Test are depressing

So it's been almost a month since I posted anything, oh well. You know the reason by now, I'm busy and boring.

Recently I finished grading the first midterm for the class I'm teaching. It's the second semester teaching the course and I'm learning how to do it a bit more effectively, at least that's what I thought. The midterm average was only 52%. But I'm not really worried about that, I kind of like scaring them on the first midterm, it gets them working harder for the rest of the semester. That being said there are a few things about the comments and answers that I saw that are concerning me.

For one thing, it seems to the students, that my questions are difficult to understand, they can't seem to figure out what I'm asking for. This is something I'm having some issues with. I've been looking over the questions I gave them and I will admit, in some instances I include superfluous information, just to see if they can extract useful information from the question. Other than that the questions I ask of them are succinct and in my opinion clear. So short of actually setting up the equations for the students I really don't know what I can do to help them.

The other thing that just floored me when I was grading the exam was one error that was made by close to 20% of my class. Normally that's not a big deal, I've had questions where most of the class made the same mistake, but those were usually cases of subtleties or particularly challenging questions. The one that this group fucked up was a logic question, you know the kind you are taught to figure out in kindergarden. In specific the students had to determine if a given value fell within the 95% confidence limits of a series of values. Ok, so that probably sounds like gibberish, but they knew what I wanted and were able to do the math properly, finding out that the confidence interval was 10.05 to 10.17. So when it came to answering the question, does 10.00 fall within the confidence interval why did 20% of them say that it did? I'm not dealing with six year olds, these kids actually have the right to vote!

It really is a very sad situation when 20% of a university class cannot answer a basic logic question. So with that in mind I don't think I'm to blame for their failure to understand my questions, clearly the education system has failed them year after year, and now 15 years into the system they still can't deal with the basics. I'm going to do what I can to actually get them to turn on their brains, but I'm obviously swimming against the current in a lot of cases.

*Note the exam sheet posted is not from one of my students, but supposedly from a genius who answered "C" for a true/false exam