For my logic classes I have a diversity of weighted tests and homework assignments, and in place of a final exam, you are simply allowed to make up 3 tests. This allows people who didn't get the material at first to fix their grade in the end while still having the material structured.
Theoretically, I could let the students retake as many tests as they want, but that would be a lot of work, and students don't typically benefit from being able to retake more than three tests.
I think it is unethical for classes to have hidden rules or grading systems.
I think it all depends on how you see your role in loco parentis and what you see as being the purpose of grading.
As a student, I was always annoyed when my work was judged based on something other than mastery of the material. A lot of the required courses in my fourth-tier state college were pretty easy, and I worked full-time throughout college. It was vexing that some teachers felt the need to make passing a class more difficult without actually trying to teach me more.
I wonder whether doing well on the final alone is inversely correlated with retention after the final.
My strategy was typically to take a class that was far, far too easy, get bored, fail to do any of the stupid mandatory assignments, and get a terrible grade despite mastery of the material.
As a student, I was always annoyed when my work was judged based on something other than mastery of the material.
Since I teach lit discussion-type classes, I am pretty keen on having attendance affect the grade. 1) Because participating in class helps you learn and 2) because class discussion sucks if lots of folks are absent all the time.
I used to regard one of the functions of grades as bribing students into virtue.
I wonder if there's any useful way to make the necessity for homework contingent on test scores. Say, an initial baseline quiz. If you get an A on that, the next two problem sets are optional, but for everyone else they're required. A on the midterm, the next problem sets are optional. And so on.
I think that'd work to keep people from sabotaging themselves.
I think it is unethical for classes to have hidden rules or grading systems.
Little does he know it, but rob's Unfogged grade this semester just dropped by a letter.
Yeah, I think in lit classes you're testing a range of skills, including demonstrated individual ingenuity and creative thinking (daily in-class writing and discussion), research skills (annotated bib or review of criticism), analytical skills (close reading or comparative analysis paper), completion and understanding of the material (exam), and synthesis of some subset of all these things (research project). While a good analytical paper will also show creativity and mastery of the material, for example, I don't see how I could reasonably assess all these things through a final exam or project alone in every case.
And yeah, seriously, they think a final exam is better than, say, daily writing, but holy shit do they flunk those exams. And it's not the essay part they suck at. They can't identify the names of the protagonists of novels. (By "they" I mean about 1/4 of my survey students at Previous College.)
9.2: Is it that they haven't read the novels, or that they don't know what "protagonist" means? Or maybe they are good with faces, but not names?
7: For a fixed average quantity of work, that sounds similar to assigning people extra problem sets in areas they seem to be struggling with - which seems to me like a better idea than just giving everyone the same studyload regardless of need, ability, or mastery of the material.
10: We're talking like it's seriously obvious they haven't read the books at all. It's one thing not to remember what Westervelt's deal is in The Blithedale Romance; it's entirely another not to remember that Theodore Wieland is the guy who murders his entire family in Wieland.
12: Well, there's another book I don't need to read now.
7, 11 : Ideally you could tailor everyone's assignments to their progress and ability. (I think this is actually a part of the Moore's method teaching that HBGB has been experimenting with.) The problem is that this requires small classes with a lot of individual attention.
Individualized learning plans can also lead to resentment, as some students find that they are doing more work for a lower grade.
some students find that they are doing more work for a lower grade.
It's always like that, isn't it? Especially in subjects like math, some students need to do a lot of work just to get any understanding at all, and still wind up not doing as well as others who spend much less time on it, but grasp the material easily.
When I was in high school. . and was 15. . .I was given a form of 'early admittance' to the local big University that required I continue to be in high school, but take 3 units a semester until I graduated from high school. If I did that and maintained a 3.0 on those units, the contract went, I could automatically matriculate at the University without having to be admitted. B/c of where I lived and b/c I could not drive, I could not possibly get to the University before 3:30pm, and usually could not get there until 4pm. There weren't a lot of 3 unit classes going on then, but after exhaustively going through the entire schedule via telnet I determined that I could take 1 unit of art history seminar and 2 units of self paced intro to computer science in LISP. It turned out there was no good way for me to run a LISP interpreter on the home computer I shared with my whole family, and the only day the self-paced computer center was open after 3 was on Thursday, so my programming assignments were very often late and always slipshod and sloppy, and I didn't finish the final project in time. Being 15 it never occurred to me to talk to the powers that be about *why* I was having so much trouble finishing the assignments on time. I went into the final with a C- on the assignments and then aced the final. The final was taken by several hundred students. (At this point, btw, the deadline for applying to the University like a normal high school student had passed.) The professor decided to call me at home to find out what the hell was going on, and upon finding out that I was a high school student who did not even know that incompletes existed, he offered me one and gave me access to a computer to finish off the assignments and do some make-up onesbefore the start of the next semester. This allowed me to get into college. For this I am ever and deeply grateful. This story doesn't quite fit into your rubric, but I just thought it might be a weird example of an aced final being indicative of some sort of learning not captured elsewhere.
