Quizzes are good. They let you get a feel for things and if you have your quizzes in front of you, it can help you study for your tests.

Oral exams suck. Way too much pressure.

Power Point is OK for lectures. But reading straight from a PPT is bad.

When I was a lab TA the students hated quizzes when they couldn't do them fast enough. It depends upon the course.

The problem with oral exams is getting your thoughts in order quickly to explain something.

I took mostly science and engineering courses where the professor covers the board or over head projector roll with pages of equations. But I agree having someone just recite the same thing that can be read without significantly additional information is worthless.

The worst that I ever heard of was a professor that played a recording of him reading the text book with him rewind to play important points.

I'm just going to address 3, because it's the one I have thoughts on. I too hate PowerPoints, and I think much of the PowerPoint craze is based on a condescending attitude that "young people are different now and they need visual stimulation," which is often just a thinly veiled claim that young people now are stupid, have no attention span, and couldn't follow a thoughtfully structured traditional lecture.

Unfortunately, the result is rarely thoughtfully structured, and it rarely draws the student's mind through the material as effectively, removing such opportunities as seeing where a professor is going before he gets there that are actually engaging. I really think 90% of it is just laziness and a desire not to prepare actual lectures, dressed up as concern for students. Of course, it's possible that there are great ways to use PowerPoint and I just haven't seen them; but in that case, I'd say wait until you actually think of something you want to achieve that PowerPoint naturally suggests itself for. Don't just use it because it's popular, in, or expected.

1. Quizzes are great because you can see how you are doing on the material before it really counts too much. As long as you are open to helping students outside of class (i.e. an involved teacher, the way teachers should be), they are a great tool.

2. Holy fuck no.

3. As long as the presentation isn't written out on the slide (meaning you speak your presentation rather than expecting them to read it - the presentation is there mainly so that if someone dozes off for 30 seconds they can pick back up in my opinion), they are awesome. Some teachers do better without them, though. I think that's a measure of knowing yourself and how you operate in the classroom versus how popular they are.

So here's the thing with oral exams. Most people in technical degrees are terrible at presenting, especially under stress, but it's a very important skill to have. While it may suck at the time, I figure it's better to gain experience when the risks are fairly low, rather than bombing a technical interview or real presentation.

@semck

Agreed 100%

1) Quizzes are okay, but don't overuse them. Keep in mind what your goal is. Do you want to keep the students engaged with the material and make sure they study? Give one or two quizzes halfway through the course, announce clearly what material they need to study & the kind of questions etc. Or do you want to use the tests to allow already motivated students to get a better grade? Then a few more surprise tests might be better. In any case, taking a quiz has a cost both for the students and the professor, so make sure you get something useful out of it.

2) Love it! I have been on both sides. It usually takes ~1 minute to figure out how well a student knows the material. The rest of the time you can spend talking about the course, or stuff that the students might be interested in.

3) Like quizzes, powerpoint is a tool. Use it if and only if it adds something to your class. I used to be a physicist, now switched to neuroscience. In physics, nobody would use powerpoints, and nobody really needs them. Lecture notes + a blackboard are way better. However, in neuroscience everyone uses powerpoint and there's no other way. You can't just draw pictures of brains, or data from electrical recordings.

Abge, as far as oral presentations go, I would much rather personally be forced to simply participate in class and get used to being put on the spot rather than have to put together a presentation about something someone else assigned me. It's more genuine to have a discussion than to read from a script.

Students like power point because they all know how it works, see below.

How Professor hears this conversation:
Brave Student: "Professor, will this power point be available for my sick friend online?"
Professor: "Yes, I will post it after lecture"

What the rest of the class heard:
Brave Student "Professor, do we need to pay attention and take notes, or can we blow this class off and play on our phones?"
Professor: "Go ahead and play"

That abge, is why students love power point.

I'm guessing you'll be teaching something science related, so comprehensive essays are out. My favorite classes in school were all discussion based and reading was given but never checked, but it was needed for essays. I imagine its different for the sciences. Powerpoint, though, is only a tool, not a replacement for good teaching and discussion. Group work is always a consideration too.

