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How does getting a grade in an exam demonstrate anything other than the ability to regurgitate information? It doesn't display understanding along any axis of i

How does getting a grade in an exam demonstrate anything other than the ability to regurgitate information? It doesn't display understanding along any axis of intrinsic knowledge. Education needs to take a step back and reexamine what knowledge and understanding means. Right now it's basically a factory for memorization.

krastanov 5y ago
That is true about bad exams like the SAT and the GRE. And to be fair, even good exams (text problems that take the student on an adventure through deriving a curious phenomenon, for instance) suffer as their results are confounded with whether you deal well with stress. However, it has long been trivial to make good exams that are explicitly not about memorization: take-home exams, open-book exams, exams in which collaboration is encouraged, project-based exams, some forms of oral exams, and more.
- dmoy 5y ago
  Almost all of my engineering exams were open book, and the ones in EE sometimes had difficulty curves such that a 50% score would get you top marks. It worked pretty well I still have stress nightmares about op amps though
uCantCauseUCant 5y ago
Cause everyone not entirely brain-dead can memorize, but society kills the intrinsic motivation and curiosity necessary to solve-problems in most kids in a young age? So if you ruined that curiosity spark in your kid or never even kindled it- your kid has no chance, unless you force society to make school a memorization test? Its basically parrot-parenting voting for its own right to continue to exist?
dagw 5y ago
How does getting a grade in an exam demonstrate anything other than the ability to regurgitate information? Just about every exam I had at university involved solving/proving at least one novel problem that we'd never seen before. For example we might have seen the proof of a statement under certain conditions, but on the exam you where asked if it was also true for a slight different condition. That isn't something you could do just through memorizing the proofs you'd been shown in class. Memorizing and 'regurgitating' would most of the time get you a passing grade, but never a top grade.

krastanov 5y ago

That is true about bad exams like the SAT and the GRE. And to be fair, even good exams (text problems that take the student on an adventure through deriving a curious phenomenon, for instance) suffer as their results are confounded with whether you deal well with stress. However, it has long been trivial to make good exams that are explicitly not about memorization: take-home exams, open-book exams, exams in which collaboration is encouraged, project-based exams, some forms of oral exams, and more.

dmoy 5y ago
Almost all of my engineering exams were open book, and the ones in EE sometimes had difficulty curves such that a 50% score would get you top marks. It worked pretty well I still have stress nightmares about op amps though

uCantCauseUCant 5y ago

Cause everyone not entirely brain-dead can memorize, but society kills the intrinsic motivation and curiosity necessary to solve-problems in most kids in a young age? So if you ruined that curiosity spark in your kid or never even kindled it- your kid has no chance, unless you force society to make school a memorization test? Its basically parrot-parenting voting for its own right to continue to exist?

dagw 5y ago

How does getting a grade in an exam demonstrate anything other than the ability to regurgitate information? Just about every exam I had at university involved solving/proving at least one novel problem that we'd never seen before. For example we might have seen the proof of a statement under certain conditions, but on the exam you where asked if it was also true for a slight different condition. That isn't something you could do just through memorizing the proofs you'd been shown in class. Memorizing and 'regurgitating' would most of the time get you a passing grade, but never a top grade.