Ideally you could tailor everyone's assignments to their progress and ability. (I think this is actually a part of the Moore's method teaching that HBGB has been experimenting with.) The problem is that this requires small classes with a lot of individual attention.
I feel like this is my cue to mention Experiment At Evergreen* which provides, I think, some interesting examples of how it's possible to design college classes around different priorities. Though I have heard that the one set of subjects that never seemed to fit comfortably in the Evergreen model were Math and Science.
*I've even heard that it's back in print, but it doesn't show up in then Schenkman Books catalog. I'll look into that.
I was going to retell the story of the terrible, terrible philosophy class where I had to convince the instructor to give me a final instead of basing my grade entirely on the pointless weekly busywork that I had predictably failed to apy attention to, but eh. I've told it before. God that class was horrible.
We have fought the Long War chez Carp over this. My son does not like to do homework. Really doesn't. He learns the material, and usually gets As on the tests. When a teacher called me to tell me he had an F, because of the homework, despite As on the tests, I did, after agreeing that he should do his homework, have to ask: is getting As on the tests really failure?
I'm ok with grading diligence, as well as the subject matter. Doing so in every single subject, every single semester, though, seems a little excessive.
(Oh, in the school he went to as a freshman, they had a rule: only 15% of the grade [or 10% I forget] could be based on homework. Presumably a recognition that many students had actual barriers to working at home. Anyway, the teachers got around this by assigning work to be done at home, but calling it something else. That's not homework, that's a summative assessment.)
18 -- Wait, we're not supposed to repeat?
20: I repeat myself all the time. I just didn't feel like telling that one again.
20: I repeat myself all the time. I just didn't feel like telling that one again.
Single combat is the only fair grading system.
Being 15 it never occurred to me to talk to the powers that be about *why* I was having so much trouble finishing the assignments on time.
I had a key college course in my major that necessarily involved lots of out-of-class work. I did my assignments well, but only got 80 percent of them done.
My professor called me and demanded an explanation. I told her was working full-time in a restaurant, and did the best I could. Of course I understood the grading system, and knew that I was due a C.
She explained the whole "incomplete" concept to me, and told me that she couldn't possibly give me the same grade she was going to give to [poor student who sat next to me].
She later got me an clerical-type job for a company that did business in my major field, and I ultimately got my first professional job there.
College professors often don't suck.
I never took (or was offered) an incomplete. I did once get a D in a class that I never attended after the midterm (including not taking the final, and failing the midterm). That was kind of infuriating, as it meant that I couldn't claim that I had de facto dropped the class (even though I had) when I was trying to pick up the academic pieces.
23 gets it exactly right, assuming Lil' Flip is talking about lyrical combat.
I got a B in a math class for which I had the highest exam grades in the class I was told by the professor because I didn't do the homework in the class which I thought was bullshit even though really I can't complain about a B but still it was bullshit because I actually did as much homework in the class as anyone else in the class and maybe more than most of the people in the class even though I did very little of the homework for the class but the homework was on this weird honor system where you just self-reported how much of it you did and how many of the problems you got right and I think the "homework" portion of the grade was split 50/50 between those two things and I reported them honestly and as far as I was aware I was just about the only person not inflating the numbers.
26: the policy here is that "de facto dropped the class" means you didn't take any exams.
28. urple's been holding that in for a long time.
Either that or he just ate something really unusual.
I know this is not going to get a useful answer, but why did you eat the index card, Urple?
Okay.
In that case, what was an index card?
My favorite story along these lines is from High School geometry. IIRC correctly I averaged 98% on the tests (with no extra-credit problems) and around 25% on the homework, because I never did it.
I ended up getting an A in the class and the next year the teacher left teaching (though not because of me).
