4 ms·

Terry's scheme punishes well educated people who are conservative in their claims of confidence

• nilkn 10y ago
  If one were to actually use this scheme for a class, I think it'd make sense to compute both the classical grade and the probabilistic grade and isolate students whose classical and probabilistic grades differed greatly (as in your example of someone who answers everything correctly, but with low confidence). The professor could then exercise manual judgment to assign the appropriate grade and also probably discuss the discrepancy with the student (i.e., they might find it interesting that they consistently underestimated their knowledge of the subject; on the other hand, a student who was overly confident but did poorly might find it interesting that they were consistently overestimating their knowledge).
• Jabbles 10y ago
  Why should being conservative in your confidence be rewarded above having an accurate assessment of your confidence?
  • Jtsummers 10y ago
    In the case of an exam, students are under stress and pressure that will often lead them to underestimate themselves, especially knowing that if they're wrong that 100% probability will net them a -infinity score for the exam, even if they get everything else right. This also means questions have to be very carefully worded. I recall a number of exam questions (over many years of school, not one class in particular) where the "wrong" answers were arguably right depending on how the sentence was parsed just based on poor use of punctuation or other ambiguous wording.
• arjie 10y ago
  As it should. If you don't know that you know, do you really know?
• daxfohl 10y ago
  Or even more to the point: it punishes those who are geniuses at the subject matter, but not so great at probability. Especially under stress, where the system could be seen as akin to gambling.