Very surprising

[Harry Roy]

I was astonished at the results Brian reported. It is very impressive
that Brian developed a program to analyze how far the students got.
That is perhaps a way to guide the grading of reports? A TA would
have to take into account the results of the program...

I have to say that I think our students at Rensselaer definitely got
the idea that they could make crosses between different cages. This
might be because I used the program during class to show them how to
analyze various situations. But I did not use the program Brian made
and have no really objective quantitative data on whether they used
too little or too much information. My opinion is based on the fact
that the TAs who graded our reports were guided by a rubric that I had
written, reviewing personally some representative reports. Also I
relied on the structure of the assignment involving two stages, one
for the analysis of properties at each locus, and the second the
question of linkage.

It is possible that the students also benefited from reports produced
by students in previous years. This is not regarded as cheating, since
the students had to use their own randomly generated data file. Also,
they could get a good idea just by fiddling around with some of the
problems in their "peekaboo" version.

Unfortunately this semester I am not going to have the students write
reports on their work/play with VGLII. This is because we are trying a
different way of getting the students to write about biology this
fall. However I still plan to use the program to show students how to
analyze genetic situations.