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I had an experience like this in Numerical Methods in university years ago. The exams were incredibly difficult for bad reasons: you had to calculate many iter
by cowpig 5y ago
I had an experience like this in Numerical Methods in university years ago.
The exams were incredibly difficult for bad reasons: you had to calculate many iterations of an algorithm by hand. You also had to memorize a bunch of algorithms (rather than understanding how they worked or how to modify them to solve different problems).
The professor also had a "can't do anything about it" attitude, and so the entire class was blatantly cheating as a result, and I got the worst grade of my academic career.
It sort of broke the camel's back for me; I consider our current approach to academics to be fundamentally broken.
It's harder to design exams where people cannot cheat, but it's certainly possible. Randomize the orders of questions on the test. Have multiple versions the same question (e.g. in a math exam, change a 2 to a 4, or a sin to a cos). Now you have unique exams for each student.
Most importantly, design questions that require critical thinking, and allow everyone to use their computers/books/notes/whatever. That's far more representative of real life anyway.
These simple changes would both make cheating very difficult, and result in better learning: memorizing a bunch of crap the day before an exam will have basically no impact in my life. Learning how to reason critically about the subject matter will give me lasting benefits, even if that subject never comes up again.
This ProctorU stuff is just quadrupling down on a fundamentally broken approach and making it much worse.
- jdmichal 5y agoMy AP calculus teacher allowed us to use calculators on our tests. Why? Because he knew exactly how to design questions such that the calculator would switch from exact to approximation mode. So you could enter any problem on the test into the calculator, and all it would spit out is a useless answer with as many decimal places as it could handle. Of course the calculator worked fine on every homework question. But you better have still learned the material if you wanted to make it through the test.
- sonograph 5y agoI don't follow. Do you mean to say that the calculator would produce .333333333 repeating but the student was expected to write 1/3 ?
- azalemeth 5y agoI suspect think more along the lines of spitting out a numerical answer instead of sqrt(pi) when fed with \int_-\infty^\infty exp(-x^2) dx...
- VLM 5y agoThose reciprocals are too small. Lets see if the kids know how to multiply fractions: factorial(256) times ( 1 divided by factorial(256) ) equals ? And yes, there will unfortunately be kids trying to brute force it by typing it in instead of cancelling the factorial(256).
- voxic11 5y agoThe TI-89 comes with a excellent symbolic solver that can do solve this or any calc problem and give the proper symbolic result. It can even do things like equation simplification and give the results in terms of the variables. Looks like this https://imgur.com/a/FmdCyYU https://imgur.com/a/FmdCyYU
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mmcgaha 5y agoSaying any calc problem is a stretch. Just pull up the MIT integration bee and see how many the 89 can get symbolic results for. I think the 89 is awesome for algebra because typing in an equation and doing an ans(1) with an operation will let you do the algebra process without making stupid arithmetic mistakes. I wish someone made a calculator that does this only and not one that does all the other CAS tricks for integration and derivatives. Oh and I wish they would make it RPN but that is a whole other story.
- jdmichal 5y agoYes, except not obvious and usually involving irrationals, so good luck figuring it out.
- Workaccount2 5y agoCalculators are generally useless in Calculus. Or at least they should be. Calculus is a process, and normally you are graded on that process, not on the answer. We were allowed calculators too, but the problems were designed that anyone even mildly good at mental math didn't need them. In theory you could teach all of calculus without ever even using numbers (perhaps except 0).
- cbsks 5y agoIt's been a while since I took calculus, but I seem to remember that a TI-89 calculator could show its steps when solving a problem.
- titanomachy 5y agoI think you need more numbers than that. At least 1, pi, and e. Definitely don’t need any numbers bigger than 4.
- astura 5y ago>Calculators are generally useless in Calculus. Or at least they should be. Calculus is a process, and normally you are graded on that process, not on the answer. Yes. It's been so long since I took calculus but that's the reason why we weren't allowed calculators in my Calculus class. All the formulas needed for the test were also provided (as we weren't being graded on our memorization skills either) My professor also said don't bother doing simple arithmetic just to simplify an answer - leave it at 12/56 or whatever. Turns out, it was a really, really great system.
- xg15 5y agoI think professors should ask themselves if their exam would make a good CAPTCHA. If a machine could solve the exam easier than a human, it's a bad exam.
- skeeter2020 5y ago"circle all pictures that represent sqrt(pi)"
- someguyorother 5y agoCalculus captchas do exist, which I guess proves the point! https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/03/09/a-complicated-calculus-based-anti-spam-captcha/ https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/03/09/a-complicated-ca...
- kiba 5y agoHave you considered that memorization is a good thing? I memorized a lot of information, but I still search just as often on google and stackoverflow whenever I needed to check something. It also help that I don't try to memorize a bunch of a crap before an exam.
- sandworm101 5y agoYou must not have seen a modern home cheating rig. The student read/scrolls through the entire test to read each question, as is recommended. A small camera that sees the screen transmits the questions to a team in another room. Each team member works on one question at a time. A single person then communicates the prepared answers back to the test taker via an earpiece, one small enough that it isn't detectable on the camera. Such a rig costs a few hundred dollars at most. Another common trick: looking at your keyboard isn't cheating. Any small display secreted on your keyboard will go unnoticed. You will just look like you aren't a great typist, someone who needs to look at the keys. Want to go real hardcore? Cut into your laptop and send the screen/keyboard/mouse signals to a different monitor. Then you can have an actor sit in front of the webcam pretending to take the test. I doubt they are correlating keypress sounds to characters appearing on the screen... yet. As any security expert would tell you: if the attacker has unfettered access to your hardware then all bets are off.
- SiempreViernes 5y agoHow much does the team cost?
- pjbeam 5y agoThis is one of those situations in which it pays to have likeminded friends.
- sandworm101 5y agoThat would depend on the level of expertise you need. To pass a highschool calc exam, probably less than 100$. To have someone sit the LSAT for you in person, probably in the low five figures. I've never been involved with people actually being paid for such things but they do happen. Huffman allegedly paid $15,000 to get her daughter unlimited time on the SAT. Paying to have someone actually stand in would have certainly cost more.
- silexia 5y agoThe team could just be your own friends in the class. Each one of you gets a turn to take the test with the others helping find answers. No cost.
- SiempreViernes 5y agoFundamentally, what you are complaining about is teaching being under resourced: making lots of variations of questions obviously takes more effort both to create and to score so that's why it's not done. Making questions that require critical thinking is very hard because you need a very good understanding of the students mind to test the correct thing, so it's usually not done.
- majjgepolja 5y agoIt's also that many teachers are underproficient.
- majjgepolja 5y agoopen book exams with serious thinking questions is the answer. I had such a numerical methods exam, I had a python script ready for it. No regrets on automating something that should be automated. I understood how the method works and wrote code for it.
- toomanybeersies 5y ago> I understood how the method works and wrote code for it We were allowed (and encouraged) to write cheatsheets for most of our exams at university. However, they had to be a single sheet and handwritten. The reasoning was that in the process of creating a cheatsheet, students would reinforce their learning. The handwriting requirement was to encourage us to write them ourselves, instead of just printing one off, and the size requirement was so that we had to think about how to distill a semester of learning instead of just trying to copy the entire textbook by hand. I really liked the system, and I feel like it did help more than just allowing open book exams. I remember of the few exams that were open book (some even allowed us to use the internet, but with a ban on communicating with others), I usually got a worse grade, as I ended up putting less effort into studying.