Korean Job Discussion Forums

[withnail]

I would be grateful if some of you guys could let me have your thoughts on a few questions related to evaluating freshmen uni students.

1. Do you have control over how you evaluate them or does your department prescribe how it must be done?

2. Which of the four skills (Speaking, Writing, Listening, Reading) or which combination of these do you seek to evaluate and why?

3. Given that you may have a total of 150+ students, what do you do to keep the workload down?

[Juregen]

Let them grade themselves?

[Milwaukiedave]

withnail,

We have a set of guidelines for each level in terms of what they are expected to get from the course (but you know how that goes). For the lower levels, we create conversations questions from the book (levels 1-3) and level 4 depends on which book each teacher uses (many use conversation topics since the students are a higher level and have studied abroad).

Then depending on how you are weighting the final exam, you can allot a percentage to different areas (vocabulary, pronunciation, etc) and make up a form and print off a bunch. At that point, if you have the questions and the evaluation form, it becomes pretty easy to just line them up and bring them in and talk with them while giving them a grade

[withnail]

that is very helpful and sensible, thank you. I do wonder though, if universities in general attempt to divide their freshmen by level of proficiency before starting. I was under the impression that freshmen groups are large classes of very mixed ability. Do unis really take the trouble to level check their new intake and separate them by English proficiency?

Apologies if these questions seem dumb - I will start my first uni job in March next year and am interested...

[Milwaukiedave]

Some do that and some don't. The first university I worked at didn't seperate by ability, the one I work at now does. Even then, you still have cases where there is a big difference between the student with the highest ability and lowest. The place I work at now also does something different in terms of the final evaluations, the teachers change classes and evaluate a different group of students then they taught throughout the term.

[Paji eh Wong]