I spent a significant part of the day preparing for my Software Engineering course.  My prospective teaching assistant suggested half-jokingly that we use multiple-choice questions (i.e., monkey puzzles) to make the marking easier.  I dismissed the idea, but after a little research I am seriously considering this option.  MCQ (as they are known in the teaching biz) are sometimes regarded as too easy (because the students have all the answers in front of them), but they can actually be extremely effective, even for measuring “deep” knowledge.  The biggest problem is that good MCQs take a lot of effort to set.  I only realize now that my old teachers who maintained banks of questions year after year were not so stupid after all.  I knew about this difficulty before, but I hadn’t realized how much documentation there was out there.  In some of the material I looked at now, someone claimed that he can manage about at most three or four good questions a day.

I’m still not entirely convinced that MCQs are the way to go, but it is definitely an option I’m keeping in mind.  There are also other aspects to the course that I’m still puzzling over.  My slides/lecture notes are supposed to be clear, concise summaries of the usual topics, but I’m not sure that they give me much to talk about in class.  This has been a problem in the past, too.  There is not much to explain in SE, and few (small) examples.  In essence, it is one long, hard “sell” to convince the students that these methods are somewhat effective.  Perhaps there is a little bit of attitude to convey, but I really prefer “harder” subjects with a little more mathematical substance.

It is easy to make the course difficult or easy, and I’m not really sure at exactly what level I want it.  In the end, I suppose, I want the students to feel that they are not wasting their time.  I think there is a lot to learn about SE, but it’s not for everybody.  Usually the class gets quite excited about the project, so perhaps I’ll focus on that more.