Each year, my Advanced Placement Psychology students are given the opportunity to take the AP Exam for college credit in Psychology. This year, 57 students took my class. Of them, 54 are taking the exam.
Advanced Placement is a product owned by the College Board - the same organization responsible for the SAT. The test that my students will be taking is a national achievement test established to gauge understanding of Psychology. It costs them $82.00 each, but the benefit is that most colleges and universities offer college credit for decent scores.
Last year, I had a number of students who could have done well enough to receive college credit not take the test due to their own insecurity. I want all students who make it through my class to take the AP Exam. Why do all the work and not get the reward?
This year, I added the incentive of an automatic ‘A’ on the class final exam to all students who take the AP Exam. My logic in doing so is that the AP Exam is our class exam. Since I won’t be able to see their scores on that exam until sometime in July, I have no way of assigning them a grade for their exam before the year ends. Therefore, they get an ‘A’.
And, I’m happy to say that it worked: ninety-five percent of them are taking the exam.
Now, I just need to get them to study!
After 10 years of owning a computer, I’ve started backing up. It’s silly that I’ve waited this long, especially considering the number of hours I’ve spent amassing the large sum of data on my hard drive. The truth is I’ve been pretty lucky and have never had a complete data loss have only had one complete data loss on a computer that held a bunch of games and college papers.
Here’s what I got:
Iomega 33720 UltraMax 1 TB FireWire 800 Desktop Hard Drive
I bought this drive from Amazon for under $300.00. Its 1 TB is divided over two drives, which I have decided to use independently.
On one drive, I’m backing up using Leopard’s Time Machine. This is my “oh crap, I can’t believe I just saved over that file” backup. Time machine is great for going “back in time” to retrieve a previous version of a file. It keeps hourly backups of the past day, daily backups of the past week, and weekly backups until the drive you’re using it on is full. Then, I presume it just starts deleting the oldest week saved.
On the other drive, I’m backing up the same data using “Shirt Pocket’s” SuperDuper software. This is my “oh crap, my hard drive just completely crashed and I need to boot from an external drive to keep working” backup. This is the catastrophic situation backup I’ve needed for a long time.
Overall, the drive works well. It came pre-formatted in HFS, so I was able to just plug it into my iMac and go. It is somewhat noisy, though. The fan on its backside is about 5 times as loud as my iMac, and every read and write is quite audible. It’s loud enough that I’ll probably move it off of my desktop as soon as I buy a longer Firewire 800 cable. But, even so, it’s buzz is not nearly loud enough to distract me from my work.
You wouldn’t think I’d be so excited about a technology purchase that does nothing for me unless something goes terribly wrong! Even so, it does what it does quite well and it’s a relief to know that I’m covered.