this case, students tend to be overconfident about their scores). And third, the students' guesses provide us with data for a class discussion, as described below.