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Exams are over and Q1 has come to an end. Boy, it was fast!

Question Papers

While the students prepared for writing their exams, we worked on setting the question papers. Vishwajeet worked on a balanced Mathematics paper, without any MCQs interestingly, because he didn’t want them to guess (“tukka”).

Then the BWH team came together to brainstorm a balance approach to test their Computer Science learning:

Here is the pattern we came up with:

1. Theory: 50 marks (mostly boolean algebra, algorithms & flowcharts, number systems, and basics of software)
2. Practical: 30 marks (Calc and Scratch)
3. Final Group Project + Presentation: 20 marks (Scratch based game)

The presentation part lets us test three things at once:

• Slides with LibreOffice Impress
• Spoken English
• QnA: Grill to see if they really did the project themselves?

I am pretty happy on how the theory question paper turned out to be since we hand-picked each question and reviewed things multiple times.

English was also two parts: theory and Viva (taken by Rekha ji).

The Examinations

The exams took place from 9.30AM in the morning and Gajendra from our team acted as an additional invigilator.

The Disappointment

I had high hopes and Vishwajeet had too, but they were shattered as soon as we received Mathematics answer sheets for grading. They had done poorly: lots of silly mistakes, incorrect basic arithmetic, and missing practice. Even worse, three of the girls had badly failed!

We decided to stay calm till the CS paper was over and see if that goes well.

The situation was better in CS, but again did not meet my expectations, given the practice we made them do and efforts we had put in. The efforts from the student’s side did not show, for except a few. Only half of them scored above 50% marks 😢

We started discussing this internally. What went wrong? What to do now?

The Panic Problem

This is a common thing we noticed in few of the good performing students. These students did well in class room and homework assignments, but not in exams. They had panicked. I will discuss one possible solution for this panic problem soon.

The students who had joined a month late (during the end of admissions) also did not perform well for obvious reasons: they were not able to catch up. They had clearly not put in the extra hard-work which was needed.

The Reviews

We blocked yesterday (Saturday) to spend the day at CS17 Campus.

The agenda was clear: make them realize their mistakes, set clear expectations for each one of them, and encourage them to change gears and be back on track.

We started with general discussion on the freedom and facilities the students were provided and how they had not met expectations. I emphasized the importance of discipline above marks because we had received a few complaints from the BSM team.

Then Vishwajeet, Shivam and I, sat down with their Math and CS answer sheets and called them one by one. We went over each answer together and pointed where they had gone wrong. We also solved questions that were commonly wrong on the board. The process took a few hours, but was totally needed in my opinion.

Earlier my plan was to start the programming part first thing in Q2. But that will have to wait now. We will take a month to help them strengthen their understanding and learning of important topics of this quarter like logic building in scratch, Algorithms & Flowcharts, Calc, and basic mathematical calculations.

Even English needs to continue full time for one more quarter based on feedback shared by Rekha ji and the problems in understanding the question paper by Hindi medium students.

They have promised to do better starting next quarter and I trust them.

🤞🏼

The Outing

Rekha ji and I had planned an outing a few weeks before for this very day, but after a stressful day of results and reviews, it really felt like the right time.

We all headed to a nice local cafe and had a very good time with Pizzas, Pasta, and Ice cream!

Our Part

Along with the students, this exam cycle also helped us get more clarity on how to do better assessments starting next quarter. This time we had one big exam at the end of the quarter, which we think is too long a time gap to assess and, share feedback.

So, starting next quarter we will also have a mid-quarter examination. Shivam suggests some mock papers too. Since the students will be made to sit in this timed environment a bit more frequently, the panic problem hopefully should ease out.

Up Next

Next week, the students will be busy with their final projects (Scratch game, teams of two). This will be followed by a parents meet-up the coming Sunday. Shivam is working on adding the features to maintain exam results on CS17 portal app.

Also, I might skip next week’s blog since I will be travelling for Frappeverse starting next Monday, but will post a combined one after we return Frappeverse Mumbai.