I got a C in AP Physics senior year of high school after getting A's on the tests (and a 5 on the AP, but I'm not sure that was in yet), because I stopped doing homework after I got into college. I was kind of pleased with Mr. Borden for sticking to his grading rubric rather than giving me an A for knowing the material, although I probably would have been annoyed if the grade mattered for anything.
I had one class where the professor and the TA were essentially in open warfare (she was new, and he thought she was not doing a good job, and she thought he should just shut up, then). At the end of the class she dumped all the grading on him, so he asked every student what grade they felt like they deserved.
I got an A!
32 really to 30 more than to 28.
37: I mean all we turned in each day was an index card with our name on it, the number of homework problems we completed, and the number of problems we got right. It was preposterous.
27: MC Flip-Dawg is never not talking about lyrical combat. Wu Tang!*
* I have no idea what I am talking about.
I got a C in one class in high school despite getting As on all the exams because the teacher was a horrible person who played favorites, essentially, and left herself enough room (some kind of essay that was turned in towards the end of the class and counted for some insane portion of the grade, I believe) to penalize kids who sassed her.
The juxtaposition of 40 and 43 is also good, though depressing.
Grading on the honors system can't possibly do anything except penalize honesty.
I am shocked to hear that you sassed a teacher when you were in high school, Tweety.
"Sassed" not exactly the right word, of course; I respectfully challenged the assumptions behind the things she was saying.
Now, my history teacher I totally sassed. Once he threw his shoe at me, and once I bet him an A on the midterm that he had misspelled a word on the board (I forget what I had to do if I lost; I was evidently correct and so not worried about it). He welshed, but I got an A on the midterm anyhow. Also, for the first assignment he gave us (a recap of what we had learned about 14th century tuscany) I wrote a wacky, pun-filled teleplay. I think I was exploring boundaries.
Can I just say how annoying I find it when students who have had the class before, say Cal II in high school, then impatiently act like everyone else is totally dragging them down and why are we still going over this stupid material, I already get it?
About half the class has seen large parts of the material. But if I say "Hey, any questions? Are you guys ready to go on?" no need to be all extra-emphatic about HOW READY you've been for like the past ever.
Ok there's just one kid in particular that I'm annoyed with. But he's had Cal II before.
re: 50
Can't you just single the person out to answer a question, and then pwn them with something? Get your John Cleese on?
I can't imagine acting like the student in 50; why wouldn't you just skip class?
I keep being worried that somebody from [ school I currently attend ] is going to find this thread and retroactively deny me admission.
I agree with 50. People who already know calculus shouldn't be in my damn class! I kinda want to have a quiz at the beginning and kick out anyone who can do integration by parts.
you could tailor everyone's assignments to their progress and ability. (I think this is actually a part of the Moore's method teaching
In my experience, Moore's method was more like a daily knife melee*, but our prof was good enough that that wasn't too bad. He was a Marine and after the 8AM class we'd go down to the pool table and usually he'd win handily.
heebie may have a different style.
seriously, I dearly wish my university had a little list of Types of
Grading so that we could explain in each class what we were grading
for and what wouldn't work. Mastery? Performance? Effort? Showing
and/or sucking up? Each appropriate in their place but infuriating
when pretending to be something else.
16: I was in possibly the same program and I got the worst case of flu I've ever had during the first week of finals, when our exam was scheduled. I called the professor (who was surprised I found his number, but my parents were on staff and had access to the employee directory) and he suggested I take an incomplete. My understanding of the program requirements was that I couldn't take an incomplete in any class, so I explained to him that I was in high school and needed a grade in the course to stay on track to become a "real" student the following year. He let me take a make-up exam a few days later.
The funny thing is that I guess I was so pathologically honest that it didn't even occur to me why he asked me if I had friends in the class. I realized afterwards that I guess I could have asked them what was on the exam. I did well enough. Even before getting sick I hadn't been doing the homework or attending most lectures during the last half of the course so it didn't surprise me. I'm still annoyed that I never figured out how one of the questions worked and now I don't remember it at all.
I took a summer math course in high school (as a way of jumping over a full year of second-year algebra) and the policy of the summer program was that you couldn't miss more than two sessions. We met three days a week and usually had a test/quiz every class, and I skipped two classes in a row to get almost a week to go camping. I meant to do the homework, but I didn't. But I did do the preparation one would do for doing the homework.
