Our Guest Post today comes from Howard Weiss, who is Professor of Operations Management at Temple University. Howard has developed both POM for Windows and Excel OM for our text.
I have used MyOMLab with the Heizer/Render/Munson text for over 6 years now. One option on assignments in MyOMLab is to “Allow partial credit on questions with multiple parts.” In other words, a student does not need to get every part correct on a question to receive credit. This is only one aspect of partial credit and because I use MyOMLab for exams I need to allow for other types of partial credit.
For example, I commonly see students making these mistakes: Forgetting the initial inventory in aggregate planning; Maximizing instead of minimizing in LP; Entering the service time instead of the service rate in waiting lines; Not converting one time unit to another in line balancing; Not converting months to years in inventory; Not multiplying by the cost per unit in layout.
For some of these mistakes, all answers would be incorrect and MyOMLab would give the students a zero for each problem. When I used to grade exams by hand, I would typically identify the mistake and give the student partial credit on the problem.
I now tell the students that they must save all of their work on the problem, which in my case is an Excel file. I encourage the students to review their exam results and to send me an email if they think they deserve partial credit on the problem. They must include their original Excel file with the incorrect work so that I can see that it matches the answer they entered into MyOMLab, an explanation of the mistake that they made, and the correct way to solve the problem. I typically give half credit on the part of the question for students who successfully do this. Many of my students take advantage of this option. They, of course, want the exam points and, I, of course, want them to learn from reviewing the exam.