5 ms·

I mean allowing multiple redos for tests doesn’t seem awful. Especially if the test questions can be mixed up. My physics and calculus classes did this with onl

by ahevia 5y ago

I mean allowing multiple redos for tests doesn’t seem awful. Especially if the test questions can be mixed up. My physics and calculus classes did this with online software & I mastered those subjects pretty heavily towards the end. I understand this can’t be repeated for all subjects but the general idea doesn’t seem like the worse

WalterBright 5y ago
It's a lot of work to prepare a good physics exam, partly because you don't want to pose questions that the students are already familiar with.
- mlyle 5y ago
  At what level? Undergraduate physics / secondary honors track, sure. But in MS physical science and the intro physics HS class I'm familiar with-- doing simple, well-understood kinematics problems is where a whole lot of test effort is spent (while trying to build intuition and process that the best students will be able to use for harder problems). I mean, it's fun to ask "trick" questions, like what happens to a helium balloon in a turning car, etc, but I wouldn't assess based on them. If students are going to be engineers or heavily use physics, they can go to AP physics and college physics classes and draw complicated free body diagrams and set up big equations.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    I'm not suggesting "trick" questions. Let's give a simple example: 10 * 10 = ? If the student has already seen that question, he knows the answer is 100. If he hasn't seen it, he has to apply the the techniques learned to solve it. Which of those two is a proper test question?
    - mlyle 5y ago
      I think your example is a curious one, because obviously we want the student to know 10 * 10 by rote. Indeed, arithmetic is one area where (almost) everyone favors rote. To be more general: if you're giving an 8th-9th grade kinematics test, there's two or three families of easy inclined plane problems, and hopefully your students have seen a few of all types. They shouldn't know the answer is "3.5 m/s", but they should be able to select a procedure they've used before and employ it.
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        > obviously we want the student to know 10 * 10 by rote Let's clear that up, make it: 1289 * 689 > they should be able to select a procedure they've used before and employ it. And if they've already seen the question they know which procedure to use, and you're no longer testing "should be able to select".
        mlyle 5y ago
        > Let's clear that up, make it: 1289 * 689 And if my goal is to figure out if a student has mastery of standard multiplication algorithms, I can take that 1289 * 689 question and flip the digits around have have an equivalent question -- 1688 * 986 will serve just fine. The algorithms aren't secret, and multiplication being on the test shouldn't be a secret. > And if they've already seen the question they know which procedure to use, and you're no longer testing "should be able to select". If you teach 8th grade physics, you pretty quickly build a library of all the standard inclined plane problems. If you need to give someone a make-up or repeat test, you grab some from tests that you've given in past years that have not been problematic, and switch a number or two.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    > like what happens to a helium balloon in a turning car Is that really a "trick" question? The balloon drifts to the underside of the roof on the inside of the turn. > I wouldn't assess based on them I would. I expect physics students to get past their knee-jerk intuitions and think about the principles they've been taught. Otherwise what's the point of learning physics?
    - tzs 5y ago
      A slight variation of that balloon question (it asked what happens to the balloon when the car starts moving) was on a Ph 1 homework at Caltech in 1977. I don't know if I'd call it a trick question, but there were large contingents supporting both "it moves toward the back" and "it moves toward the front", and a few going with "it stays where it is". Back in those days there was an annual organized bus trip to Disneyland for Caltech students, and that homework set happened to come out right before that. The Disneyland trips always had a large number of first year students, and Ph 1 is a required course for all first year students, so something like 80% of the people in my bus on that trip had opinions on that problem. Several bought balloons when it was time to return to the buses. It must have been a strange sight to the bus driver to see the entire busload of students get on the bus and then just sit in silence staring at balloons while waiting for the bus to start moving.
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        > annual organized bus trip to Disneyland for Caltech students Huh, I was in Page House in 1977, and never heard of that. I do recall the whole House trooping off to see the premier of Star Wars :-)
        tzs 5y ago
        Star Wars came out the summer before I got to Caltech. I don't remember how many years ahead of me you were--were you still there when The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980? Someone on Caltech's board was also high up at the studio and arranged for two free showings at Caltech a week before release. One showing was for undergraduates, and one was for faculty and board members. I think there were only a few undergraduates who did not sign up their tickets to that. Now that I think about it I'm not sure if the ASCIT Disneyland trips were actually annually. I know that ASCIT did one in my frosh year, which was 1977-78, and I'm sure they did one in my junior year because I took advantage of a lot of people being away on that trip to try magic mushrooms. I didn't want to have to deal with a lot of people while tripping. That didn't quite go as expected. As I wandered around campus enjoying the hallucinogenic effects of the psilocybin, I kept running into Chinese people I did not recognize, many of whom were speaking Chinese. Walter of course knows this, but for the rest of you Caltech is small enough (under 1000 undergrads) that one should be able to recognize most of the other students on sight. Also, the percentage of Asian students at Caltech was a lot lower back then, so I could tell most of these people weren't Caltech students just by the shear number of them. I was starting to freak out a little bit because I'd read up on the effects of psilocybin before trying it and highly realistic full sensory interactive hallucinations of Chinese people was way outside the bounds of anything I expected, so I thought something might be going really wrong like the 'shrooms I bought were laced with something else. It turned out that I was in fact seeing real Chinese undergraduates--but not from Caltech. I was not the only one who decided to take advantage of the campus being a little less crowded that night. The Chinese Students Association had decided to throw a party and invite all the Chinese students from all the other schools in the Los Angeles area including UCLA and USC. They (ASCIT, not CSA!) were still at least occasionally doing this at least up to the mid '80s. There's an article in an '84 issue of the Tech [1] that mentioned Disneyland trips as one of the things that wouldn't be happening if not for ASCIT. [1] https://campuspubs.library.caltech.edu/1221/1/1984_11_02_86_07.pdf https://campuspubs.library.caltech.edu/1221/1/1984_11_02_86_...

