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> HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it? I have experienced good tests and bad tests. I studied in France, tests were ope
by nicolas_t 4y ago
> HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it?
I have experienced good tests and bad tests. I studied in France, tests were open book with no multiple choice questions, only problems to solve. This approach scales badly and is a lot of work for the professor grading but it measures knowledge.
The problems were long, had few questions besides describing the problem and maybe a few questions to guide the student along the path to solving it. We had either 3 or 4 hours to solve those problems.
Those tests worked very well. I'd come out from one of those tests having often learned something new.
I was an exchange student in the US, tests involved multiple choice questions, they were closed books with questions around rote memory. While I did feel that some of the education in the US was valuable and interesting, I hated those tests, they didn't correlate as much with comprehension of the subject matter and more with learning facts that are more or less tangentially related to the subject matter. I still remember in a computer graphics tests being shocked by being asked when Opengl was first released, which companies were involved and other completely useless knowledge.
What's interesting to me is that there's much less opportunities to cheat with the former tests while the later tests are pretty much made for cheating. So, imho cheating is a symptom of bad tests.
- codefreeordie 4y agoWhy is it a foregone assumption that the important attribute of education is "measuring knowledge"?
- oblio 4y agoBecause we have a limited number of everything and we have to compare people.
- vintermann 4y agoThe more we can split up "Teaching people useful things" and "Rationing access to status objects" the better off we are.
- oblio 4y agoMany (most?) people learn your A to get to your B.
- vintermann 4y agoThat's a good reason to split it up, that people don't understand there could be anything else to pursue education for.
- randomswede 4y agoI suspect that a "certificate of course completion" (or, if you prefer, "a course grade") does not actually requiring comparing individuals A and B. It does, however, require gauging that individual X, for any individual X who have taken the course, said individual X have acquired enough knowledge to consider "having passed". Anything beyond "pass/fail" is merely trying to stack-rack students and impose un-needed competition. But it is good for the gamification of knowledge acquisition, so perhaps not entirely bad.
- qsort 4y agoI don't know if it's popular in France, but another very simple idea that eliminates cheating entirely is oral exams. They're still done a lot in Italy. I once literally inverted a binary tree on a whiteboard :)
- baud147258 4y agoI was a student in France and during the two years of high schools I had a bunch of blackboard exams and yeah, you kinda have to learn the material. Of course it also helps to be confortable in such situations, but we had enough of them to get trained in that
- tharkun__ 4y agoYou had enough of them to get trained in that. And it might have taken you just few enough to get comfortable for it not to affect your grades in such a way that you dropped out. I had a friend in university that would just completely fall apart in any kind of such situation, even when it wasn't for an exam and even when it was a group presentation setting and it wasn't just him up there. Written exams were completely fine though. Did he not deserve to get a CS degree and just work in some company where he doesn't have to become a team lead or architect where he'd need to speak and present and instead steadily and happily work in his corner, talk to his immediate peers and crank out solutions?
- ethbr0 4y agoI'm going to go out on a limb here and say that presenting to other humans is (a) a skill that most people can learn (to at least "acceptable" levels of proficiency) & (b) a skill that most people should learn, because it's a huge part of working in the field. I understand it's incredibly uncomfortable. I'm a pretty serious introvert and got the shakes and sweat dripping off my hands the first few times I did it. But with exposure and effort to self-improve, it's doable. I didn't like it, but I'm incredibly thankful I was forced to work on it.
- 4y ago
- pgCKIN 4y agoTotally agree. I might a bit partial to that, because I tend to underperform multiple choice tests for overthinking, but I've really the impression that open ended questions test knoledge much better and make it more difficult to cheat. Beside that, having almost nothing to do with cheating, another good thing in the French system is the continuous grading: labs were graded, projects were graded, small intermediate tests were graded, so you really do not study for just the exam (actually often you do not study at all for the exam). (beware: my experience is limited to a single grande école I attended).
- nicolas_t 4y agoI went to INSA in the early aughts and we didn't really have continuous grading, labs (TPs) were graded but the biggest part of the grades (les partiels - exam week) happened twice a year (or 4 times a year during the first two years of prépa intégré). I do know that since then they've moved to a continuous grading system. I'm not sure if that's the same with other grande écoles but I do know that my friends in other grand écoles had a similar system of 2-4 partiels a year.
- sbohacek 4y agoI'm currently grading an open book test as you describe. It turns out that someone put their attempt at answers on chegg.com shortly after I posted the test. The temptation to use chegg is too great for students to resist. When chegg has the wrong solution (which is often the case), students will doubt themselves and will go with the wrong chegg answer. To be clear, the only goal of chegg.com is to help students cheat. The world would be a better place if chegg and its copies did not exist.
- ModernMech 4y agoMy solution to this is to use version control and have them record an explanation of their work. If they copy from chegg they also have to forge a commit history, as well as explain the code line by line. I’d like to see them do that without learning anything.
- vintermann 4y agoThis is a common thing in computer art e.g. demoscene competitions too.
- HanClinto 4y agoWhat about seeding the system and putting your own (bad) answers up there ahead of time?
- da39a3ee 4y agoYeah I came from uk undergrad to us grad school and was shocked to see that even some advanced undergrad classes, with grad students in them, were tested by infantile multiple choice questions (this was at harvard). It almost makes one wonder whether the us dominates academia to the extent it does because of the foreign influx.
- com2kid 4y ago> I was an exchange student in the US, tests involved multiple choice questions, they were closed books with questions around rote memory. As a US citizen, many tests were open book essay style, especially once we got to college. In public school however, lots of "standardized" multiple choice tests that were used to grade the school. Some of those tests also include an essay portion. Teachers in the US aren't paid to do grading, they typically do it at home in their own time, thus very few essay style tests.