1. As long as it's not busy work quizzes are fine.

2. No real opinion on oral exams. I only had one and it was fine. It does seem like it wouldn't fit well in many, even most, subjects.

3. As long as Power Point isn't all you do then even a bad one can be OK.

As for quizzes, make them short, 3-7 short easy questions from the reading. Something so obvious in the reading that any fool can answer, but that does require at least skimming. Otherwise they require memorizing all the random shit facts in the chapter and everyone will hate you with a passion.

Oral exams, the problem is subjectivity, if you can find a way to do it where your butt is covered when you get complaints from poor performing students saying they did in fact tell you what you wanted to hear, and you just don't like them, then they are great. Professors think students will lie, students think professors hate them, that's why they are rare.

What is fun though is to assign each student a topic, and have them lead a class based discussion for 30 minutes or so. Every student is assigned a grade based on participation when other people present, and for when they do. Make it 25% of their grade and they will take it seriously. Give them a wide range of topics and they will find something interesting to them, getting them more involved. This works well because you can always butt in if they are floundering and help them out, or if it turns into a good discussion then you can let it run longer then the time frame.

@bo

I'm all for calling on students in class, but your questions simply can't have the same level of rigor as in an oral exam.

That can be a fun idea, jmo, but it's not practical if there's a lot of hard material to cram into a term.

@semck, true, there are a ton of different engaging ways to teach, it really just depends what the material is, and how much leeway abge is going to have.

@jmo

That's actually a good idea. It's mostly a lab based course. Maybe I'll have groups choose one of the labs to present on. Means less lectures to prepare for me : )

They don't have to, abge. As long as the student gets the material, learns it, and is able to do their part in furthering the discussion so that every other student gets it too, they'll learn the technical skills for speaking and they'll learn how to respond to things they weren't prepared to answer to prior. Based on what you said about why you like oral exams, they get the same things done.

"The only problem is they seem to always take a lot more class time than expected."

I used them in every course I taught. Implemented a 10-15 min hard time limit and made the quizzes brief but made sure they hit on the main points of what we had gone over thus far. Usually 10 multiple choice and 2 short answer questions with students being allowed to choose between 15 MCs and 5 short answers.

2) I loved oral exams. Students hate them because you end up studying a lot of material but only getting tested on a relatively small portion of it. Also students seem very reticent to speak. I think they're difficult to organize too with all the scheduling conflicts.

3) Dislike powerpoint intensely. I think it's a big distraction and really sucks the life out of lectures and discussions. I tended to use chalkboard, but sometimes I type up some notes and post them afterwards. I was begged to use PP all the time, though, from students and faculty observers alike.

@Putin

Yeah, that's the other problem with oral exams. I'd pretty much have to take an entire lecture period to do it. Not sure it's worth it.

@abge, yeah, with lab's it's nice because you can give them the options to pick from beforehand (give them only the topics, not the date, so they pick based purely on interest). Then you either give them a starting point with some basic material, or let them run rampant. Group with the best class voted presentation gets 2.5? percent bonus on participation (can't vote for their own project), same goes with your favorite presentation. "Bonus" will make them thrilled and put a lot of effort into them.

Depends on how many students you have, and whether you have TA's helping you.

Oral exam: 20 mins per student, which in a 30-person class amounts to 10 hours. Split that over two days and you'll be done with it.

Written exam: 3 hours preparation time (at least), 2 hours exam time (at least), 10 mins per student grading time (at least). For 30 students, that's the same 10 hours. Admittedly a TA can help you out.

abgemacht, what class would you be teaching? It would help to know what kind of stuff you should be doing.

Right, but an oral exam takes 10 hours of *class* time, whereas a written exam only takes 3.

This class is on Windows and Operating Systems. It's one of the required courses for a 2-year associates in IT.

I like the title. Do you think you'll spend more time on Windows, or on Operating Systems?

I plan on spending as much time on Windows as I can muster before collapsing in my own vomit. I'll spend the rest of the time on Operating Systems in general.

" It's one of the required courses for a 2-year associates in IT."

Oy vey. Nevermind.

Yes, Putin?

@semck

To be more clear. Labs constitute ~50% of the course. Those will all be exclusively Windows. Most of my Lectures (the other 50%) will mostly be about OSes in general.