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Exactly, I strongly believe that any test at a secondary education level should be open book. We should be testing for reasoning and capacity to apply knowledge
by gommm 4y ago
Exactly, I strongly believe that any test at a secondary education level should be open book. We should be testing for reasoning and capacity to apply knowledge not rote-learning.
It's also why I believe that in most cases multiple choice questions have no place in any well designed tests because it's extremely hard to create multiple choice questions that actually test the application of knowledge versus the regurgitation of rote learning.
When I was in university (grande école) in France, luckily all tests followed that format, they were open book, very few questions that needed deep detailed answers and were about interesting problems. Even finding tests from previous years and doing them was actually fun (tests were never reused).
I did an exchange in the US at RIT and most tests had very boring rote learning questions. For example in a computer graphics class: Which company were voting members of the OpenGL Architecture Review Board? Which year was the first OpenGl specification released?. I still remember those questions because I was shocked by how utterly stupid it was to have those on a test but, in general, 25 to 50% of the points of any tests was on those completely irrelevant, useless questions that anyone can google for.
Cheating is a problem for universities that never had proper testing standards. But that's a symptom of incompetence on the part of professors and of universities not making the choice to ensure that tests have to be well designed.
- p1necone 4y agoI've seen some very hairy multi choice questions in Math/Computer science (think testing order of operations, which function gets called due to complicated polymorphism etc). I think it depends on the subject. Although I also encountered a few where multiple answers were technically correct. Then you have to guess at which answer the professor thinks is "more correct" which kinda sucks.
- gommm 4y agoYeah, another decent alternative I've seen was a test with a few multiple choice questions where each question needed quite a bit of reasoning and where you had to give the reasoning to get the points. The multiple choice question was a way for the teacher to quickly know if you had the correct answer and for the student to verify their answer against possible answers and see if they might have made a mistake but the teacher would still need to review the half a page of reasoning for each question. It can be done decently but it's much easier to write and much more common to see bad multiple choice questions.
- connicpu 4y agoIn one of my Math/Computer classes in college, part of the class was that along the way you were supposed to be implementing the mathematical concepts in code along the way, so that you would have your code available to run on the test questions when it reached the day of the test! Whether you programmed on a TI-89 calculator or your laptop was up to the student, but the tests were open note and open device and it felt very freeing. The actual methods of input and exact algorithms were of course carefully picked so that there would be no easy off the shelf code solution, but once you understood it the problems could be trivially implemented in any programming language with a BigInt type