Mid-term Quiz Results

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A few weeks ago we gave a quiz to the SWC students on the first three topics of the course: Version Control, Spreadsheets, and Databases. We did this in addition to our student check-ins in order to get a sense of how the students were doing with the material. Half of the class (24 students) submitted their answers.

Results:
Everyone did really, really well! The majority of the mistakes were small SQL syntax errors, or other similarly minor things.

Problem areas:

• Spreadsheets — Absolute References:
  This was probably the most common error made on the quiz. There were quite a few instances where students failed to recognize the necessity of using absolute references in their solutions. (Questions 2 and 6 in the Spreadsheets section of the quiz.)
• Databases — Nested Queries:
  The final question of the quiz involved nested queries. A few of the students did not use nested queries correctly, or failed to use them at all.
• Version Control — Comments:
  Ah, of course. There was tendency for students to skip the "give a meaningful comment" part when explaining how to commit changes to a repository.

Overall, the students did very well. We did not assign numeric scores, but the majority of the quizzes were perfect or near to it.

Well done, Fall 2010 class!