Codes

Although students will walk back into my class on Tuesday, we won’t actually start the second semester “for real” until Wednesday.1 This is because three years ago, I started the practice of putting my B-day classes in front of my A-day classes for the entire second semester in AP Stat.2 The following is some background as to why I started doing this.

Each year at the start of the first major exam3 in AP Statistics, I put a brief “honor statement” at the top of the first page for students to sign.4
Just below is a shot of said honor statement:

Here’s the crucial text (in case you’re on a small screen):

HONOR STATEMENT: I understand that Mr. Youn expects that I will never discuss (nor have I discussed) the contents of any quiz or test with anybody else until we review it together as a class. This gives all of my classmates a fair chance at taking this test. I will respect my classmates by following these expectations at all times.

Please sign if you agree: _______________

I’m not naïve — there is no way to completely eliminate cheating.5 However, there are, quite honestly, a large number of students who don’t even realize that the behavior described in this paragraph is considered an act of scholastic dishonesty. The purpose of this exercise is merely to communicate our expectations to them. 6

Back when I was a senior in high school, our teachers would explain to us that we — meaning students — were competing with one another for spots in college, and thus, it ought to make sense for us to NOT want to discuss contents of an exam that we had just taken with friends of ours who were taking the same class in a later period that day.

But even in the “dark-age” absence of cellphones and social media,7 we had trouble keeping secrets. 8

These days, kids at my school are on an A/B block schedule, in which we have 8 total class periods, but only four 90-minute classes each day — so it takes a cycle of two days to get through all 8 classes. This, in theory, allows students to disseminate contents of, oh say, that day’s evil exam in AP Stat in between days.9 Oh, and not to mention, kids these days have incredibly sharp camera phones, and social media, and messaging apps galore.10

In theory, this gives a perpetual advantage to the kids who have classes on “B” days, as their classes — and thus, exams — are systematically a day later than for students who have the same classes on “A” days. 11

And this is one of the main reasons that I started teaching my classes B-day first for the entire second semester — it gives the B-day students a chance to be at the front of the line, and to make it through a semester sans the luxury of hearing about the next day’s class from their A-day friends.12

But the much bigger reason I choose to start with my B-day classes every January?

After hibernating for two weeks,13 who the heck is prepared to teach a tough lesson on sampling distributions14 the first day back? 15

The following is a charming16 xkcd that touches on the universe of pain in which we’ll be living for much the duration of the second semester: Inference.17

1. Tuesday will end up being some sort of review and/or data collection activity. Nothing that is overly “processor-intensive”. [↩]
2. I have also done this in Pre-AP Algebra II a couple of times, but more for reasons related to bad-weather days or other disruptions in the calendar. [↩]
3. Incidentally, the first major exam of the year has been falling on — or very close to — September 11 [↩]
4. and hopefully, read [↩]
5. A law-school friend of mine once pointed me to a study that indicates that institutions of higher education that make students aware of an honor code actually have higher incidences of scholastic dishonesty than schools that don’t… but I have to think that has more to do with the competitiveness of the students that attend such institutions, rather than the presence of an honor code itself. [↩]
6. Oh, it also provides excellent fodder for the “sensitive questions” activity that I pull on them much later in the year, after the last major class exam. [↩]
7. And I don’t even mean SMARTphones. Cellular phones didn’t become ubiquitous among consumers until I was midway through college. Like I said. Dark ages. [↩]
8. This perhaps begs the question of which code teenagers respect more: the code of honor or the code of friends? I’m sure there’s a lesson on game theory in there somewhere… [↩]
9. not to mention in between class periods [↩]
10. Oh, how I cannot wait for communicating during exams via smart watch starts to become a thing… </sarcasm> [↩]
11. When you teach the kids at the higher ranks, this kind of stuff is not insignificant. Last year — Season 7 — I taught the entire senior class top 10… that was an interesting dynamic at times. [↩]
12. Not that this approach solves everything — with this regard, kids with class later in the day will always have an advantage over kids who are in the morning periods, etc. But it does mix things up a little, at least. [↩]
13. And oh boy, after a grueling stretch run to close the first semester, this Winter Break was closer to hibernation than any Winter Break I’ve had since college… [↩]
14. and in the second semester of any math class, the first lesson is never light-weight [↩]
15. That’s the code I prefer to go by: the code of mental self-preservation. [↩]
16. well, *I* think it’s charming [↩]
17. After “Inception” and “Interstellar”, I’d like to a Christopher Nolan flick about “Inference”. Like his other stuff, you’d have to be genius to understand it… [↩]