6 ms·

To me, this underscores notion that schools continue to test for the wrong thing. With the exception of professions/trades that require impulse application of k

To me, this underscores notion that schools continue to test for the wrong thing. With the exception of professions/trades that require impulse application of knowledge, I don't know why I would want/need someone to memorize a concept in order to apply it. Productive members of our society/workforce think critically, they ask good questions, and they research and leverage the information at their disposal to make data-driven decisions. Let's test for that.

Enginerrrd 6y ago
Thinking critically on the subject: it also prevents the problem of having someone take the test for you by feeding you information through an earpiece or chatbox on a browser tab. In places where testing fraud is rampant, this is a common form of fraud actually. So even a well designed
bawolff 6y ago
From what i remember of uni, most of the tests i took were not testing if you memorized a concept, but if you could apply it. Sure the situation was still extremely contrived, but it wasn't simply regurgitating facts
- kenniskrag 6y ago
  Same in university of applied science in switzerland. For example you learn a depth first search and in the exam you have to store some information on each step to print it in the end. You have to learn different proof schemes and use the easiest one for a given hypothesis. Sometimes you get with the wrong one in an endless recursion for example.
bllguo 6y ago
while this sounds good on the surface, i think memorization is much more important than you give it credit. imo you absolutely should have key concepts memorized if you have any real understanding of a subject. and as you become more of a specialist, your bar for what constitutes a "key concept" should raise. Being able to search things up is well and good, but dont you run into situations where you don't even know what to search for in the first place?
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  You can’t get intelligently conversant about a thing without having the key bits in your mind, you’re right. But you don’t need to have as much memorized as we’re were tested on when I was in school (90s-early 2000s). And you need a lot more than just memorization to reach real understanding. Every few years I need the quadratic formula for something, and I just derive the thing instead of remembering or looking it up. I’ve essentially traded some memorization for some understanding. We’re surely going to do it wrong, so I’d err on the side of too much understanding and too little memorizing. If you have a real feel for how a thing works, it’ll stick with you longer than the date of such and such battle.
  - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
    > and I just derive the thing instead of remembering or looking it up. Most people can't do this or have a very hard time learning much easier things. I find that the crowd that talks about "pointless learning/testing/education" are often either ones that struggled mightily and were never really that smart, or they are so smart that they are above it.
    - Tainnor 6y ago
      I guess then the point becomes - in the age of computers, what's the value in memorising the quadratic formula without understanding where it comes from? It's much more important to know that there is a quadratic formula, or more fundamentally that every quadratic equation has 0-2 roots (exactly 2 if dealing with complex numbers) and what the different cases loom like (does the parabola touch or intersect the x-axis?). It's typically more important to be able to solve a quadratic equation through guessing, factoring or completing the square. Because these things teach you something about how mathematics works, regurgitating some formula serves no purpose, you can just ask Wolfram|Alpha instead. And even if you can't complete the square etc., I'd much rather people understood the conceptual side of it instead of remembering formulas.
      - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
smabie 6y ago
Memorization is absolutely crucial to getting good at math. In fact, I don't think there's any other way to get good at math besides memorization and doing problems, over and over and over again. It's rote, sure, but it has tremendous value. If you think you understand something, but can't actually solve problems without referencing anything, you don't actually understand it.
- Tainnor 6y ago
  I think this is only half true. Of course, if you want to be good at maths, you will have to remember things because you can't always look up or re-derive every smallest detail (and because you have to become good at pattern-matching at some point). But the memory tends to work best if it's activated by deliberate practice. For example, instead of memorising a proof line-by-line it's much better to try to remember the key points and then practicing filling in the gaps. If necessary, repeat this process several times. When I was studying for ODEs, I tried to re-derive many of the standard techniques by trying to remember which trick to apply instead of trying to memorise the formula.
  - KMag 6y ago