by ahevia 5y ago

WalterBright 5y ago

It's a lot of work to prepare a good physics exam, partly because you don't want to pose questions that the students are already familiar with.

mlyle 5y ago
At what level? Undergraduate physics / secondary honors track, sure. But in MS physical science and the intro physics HS class I'm familiar with-- doing simple, well-understood kinematics problems is where a whole lot of test effort is spent (while trying to build intuition and process that the best students will be able to use for harder problems). I mean, it's fun to ask "trick" questions, like what happens to a helium balloon in a turning car, etc, but I wouldn't assess based on them. If students are going to be engineers or heavily use physics, they can go to AP physics and college physics classes and draw complicated free body diagrams and set up big equations.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I'm not suggesting "trick" questions. Let's give a simple example: 10 * 10 = ? If the student has already seen that question, he knows the answer is 100. If he hasn't seen it, he has to apply the the techniques learned to solve it. Which of those two is a proper test question?
  - mlyle 5y ago
    I think your example is a curious one, because obviously we want the student to know 10 * 10 by rote. Indeed, arithmetic is one area where (almost) everyone favors rote. To be more general: if you're giving an 8th-9th grade kinematics test, there's two or three families of easy inclined plane problems, and hopefully your students have seen a few of all types. They shouldn't know the answer is "3.5 m/s", but they should be able to select a procedure they've used before and employ it.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      > obviously we want the student to know 10 * 10 by rote Let's clear that up, make it: 1289 * 689 > they should be able to select a procedure they've used before and employ it. And if they've already seen the question they know which procedure to use, and you're no longer testing "should be able to select".
      - mlyle 5y ago
        > Let's clear that up, make it: 1289 * 689 And if my goal is to figure out if a student has mastery of standard multiplication algorithms, I can take that 1289 * 689 question and flip the digits around have have an equivalent question -- 1688 * 986 will serve just fine. The algorithms aren't secret, and multiplication being on the test shouldn't be a secret. > And if they've already seen the question they know which procedure to use, and you're no longer testing "should be able to select". If you teach 8th grade physics, you pretty quickly build a library of all the standard inclined plane problems. If you need to give someone a make-up or repeat test, you grab some from tests that you've given in past years that have not been problematic, and switch a number or two.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > like what happens to a helium balloon in a turning car Is that really a "trick" question? The balloon drifts to the underside of the roof on the inside of the turn. > I wouldn't assess based on them I would. I expect physics students to get past their knee-jerk intuitions and think about the principles they've been taught. Otherwise what's the point of learning physics?
  - tzs 5y ago
    A slight variation of that balloon question (it asked what happens to the balloon when the car starts moving) was on a Ph 1 homework at Caltech in 1977. I don't know if I'd call it a trick question, but there were large contingents supporting both "it moves toward the back" and "it moves toward the front", and a few going with "it stays where it is". Back in those days there was an annual organized bus trip to Disneyland for Caltech students, and that homework set happened to come out right before that. The Disneyland trips always had a large number of first year students, and Ph 1 is a required course for all first year students, so something like 80% of the people in my bus on that trip had opinions on that problem. Several bought balloons when it was time to return to the buses. It must have been a strange sight to the bus driver to see the entire busload of students get on the bus and then just sit in silence staring at balloons while waiting for the bus to start moving.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      > annual organized bus trip to Disneyland for Caltech students Huh, I was in Page House in 1977, and never heard of that. I do recall the whole House trooping off to see the premier of Star Wars :-)
      - tzs 5y ago
        Star Wars came out the summer before I got to Caltech. I don't remember how many years ahead of me you were--were you still there when The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980? Someone on Caltech's board was also high up at the studio and arranged for two free showings at Caltech a week before release. One showing was for undergraduates, and one was for faculty and board members. I think there were only a few undergraduates who did not sign up their tickets to that. Now that I think about it I'm not sure if the ASCIT Disneyland trips were actually annually. I know that ASCIT did one in my frosh year, which was 1977-78, and I'm sure they did one in my junior year because I took advantage of a lot of people being away on that trip to try magic mushrooms. I didn't want to have to deal with a lot of people while tripping. That didn't quite go as expected. As I wandered around campus enjoying the hallucinogenic effects of the psilocybin, I kept running into Chinese people I did not recognize, many of whom were speaking Chinese. Walter of course knows this, but for the rest of you Caltech is small enough (under 1000 undergrads) that one should be able to recognize most of the other students on sight. Also, the percentage of Asian students at Caltech was a lot lower back then, so I could tell most of these people weren't Caltech students just by the shear number of them. I was starting to freak out a little bit because I'd read up on the effects of psilocybin before trying it and highly realistic full sensory interactive hallucinations of Chinese people was way outside the bounds of anything I expected, so I thought something might be going really wrong like the 'shrooms I bought were laced with something else. It turned out that I was in fact seeing real Chinese undergraduates--but not from Caltech. I was not the only one who decided to take advantage of the campus being a little less crowded that night. The Chinese Students Association had decided to throw a party and invite all the Chinese students from all the other schools in the Los Angeles area including UCLA and USC. They (ASCIT, not CSA!) were still at least occasionally doing this at least up to the mid '80s. There's an article in an '84 issue of the Tech [1] that mentioned Disneyland trips as one of the things that wouldn't be happening if not for ASCIT. [1] https://campuspubs.library.caltech.edu/1221/1/1984_11_02_86_07.pdf https://campuspubs.library.caltech.edu/1221/1/1984_11_02_86_...