Quiz recap

December 11th, 2010 by Jack

The quiz results are in and I would call the class performance “typical.”  Five of you made me “happy” by scoring in double digits.  Most of the rest at least passed by scoring 7 or better.  But a few of you clearly need work on your research skills.  I’m always happy to help; all you need to do is ask.  Believe me, I hate giving poor grades as much as anyone hates receiving them.  When you fail, we both fail.  On the bright side, school is the place to learn your weaknesses so you can address them without terrible consequences.  Especially in the first semester.

Among the high scorers, special kudos to Yudith Ho, the only one to correctly point out that my brother is not enrolled in any political party.  It wasn’t a trick question, but I wasn’t going to pick a Democrat or Republican, where you could just guess and have a decent chance of getting the right answer.  Once you figured out his birthday and his county, all you had to do was go here.

Congratulations also to the few who knew to use Access World News for the Staten Island Advance question and Associations Unlimited for the Habitat for Humanity question.  It didn’t surprise me those were among the “harder” queries.  For whatever reason, students seem not to make sufficient use of the premium databases the school makes available, even the higher-profile ones like Nexis and Factiva.  However, a lot of you did know to use ReferenceUSA for the corporate sales volume question, so that was good (…although maybe it was because I assured there would be a RefUSA question on the quiz).

The biggest surprise (and disappointment) was that not many knew where to go for the 1996 New York Times web headlines, especially since we had just reviewed the Wayback Machine the previous week, so it should have been fresh in mind.  I would have expected that to be one of the quicker and easier questions on the quiz.

Apparently, the easiest questions were the ones on Prue’s web site, the sex offenders and the police precinct crime stats.  Almost all of you got credit on those.  The last of the three should have been easy though, given that you already had to do it for the CD beat memo.

So that’s all, folks.  Enjoy your holiday break.  I may be back with some of you next semester; ya never know.  If not, just remember, ARE YOU SURE? and SAYS WHO?

And WHO DAT?!?! (LOL)

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