    ^ This. For my Mechanical Engineering undergraduate courses, almost all of the formulas (models, actually) could be re-derived from linear approximations on infinitesimal elements. Memorize and internalize how the model is derived, practice re-deriving the model, and you can re-derive the formula during the exam, and do a bit of hand-wavy intuitive double-check of your answers. If you've only memorized the formula, you're going to have a very tough time coming up with an estimate against which to check your formula's answer. On a side note, I really wish we had more emphasis on the conditions under which the linear approximations broke down. I remember sitting at the front of the MIT 2.002 class, and there was a demonstration of metal fatigue using a hydraulic press at the back of the classroom. Professor Sanjay Sarma stepped up to the front row in order to better see the demonstration at the back, and so I asked him about my intuitions about which way the model diverged from reality under vibration frequencies high enough that the quasistatic assumptions built into the model broke down. He looked to both sides of us and told the students on either side of me not to listen because they might get confused, and then we had a little discussion about conditions beyond which the model applied and which way the model's error went under those conditions. It was simultaneously one of the best and most disappointing moments in my education. It was an exciting discussion, but I was sad that the world beyond the linear approximations was considered to be likely too deep a rabbit hole for most of the class. Sanjay (as he preferred to be addressed) was an excellent educator, and I'm sure his judgement was based on past experience... each semester has a given complexity budget, and the field of Mechanical Engineering is so broad (statics, dynamics, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, mechanisms, control theory/sensors/OpAmps, manufacturing techniques, design for mass manufacturing, numerical process control, destructive/non-destructive testing, etc., etc.) that undergraduates need to spread a limited complexity budget across so many subjects that they can each only be covered relatively shallowly.
sn41 6y ago
I teach programming. What prevents students from colluding over their tablets/mobiles/laptops while taking the exam from another device? Can't the student mirror the screen elsewhere, leading to interesting possibilities for cheating? Proctoring is not a solution that I am comfortable with. I do not want to peer into the private lives of students and their home environments. Not every student is well-off, and has a private space all to their own for 3 hours. I think taking tests from home does not really work with any of the models I have seen discussed this year. Cheating is real. It has nothing to do with rote learning. I am out of ideas which are foolproof.
- gravypod 6y ago
  Could you make your class project based and give everyone different, but equally difficult, projects of their choosing. Each check in into master would then be merged after a code review with you where you ask questions about why implementations are done specific ways to solve the problem/refactor. Code is only merged when it hits a quality marker you set. Students are graded by percentage of deliverable hit from original project specs. Ex: student is to implement a K&R C compiler + code generator in 1 semester. Help them break up the project into manageable chunks (tokenize, AST, register allocation, etc). Each feature includes tests, comments, docs, and is presented to you by X date. Code review and cycle as many times as needed as long as it gets in by X date. By the end of the class the student hit 100% of their deadlines but only pass 70% of some test C files you create so they get a 70% (or higher if their code was consistently good and did not need cleanup) in the class or something. It would never work because "you need to have a final exam" but it's the ideal I think we should strive for if you are "teaching programming" since this is how most work I've done in the real world has gone.
  - acbart 6y ago
    This will never work because it absolutely fails to scale, at a time when we have a complete lack of computing educators. Customized projects for each student? I have 159 students in my CS1 this semester, and I can barely keep track of them with the massive amounts of data I collect. The idea of making individualized assignments is beautiful but unrealistic.
Polylactic_acid 6y ago
The problem is less that students can look up answers online, its that they could hand the laptop to someone experienced and have them complete the exam for the student. An ideal situation would be allowing students to use online resources but not to communicate with other people during the exam.
- YungSven 6y ago
  My university in Germany uses this approach. We have to livestream ourselves from the side so the supervisor can see the whole desk, before each exam we have to authenticate with our Student ID so nobody else can write the test for us and we are allowed to use everything - except direct communication. This form of testing is called "Open Books" or "Open Material". Before the pandemic we were allowed to bring our books and even handwritten sheets to the exam. What I like about this is that you don't get points for just remembering things. On the other hand, this probably wouldn't be possible in subjects like economics where you have to remember a lot. Edit: typo
  - eatthoselemons 6y ago
    Designing tests for open book seems to be a good way to a) make cheating in effective, (no need to sneak in a formula sheet when everyone has it) b) More like the real world, I always have google at my fingertips, it is just how efficiently I can use google and my existing knowledge to solve a problem