When I got back and didn't have the homework, the teacher got a bit angry and implied that we'd need to discuss whether I could finish the course. I told her to just give me the tests and did fine. After that, I still had to catch up on the homework, but it wasn't a big deal.
The final day of the class we had a final exam. For some reason she still assigned homework for that day. I didn't do it, and when she came by to collect it and I didn't have it, she just sort of shrugged. I did have something on my written evaluation to the effect that I didn't have the most serious attitude but my grades were fine.
The 2nd year (Freshman year for most people who took it) multivariable calculus class had a grading formula with an either/or option which many (fairly bright and hardworking) students found to be harder to understand than the actual material they were learning.
40: I had a teacher in high school who did stuff like that, but he had this very strong moral presence. Many, if not most, of his students would give themselves a lower grade than what he would and later did give them.
59: I appreciated the grading distributions in my stats classes. I appreciated them more once I had the stats to understand them.
The final vs. homework is a good problem with 'nudging'; I think we know that more students will do badly if they can gamble on just acing the final, but not giving them that rope to hang themselves with seems a bit .... nudgy.
I had a history course that was 35% midterm, 65% final, unless you did an optional paper, which lowered the impact of the final. I think most people did a paper; in any case, it was a very simple calculation to make on the students' parts and the instructions for the paper were really clear so you knew what your were getting into.
I was sick of writing papers, so I went with just the exams.
The math course where I got sick was set up so that homework/discussion was optional. If you did well, you could get your grade bumped up 1/3 - good for borderline cases, I guess. Otherwise, there was no penalty for not doing the work except the penalty of possibly not being prepared.
The next math course I took required homework and I did quite a bit better.
There's a study somewhere that found it much more effective to reward at-risk middle schoolers for good habits (read a chapter a night, always have pencil & paper, I forget) than to reward them for the grades that got measured. One would think, oh, only kids and unlucky ones, but the lifehacker tricks and Gawand's checklists work too.
54 People who already know calculus shouldn't be in my damn class!
I wish my high school math teachers had shared that attitude.
64: That kind of reward system would have been good for me.
I got a C in AP Physics senior year of high school after getting A's on the tests (and a 5 on the AP, but I'm not sure that was in yet), because I stopped doing homework after I got into college.
I did the same thing in AP American History, except that I hadn't yet applied to college.
We just had curriculum night at Tony Private School and Carol Dweck got a shout-out, so perhaps the apple will not land right next to the tree.
It's odd how brutal schools are. Pretty much any negative interaction I've had with anyone as an adult, I can think back on and generally not feel like it was a big deal, and often see their point of view. But thinking back on interactions with teachers in high school, I can still get so angry I just kind of start shaking and find it hard to see them as ordinary humans capable of dealing with other people.
||
Essear, I remember you once lamenting that math had mathoverflow and physicists didn't have anything comparable. http://theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com/ went public beta today. I have no idea how good it is, but it's at least mostly things I don't understand.
|>
Yeah, I was already participating a little in the private beta. I'm... not really impressed, so far. But we'll see how it develops now that it's public.
67: That rings true. I've blacked out much of high school because the memories made me too angry, and I didn't have a particularly bad time, compared to most reminiscences that one hears.
It's odd how brutal schools are. Pretty much any negative interaction I've had with anyone as an adult, I can think back on and generally not feel like it was a big deal, and often see their point of view. But thinking back on interactions with teachers in high school, I can still get so angry I just kind of start shaking and find it hard to see them as ordinary humans capable of dealing with other people.
How much of that is the extra brutality of high school, do you think, and how much is the superenhanced emotional intensity of being an adolescent?
71: it's not, okay? I... shut up!
(flees)
College professors often don't suck.
Oh, this is very true. Whenever anyone asked me about going to my big public University I always pointed this out. I estimate that out of the ~30 odd professors I had, only 5 or 6 weren't really quite great and only 2 really sucked. I did switch majors (from bio to physics) based on the early trending, but still.
71 How much of that is the extra brutality of high school, do you think, and how much is the superenhanced emotional intensity of being an adolescent?
Sure -- definitely being an adolescent must have had an influence. But I also imagine that dealing with hordes of adolescents for decades probably also had some real effects on some of the teachers and that the way they treated us wasn't all in our heads. (I have very few negative memories of other students in high school the way I do of teachers. Middle school is a different story....)
