Creative teaching assistant organization to maintain an Integrative Physiology course with 440 students
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We were recently challenged with trying to maintain the integrity and learning experience of our Physiology course, which included the use of long-answer, essay-style test questions, with a class size that increased over 2 yr by approximately 200 students. We reorganized the teaching assistant (TA) support structure in an attempt to keep the testing style and mark (or grade) the exams accurately, in a timely fashion, and provide feedback to the students that want it. Each of four TAs became experts in two sections of the course. To assess our success, TA time allocation for specific duties was recorded. Marking (or grading) accuracy was assessed by recording test data including the number of tests returned for remarking and how much marks changed by when a grade was reassessed. Student feedback was solicited to determine whether this structure provided adequate feedback and support to the students. TAs spent an average of 115 h and 35 min +/- 7 h 21 min of a total of 140 h contracted. On average, 13.2 +/- 0.5% of the tests were identified as being inaccurately graded by 4.2 +/- 0.7%. When asked to score whether the statement of assessment of students was fair, it scored 4.5 out of 5, where 5 equals strongly agree. When asked whether the course provided a worthwhile learning experience, the question scored 4.84 out of 5. Thus, we were successful at marking the exams accurately, in a timely fashion, and providing the necessary feedback, and we were successful at maintaining the objectives of the Physiology course with a class size of 440 students.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it