Catastrophic result in Structured Programming [loc-004B]

I was devastated earlier this week when I marked the midsemester test for the first year course I'm teaching at the ANU. Less than one in five students passed the test, with more than half of submissions showing compile errors when running automatic tests on their code (this is for the second programming course in our programme, mind). My tutors completed the exam (100% correctly) in 25 minutes, and I gave my students 90 minutes.

I am fairly confident that this result is not a result of some deep failing on my part — I've taught first year students before with much better results — so I did a little digging to see how much students are engaging with my course. The results were not encouraging. More than half of students had not even started Homework 1, which came out at the beginning of semester (ten weeks ago), and fewer than one in five students had started Homework 2, which was directly intended to prepare them for the very test they failed. I hear reports from my tutors that students have begun education-defeating practices like copying a lab exercise into ChatGPT without even reading it.

This is all a symptom of the broader engagement crisis in teaching and an overall worrying decline in conscientiousness that is deeply troubling and bodes poorly for the future. Lecture attendance is extremely low. Usually I get no more than twenty students (out of about one hundred and twenty) in my lecture theatre. Frustratingly, it's precisely those students — the students I can actually reach — that I'm not worried about. When bad results come out like this, a lot of the relatively conscientious but struggling students begin to feel like they should give up and withdraw (and this pressure disproportionally affects under-represented groups such as female students). The rest of the semester has become a delicate morale balancing act where I need to shock students enough to get them to switch their brains on, but avoid demoralising students such that those who have ability but lack confidence are not discouraged.

I've retooled the remainder of the semester. We're going to do only the essentials in terms of more content. The rest will just be drilling exercises to help them gain the basic study skills they should already have by now. I'm so much more depressed and anxious running my course this way. I hope I can teach a 3rd year elective one day and be somewhat relieved of this.