More and more it seems that my high school experience was practically idyllic, for all that I was celibate throughout.
My high school experience was wonderful; my fellow students were totally awesome, and almost all of the teachers were somewhere on the spectrum from harmless to great. But the few who were bad (along with some of the administrative staff) were very, very bad.
My high school experience was wonderful; most of my fellow students were totally awesome, and almost all of the teachers were somewhere on the spectrum from good to great. But the few students who were bad (along with one crucial math teacher) were very, very bad.
My changes in bold and then I say god yes with a vengence. I am still picking at the scabs from those few students. In some way it was worse. . .they were so outnumbered that it took them three years to find each other, gather their forces, and wreck their vengence. Freshman year of high school I loved life. But spring of my senior year I was a wreck.
OT (though related?): is Community as awful as its pilot would have me believe? Isn't this show supposed to be be good? When does the good start?
my high school experience was...uh, it sucked. no, I received an excellent education, and I made lifelong friends. I learned, latin, that was nice. mmm, my home life was continuously awful, obviously. learned to deal with all my problems by getting wasted, that probably wasn't so hot. lots of actually great consensual sex senior year, so there was that. nonetheless, taken all in all, it was horrible and I wanted to drink drano 35% of the time. (the rest of the time I wanted to commit suicide in some more sensible and pleasant way, such as eating a gun.)
I hated high school.Not being good at sports hurt when that's what was really valued by the school. (Teachers got hired to teach asubject, but they always had to be able to coach a sport too or do theatre sets or something.)
I was vaguely glum through most of high school, but not for any good reason. Just being a teenager and finding it kind of tragic that I wasn't queen of the world. Occasionally it impresses me how much of my life I've managed to drift through without ever having any real problems.
Unhappy adolescents are all alike; every happy adolescent is happy in her own way.
80: no. Mostly, yes. Give it a few episodes. That said, I haven't yet been able to start watching season three yet; I don't know what that means.
I was super miserable and unhappy in middle school, and had this dazed survival thing going on, counting the days till it was over for about two of the three years.
In high school, I was so relieved to be out of middle school that nothing seemed as bad.
Community steadily improves as it finds its bearing. Keep watching. Brita never improves, though.
I had a pretty miserable first couple of years in high school (but, yeah, not terrible in comparison to 6th-8th grades) but then the latter second years were actually fairly fun. At least the parts that didn't involve class or homework, but since I didn't go to class very often and almost never did my homework, that was most of the time.
Possibly 88 has a rosier tint than I would have given it at the time. God knows I was ready to escape my mom's house as quickly as possible (four or five days before high school graduation, if I recall).
That said, I haven't yet been able to start watching season three yet; I don't know what that means.
It's on hulu.
90: no, I mean, I have the episodes. I just haven't quite been able to bring myself to start watching them.
I was super unhappy until I left. Then I found out a bit more about unhappiness and became a nostalgiac.
I just haven't quite been able to bring myself to start watching them.
I've got a secondary scale of how visually pleasant a TV show is. I'm not sure why Parks & Rec and The Office (for example) score higher than Community on this, but they do.
I find The Office and Parks & Rec really grating for reasons I can't quite pin down. Maybe it's the faux-documentary style. They were both kind of funny for a while and quickly became unwatchable for me.
Huh. Parks & Rec is a favorite. (The Office grates; I just don't find it visually unpleasant.)
94: weird. I haven't watched the first season of Parks & Rec, which I've heard is kind of terrible, but everything else I've found awesome.
I find The Office pretty grating too.
I just got back from Stats class. It's getting harder and harder for me to not make a "natural log" joke. I have no idea how the professor stops herself from doing so.
I'm in stats class (well, lab). It's getting harder and harder for me not to walk out, infuriated.
I just watched The Office for the first time this past weekend (two recent episodes). They were pretty funny, but I think if I watched it very often it would be very depressing.
99: If only someone in your class would start cracking jokes, to lighten your mood.
I only watched the first, I don't know, four or six or some smallish number of episodes of Parks & Rec. Maybe I should give it another try.
Because if there's anything I need, it's more TV shows to watch.
how visually pleasant a TV show is
Where would The Walking Dead rank?
I have the impression that I'm the only person in the world who really liked Pushing Daisies, but visual pleasantness was definitely a factor there.
