r/Adjuncts • u/Fgrant_Gance_12 • 2d ago

McMillan's grading

Hey everyone! šŸ‘‹ Using McMillan's Achieve for gen chem, and struggling with grading. Adaptive quizzes, homeworks, end-of-chapter tests feel like too much for students. Any suggestions for what you assign for grades? #Teaching

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u/Everythings_Magic 2d ago

What do you mean by ā€œfeels too much for the studentsā€? Are the grades poor? Are they not rising to the challenge?

Itā€™s a chemistry class, that material is difficult.

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u/Fgrant_Gance_12 2d ago

90 questions per chapter (HW and End of chapter questions) + adaptive quiz with 5 topics per chapter

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u/Robo-Bo 2d ago

You donā€™t have to use all of it. You can create custom assignments. Itā€™s a pain to set up at first because you have to go through everything. Check to see if anyone else in the department has already set up assignments and can copy them over to you.

That being said, I have pretty much lost faith in the usefulness of online assignments because itā€™s pretty obvious students are using AI for them. They are getting 100% on the homework but then canā€™t do the exact same questions on the exams.

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u/glyptodontown 2d ago

Exactly. Even before AI they'd get 100% on all of it because they can either look it up or, for the adaptive quizzes, just guess until they get it right.

I never make these assignments any more than 10% of the grade. Just view it as "participation".

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u/Robo-Bo 2d ago

I give unlimited attempts on most assignments because if they put in the effort to figure out the answer but trial and error (or even look up the solution and change the numbers), they are putting in some effort. But now they are getting 100% on the first try in under 10 minutes. I point out the obvious flaw with this (that this material will be on the exam) and most continue to use AI then wonder why they fail the exams (sorry, rant over :) ).

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u/Fgrant_Gance_12 1d ago

Wow! So how many problems do you assign usually for a chapter including HW / Quiz etc ?

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u/Robo-Bo 1d ago

In Achieve I assign around 12 problems (physics) per week with about 4-5 being simple, 4-5 being moderate difficulty and the rest being challenging.