Enginerrrd 6y ago

Thinking critically on the subject: it also prevents the problem of having someone take the test for you by feeding you information through an earpiece or chatbox on a browser tab. In places where testing fraud is rampant, this is a common form of fraud actually. So even a well designed

bawolff 6y ago

From what i remember of uni, most of the tests i took were not testing if you memorized a concept, but if you could apply it. Sure the situation was still extremely contrived, but it wasn't simply regurgitating facts

kenniskrag 6y ago
Same in university of applied science in switzerland. For example you learn a depth first search and in the exam you have to store some information on each step to print it in the end. You have to learn different proof schemes and use the easiest one for a given hypothesis. Sometimes you get with the wrong one in an endless recursion for example.

bllguo 6y ago

while this sounds good on the surface, i think memorization is much more important than you give it credit. imo you absolutely should have key concepts memorized if you have any real understanding of a subject. and as you become more of a specialist, your bar for what constitutes a "key concept" should raise. Being able to search things up is well and good, but dont you run into situations where you don't even know what to search for in the first place?

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
You can’t get intelligently conversant about a thing without having the key bits in your mind, you’re right. But you don’t need to have as much memorized as we’re were tested on when I was in school (90s-early 2000s). And you need a lot more than just memorization to reach real understanding. Every few years I need the quadratic formula for something, and I just derive the thing instead of remembering or looking it up. I’ve essentially traded some memorization for some understanding. We’re surely going to do it wrong, so I’d err on the side of too much understanding and too little memorizing. If you have a real feel for how a thing works, it’ll stick with you longer than the date of such and such battle.
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  > and I just derive the thing instead of remembering or looking it up. Most people can't do this or have a very hard time learning much easier things. I find that the crowd that talks about "pointless learning/testing/education" are often either ones that struggled mightily and were never really that smart, or they are so smart that they are above it.
  - Tainnor 6y ago
    I guess then the point becomes - in the age of computers, what's the value in memorising the quadratic formula without understanding where it comes from? It's much more important to know that there is a quadratic formula, or more fundamentally that every quadratic equation has 0-2 roots (exactly 2 if dealing with complex numbers) and what the different cases loom like (does the parabola touch or intersect the x-axis?). It's typically more important to be able to solve a quadratic equation through guessing, factoring or completing the square. Because these things teach you something about how mathematics works, regurgitating some formula serves no purpose, you can just ask Wolfram|Alpha instead. And even if you can't complete the square etc., I'd much rather people understood the conceptual side of it instead of remembering formulas.
    - ntsplnkv2 6y ago

smabie 6y ago

Memorization is absolutely crucial to getting good at math. In fact, I don't think there's any other way to get good at math besides memorization and doing problems, over and over and over again. It's rote, sure, but it has tremendous value. If you think you understand something, but can't actually solve problems without referencing anything, you don't actually understand it.