101: Telling people that the Poisson distribution was so named because it was first used for counting fish is a good one also.
I re-watched the first season of Parks and Rec recently and it's more American Office-style embarrassment situation comedy than I remembered. Then it really picks up in the second season. There's no one as annoying as Michael Scott, which is always what kept me from enjoying The Office as much as I would have, even though I've watched the entire Office.
I watched the first three or four episodes of Community and didn't like any of them. I'm told the show improves, but it needs a lot of improving.
My problem with the fake-documentary-style TV shows is partially that storytelling becomes about 50 times easier when at any time you can just cut to any character saying whatever's on their mind directly to the camera. But it's more the lack of background music.
A big part of being visually pleasant is scenes outdoors. The Rockford Files and Six Feet Under both stand out in my mind for this. The Wire had both outdoor scenes and no background music. Well-done music on TV is IME rare. A modern version of What's Opera Doc would be a music video.
Do people have places to browse videos? There are a few that really stand out-- Losing My Religion, Spoek Mathambo's Control, ummmm-- I'm sure there are others.
||
This fucking stats instructor. I will attempt to reproduce exactly what she has on the slide:
Yijk=α + βjXj + βkXk + β3XjXk + si + εijk
Where a is the overall mean
Why isn't the subscript actually subscript on Y? Why isn't the third coefficient βjk instead of β3? Why are you calling α "a" in the next damn sentence? Aaaaah.
|>
Losing My Religion
I hate that video.
Notation should always be explicit and suggestive. You're completely right that \beta_jk wins over \beta_3, because the former is suggestive, while the latter is not.
114: and consistent, for god's sakes.
Parks +Rec got better and better as it went along.
Why isn't the subscript actually subscript on Y?
Early in the term, it helps to learn who the whiny ones in the class are.
On the mandatory-diversifying vs. grade for mastery question: there may be arguments either way as a teacher, but there's a real problem when a significant downgrade given to someone for (lack of) diversifying gets interpreted in a (lack of) mastery context.
My son, who tests well but struggled with homework throughout middle and high schools, got hit with this quite a bit, as most of the teachers were grading on a mandatory-diversification scale (though some were willing to bend it a bit for him). For example, his high school biology teacher told us that he was getting the highest test scores of anyone in either of the two classes she taught, and was the kid all the other students wanted on their team when she had them doing competitive team quiz games. But he got a D in the class for not doing the required journal, not turning in a bunch of homework, and losing class discussion points because he was reading ahead in the textbook instead of following along with the rest of the class. Anything below a C- meant that he had to make up or repeat the class for college admissions credit, and it looked like he might have to take the high school class all over in summer school. Fortunately, we were able to get him into a joint enrollment program to take a freshman biology class at the local community college instead. That class's grade was 100% test-based, and he wound up with the second-highest grade in the class.
That episode turned out ok (though there turned out to be an unexpected adverse consequence when it came time for him to apply to college), but there were other episodes in other classes that didn't turn out so well. It's one thing to make a kid repeat a class when they didn't understand the material - maybe they'll understand it better the second time around, and you don't want to have them get lost in a subsequent class because they haven't mastered the prerequisites. It's something quite different when they have already clearly demonstrated mastery of the material, but just haven't turned in all the assignments. That wastes everyone's time, may disrupt the kid's schedule of future classes, and may wind up turning the kid off of the subject altogether.
It's one thing to make a kid repeat a class when they didn't understand the material - maybe they'll understand it better the second time around, and you don't want to have them get lost in a subsequent class because they haven't mastered the prerequisites. It's something quite different when they have already clearly demonstrated mastery of the material, but just haven't turned in all the assignments. That wastes everyone's time, may disrupt the kid's schedule of future classes, and may wind up turning the kid off of the subject altogether.
This is so blindingly obvious that it stunning it even needs to be said.
I had an undergrad physics prof who allowed us to distribute the weights for our grades between the exams and the homeworks. I put everything on the exams. Everyone else put almost everything on the homeworks.
None of them studied for the exams. I did the readings, glanced at the problem sets and studied the HW solutions before the exam.
My grades on the exams were bad, but MUCH better than the people who didn't study. Bizarrely (and I was counting on this) the prof still curved the exams. I ended up getting an A and feeling vaguely guilty.
You must have a good intuitive understanding of material. There's no way I'd have done well on my physics exams without doing the homeworks. But I'm a memorizer.