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I'd think that making an exam like that is a hellish amount of work. One might propose that students are definitely not going to remember all of that, so you ca

I'd think that making an exam like that is a hellish amount of work. One might propose that students are definitely not going to remember all of that, so you can basically reuse stuff from previous years anyway, but that's not how the world works, sadly.

jonnycomputer 7y ago
He gave us previous exams as study guides. The questions were similar, but not exactly the same.
MisterBastahrd 7y ago
I think making an exam like that is silly. Except for research work and startups, you aren't ever going to go into a job and just decided to only tackle certain problems. I had a history professor who gave a test in this manner: Below there are 3 columns of 14 items of interest, whether they be people or wars or treaties or whatever. You are allowed to cross out 2 columns, and then cross out 3 terms. Write what you know about the remaining terms. Your grade is out of 110 on a 100 point scale. Now, I loved the test, because I excel at soft trivia tests... but did it really gauge what I understood about history? Nope. It gauged my knowledge of history trivia for those terms. Understanding history is about understanding how these things connect together. If I were a history professor, I would base the majority of students' grades on papers about the subjects we cover in class to discover whether they're actually thinking about history or if they're just trying to recite facts and figures.
- asdff 7y ago
  I think it depends on what is being put in these exams, like if you are being given rote memory trivia or asked to write out a little essay with arguments supported by historical examples for those topics, that would be a tougher exam that asked you to think about history. For a calc final I took, it was 7 pages, 7 problems, 3 hours, and you were only graded on your best 6. Each of those six problems tested very intimate knowledge on specific topics in calc, but if you weren't so strong in one area you could focus on where you can shine, or if something was a walk for you it gave you more time for the tricky problems.
- jonnycomputer 7y ago
  Why should school exams mimic typical scenarios faced in work life. In typical work scenarios you have more than 2 hours to tackle a problem, anyway. This is computer science, and a data structures class to boot. Answering any of the questions required not only a deep understanding of the fundamental principles involved, but analytic skills (both in parsing the problem statement into a set of requirements and to identify problematic edge cases). Any good class will teach more than they could possibly test on in two hours. So the alternative here is to keep students guessing about what will actually be on the exam? That's why, when I was a college instructor, I gave previous exams to my students (also: i thought not doing so would disadvantage less socially connected students; lots of old exams get passed around).

jonnycomputer 7y ago

He gave us previous exams as study guides. The questions were similar, but not exactly the same.

MisterBastahrd 7y ago

I think making an exam like that is silly. Except for research work and startups, you aren't ever going to go into a job and just decided to only tackle certain problems. I had a history professor who gave a test in this manner: Below there are 3 columns of 14 items of interest, whether they be people or wars or treaties or whatever. You are allowed to cross out 2 columns, and then cross out 3 terms. Write what you know about the remaining terms. Your grade is out of 110 on a 100 point scale. Now, I loved the test, because I excel at soft trivia tests... but did it really gauge what I understood about history? Nope. It gauged my knowledge of history trivia for those terms. Understanding history is about understanding how these things connect together. If I were a history professor, I would base the majority of students' grades on papers about the subjects we cover in class to discover whether they're actually thinking about history or if they're just trying to recite facts and figures.

asdff 7y ago
I think it depends on what is being put in these exams, like if you are being given rote memory trivia or asked to write out a little essay with arguments supported by historical examples for those topics, that would be a tougher exam that asked you to think about history. For a calc final I took, it was 7 pages, 7 problems, 3 hours, and you were only graded on your best 6. Each of those six problems tested very intimate knowledge on specific topics in calc, but if you weren't so strong in one area you could focus on where you can shine, or if something was a walk for you it gave you more time for the tricky problems.
jonnycomputer 7y ago
Why should school exams mimic typical scenarios faced in work life. In typical work scenarios you have more than 2 hours to tackle a problem, anyway. This is computer science, and a data structures class to boot. Answering any of the questions required not only a deep understanding of the fundamental principles involved, but analytic skills (both in parsing the problem statement into a set of requirements and to identify problematic edge cases). Any good class will teach more than they could possibly test on in two hours. So the alternative here is to keep students guessing about what will actually be on the exam? That's why, when I was a college instructor, I gave previous exams to my students (also: i thought not doing so would disadvantage less socially connected students; lots of old exams get passed around).