Tainnor 6y ago
I think this is only half true. Of course, if you want to be good at maths, you will have to remember things because you can't always look up or re-derive every smallest detail (and because you have to become good at pattern-matching at some point). But the memory tends to work best if it's activated by deliberate practice. For example, instead of memorising a proof line-by-line it's much better to try to remember the key points and then practicing filling in the gaps. If necessary, repeat this process several times. When I was studying for ODEs, I tried to re-derive many of the standard techniques by trying to remember which trick to apply instead of trying to memorise the formula.
- KMag 6y ago
  ^ This. For my Mechanical Engineering undergraduate courses, almost all of the formulas (models, actually) could be re-derived from linear approximations on infinitesimal elements. Memorize and internalize how the model is derived, practice re-deriving the model, and you can re-derive the formula during the exam, and do a bit of hand-wavy intuitive double-check of your answers. If you've only memorized the formula, you're going to have a very tough time coming up with an estimate against which to check your formula's answer. On a side note, I really wish we had more emphasis on the conditions under which the linear approximations broke down. I remember sitting at the front of the MIT 2.002 class, and there was a demonstration of metal fatigue using a hydraulic press at the back of the classroom. Professor Sanjay Sarma stepped up to the front row in order to better see the demonstration at the back, and so I asked him about my intuitions about which way the model diverged from reality under vibration frequencies high enough that the quasistatic assumptions built into the model broke down. He looked to both sides of us and told the students on either side of me not to listen because they might get confused, and then we had a little discussion about conditions beyond which the model applied and which way the model's error went under those conditions. It was simultaneously one of the best and most disappointing moments in my education. It was an exciting discussion, but I was sad that the world beyond the linear approximations was considered to be likely too deep a rabbit hole for most of the class. Sanjay (as he preferred to be addressed) was an excellent educator, and I'm sure his judgement was based on past experience... each semester has a given complexity budget, and the field of Mechanical Engineering is so broad (statics, dynamics, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, mechanisms, control theory/sensors/OpAmps, manufacturing techniques, design for mass manufacturing, numerical process control, destructive/non-destructive testing, etc., etc.) that undergraduates need to spread a limited complexity budget across so many subjects that they can each only be covered relatively shallowly.

sn41 6y ago

I teach programming. What prevents students from colluding over their tablets/mobiles/laptops while taking the exam from another device? Can't the student mirror the screen elsewhere, leading to interesting possibilities for cheating? Proctoring is not a solution that I am comfortable with. I do not want to peer into the private lives of students and their home environments. Not every student is well-off, and has a private space all to their own for 3 hours. I think taking tests from home does not really work with any of the models I have seen discussed this year. Cheating is real. It has nothing to do with rote learning. I am out of ideas which are foolproof.

gravypod 6y ago
Could you make your class project based and give everyone different, but equally difficult, projects of their choosing. Each check in into master would then be merged after a code review with you where you ask questions about why implementations are done specific ways to solve the problem/refactor. Code is only merged when it hits a quality marker you set. Students are graded by percentage of deliverable hit from original project specs. Ex: student is to implement a K&R C compiler + code generator in 1 semester. Help them break up the project into manageable chunks (tokenize, AST, register allocation, etc). Each feature includes tests, comments, docs, and is presented to you by X date. Code review and cycle as many times as needed as long as it gets in by X date. By the end of the class the student hit 100% of their deadlines but only pass 70% of some test C files you create so they get a 70% (or higher if their code was consistently good and did not need cleanup) in the class or something. It would never work because "you need to have a final exam" but it's the ideal I think we should strive for if you are "teaching programming" since this is how most work I've done in the real world has gone.
- acbart 6y ago
  This will never work because it absolutely fails to scale, at a time when we have a complete lack of computing educators. Customized projects for each student? I have 159 students in my CS1 this semester, and I can barely keep track of them with the massive amounts of data I collect. The idea of making individualized assignments is beautiful but unrealistic.

Polylactic_acid 6y ago

The problem is less that students can look up answers online, its that they could hand the laptop to someone experienced and have them complete the exam for the student. An ideal situation would be allowing students to use online resources but not to communicate with other people during the exam.

YungSven 6y ago
My university in Germany uses this approach. We have to livestream ourselves from the side so the supervisor can see the whole desk, before each exam we have to authenticate with our Student ID so nobody else can write the test for us and we are allowed to use everything - except direct communication. This form of testing is called "Open Books" or "Open Material". Before the pandemic we were allowed to bring our books and even handwritten sheets to the exam. What I like about this is that you don't get points for just remembering things. On the other hand, this probably wouldn't be possible in subjects like economics where you have to remember a lot. Edit: typo
- eatthoselemons 6y ago
  Designing tests for open book seems to be a good way to a) make cheating in effective, (no need to sneak in a formula sheet when everyone has it) b) More like the real world, I always have google at my fingertips, it is just how efficiently I can use google and my existing knowledge to solve a problem