Walking the Talk at Texas State

I feel as though some of my professors at Texas State did "walk the talk" of assessment. In the Geography department, my favorite professor and mentor hated testing and really didn't believe that it taught students much at all. In every one of his classes, he gave students the test a week before hand. He knew that we were only going to memorize the answers for the test and forget the information afterward, so he did not want us to spend time stressing about it. He simply thought that if he had to give tests, since we were at a state school, he would at least make it so each student basically got an A each time. Although he would have loved to think that all of us would grasp the information and know it after the test, he didn't believe that it was the only way to see what we had learned about the particular subject. His focus in each one of his classes was the project at the end of the semester. This project counted for most of our grade and he expected it to take some time and utilize the information that he taught throughout the semester.

In my Geography of Texas class, we had to make a guide to Texas. We could do this in many ways. In my guide, I chose a certain greenspace that was along the Balcones Fault Line and showed how the fault line changed the geography in a small area. Then I related it to the state of Texas as a whole. In this I had to look at the ecology, elevation changes, rivers, temperature and weather patterns, as well as changes in culture and history across the state. It was fascinating to be able to learn this on my own and put it into a well crafted presentation.

In my Nature and Heritage Tourism class we had to design a presentation that could be presented to city council that demonstrated a 3 activities that could be implemented in our area. Mine involved how to bring EE into after school programs in elementary school using many parks in the area as well as the river. We used many of the concepts that were learned in class to put this together and then had to present it to the class in a professional manner.

I also found that in my creative writing classes this was also true. Although I felt that this is just the basic flows of a creative writing class/workshop. In all of my classes, we did not have tests. Our grades were based on 3 portfolios that were submitted throughout the semester as well as our participation in workshop. We continuously brought in work to be critiqued by our class members as well as our professor. Some of our professors made sure that we wrote in certain forms in our portfolio in order to learn how to write different types of poetry. Throughout the semester we also read many poet in order to learn different forms and styles of writing. This was extremely helpful to me as a poet and as a critic.

Besides these, most of my classes were based on papers and tests. Although some had great projects that made up a good part of the total grade, tests were still held very high. I knew the way I tested, I am a horrible multiple-choice test taker. I made sure that most of the classes that I took were writing intensive, because I knew that written essay tests were the only way that I tested well and would make the grades that I wanted.