Feedback and self-assessment in undergraduate student seminars in mathematics

Abstract

In this article we will discuss bachelor’s seminars in mathematics at ETH. Most students (in these seminars) are neither used to individually preparing material from textbooks nor to discussing advances mathematics with fellow students. As these seminars usually follow a single thread, it is often impossible to quickly catch up on the content of past lectures. Hence there is also the risk that students only focus on their own talks, which often results in badly aligned talks. To overcome these problems, we implemented two tweaks to the standard setup. These are extensive meetings with the organizers and few mandatory exercises. We will evaluate the success of these measures and, where success is scarce, propose further measures to possibly address these problems.