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> Why not make the problems harder and let students use every possible tool or resource to solve them? Some of us do exactly that. Many of the exams I sat in

• yummyfajitas 15y ago
  In my experience, a lot of students strongly prefer memorizing to thinking, and will penalize you on student evaluations if you force them to. My evaluations went up a full point when I switched from writing my own open note/open book exam to using the department's standard "memorize all the things and do mechanical transformations" exam. Students complained a lot less also.
  • jacques_chester 15y ago
    Mechanical exams are compatible with cramming. That's why students like them; that's how they've studied for years. Eventually it stops working.
  • sliverstorm 15y ago
    I had a professor who offered a novel scheme that left me pretty happy with take home exams. Students are usually turned off because a good take-home is really, really hard. What this professor did was give you the exam, mark incorrect problems, and then if the class average was poor, give you a second copy. You would turn the second copy in a few days later, and you would get some fraction of the credit for any improvement in your score. (Say you got a 60 the first time and an 80 the second time, you might end with a 65-70) The result was that, after being challenged by difficult problems that require your complete focus, you are given some feedback on what you got wrong, at which point you go back to the book to work out what the real answer is. That revision step is key; the promise of some recovery points is mostly just motivation to take it seriously I felt like those exams were huge learning experiences. The caveats are: it is more work for the professor; this was an upper division course, so students were serious and the class size was small; the best problems are hard and open ended.
• pjscott 15y ago
  Making them just open-book, open-notes is an easy compromise that scales nicely.
  • tmh88j 15y ago
    I agree, but only for certain subjects. For example, I was able to use a note card with equations for my physics courses. Memorizing equations is absolutely pointless; it doesn't test your comprehension of physics nor does it hint at your level intelligence. Give someone a notecard for a history exam and any sort of assessment of subject understanding is eliminated. Some courses are memorization based and there's no denying it. If your thought process for taking these types of exams is somehow comparing things in your mind, great, but you're still recalling everything from your memory. It's not like there's an equation you can plug in to know how WWII ended; it's just something you know and memorize.
    • blahedo 15y ago
      I think you've been taking the wrong history classes. The interesting stuff is the "why" and making connections between different events; and if you're tested on that sort of thing, a notecard with names-and-dates is about as helpful as a notecard with equations in a physics exam.
      • tmh88j 15y ago
        Once again, that's YOUR thought process. It seems that you happen to link events together to remember an outcome. By simply knowing a few pieces of information, it's not likely most will "solve" the outcome. This has nothing to do with writing a well crafted essay that is opinion based such as "I believe person x did this for these reasons..." 99% of the time in history classes you know the outcome, it's not your job to solve it.
      • baddox 15y ago
        For an advanced history class, where students are expected to be able to make informed opinions about complex issues, this will work (and I suspect most advanced history classes don't focus much on memorization, or even tests for that matter). But for general education history courses, the notion of "why" is just as much memorization as a list of dates. What if you disagree about the "why" that the teacher/textbook claimed? You'll lose points. Besides, for all the history courses I've taken (just gen ed ones), tests weren't a big part. There were usually short quizzes on sections of the text book, which were testing for reading comprehension more than memorization. Essays and research papers were most of the grade.
• joshAg 15y ago
  most of the undergrad cs classes i took at berkeley were somewhat open. In the lower div classes, you would usually get unlimited notes, and the upper div classes would usually give you only a few pages (usually 2 to 4). it seemed to be a good compromise of scalability and usefulness.
• tobiasSoftware 15y ago
  It's not just that it's easier to grade, closed book exams actually have a useful purpose IMO. In some classes there are a core set of ideas that are extremely important to understand and a much larger set of application concepts. Because tests require memorization it is much easier to focus only on the core ideas whereas homework or projects that did this would be frowned upon for being "too easy." I've had this especially happen with finals, like my Differential Equations final where I managed to get all the concepts of the entire semester onto a single page when studying. I had a lightbulb moment where I realized the important parts of the class were really simple, it's just all the twists and challenges about application made it seem more complicated. Similarly I got mad at a grad teacher recently when he would not make our last lecture a review because according to him we shouldn't need "hand-holding." It ticked me off because a day to summarize what we've learned over several months seems like a smart idea to me. I guess I feel like tests can be similar, a way to filter out things that are taught that are good to learn, but not as important as other things. Kind of like when a teacher says, "If you leave this class and only remember a single thing I want it to be this." On the other hand I see tests not working for some people. I have a close friend who has memory problems. She is so frustrated by college because due to her memory her application of the classes is completely different to how she is tested.
  • omaranto 15y ago
    > Similarly I got mad at a grad teacher recently when he would not make our last lecture a review Huh. A graduate course that ended with a review would feel really weird to me. I've never seen one or heard of one, and when taking a course never asked for a review, or saw a classmate ask for a review. (My direct experience is with graduate courses in mathematics at three universities on in Mexico, one in Canada and one in the US.) Edit: I just realized I'm not sure if the phrase "grad teacher" means a teacher of a graduate course, if not, disregard my comment.
    • tobiasSoftware 15y ago
      yeah I meant teacher of a grad course, and I should probably give a better explanation, it wasn't so much about a class not having a review as the teacher's attitude. Also it was a computer science class, being both a comp-sci and math major I know in computer science reviews are far more useful, especially in this particular class, a distributed systems course that was a general requirement, covered tons of topics (the book was closer to a dictionary than a textbook), and no one really understood what was taught. The thing is that any speaker will tell you that if you want to teach someone something you should tell it to them three times - intro, actual discussion, and conclusion, so I view a last day study session as the conclusion part, making it a useful teaching tool. I totally understand that graduate students should be able to learn on their own and not need something like that, but I still think teachers should keep an open mind and try to teach their students as well as they can. However our teacher told us several times, in kind of an arrogant manner, he wouldn't have the review because otherwise he would be "holding our hands." He didn't have the attitude that it's a tool, he didn't ignore it, instead he looked down on it like if you want a review then you're stupid. This guy constantly used us being grad students as an excuse not to teach us, he would expect us to know entire classes that were never required, never taught, and not prerequisites, simply because we were grad students. We actually had a project worth half the class that centered on a major networking project when the entire class had no networking experience. The whole class was miserable, we learned nearly nothing, and then he curves tons so we pass and he doesn't look so bad. I just hate the attitude that a teacher's job isn't to teach, but instead to read the book to the class. I encountered that with all my required classes in grad school while the electives were amazing with teachers who were extremely challenging but at the same time actually taught us enough to deal with the challenges.
• sterling312 15y ago
  To a certain extent, I agree with you. But to play the devil's advocate, I must say that having a open-whatever test is inherently dangerous in creating inequality in terms of information usage. For example, if you were to have a open internet test in 2003, people who knew about wikipedia would have a significant advantage vs people who didn't. Or if the student is poor, he or she might not have access to fancy electronics or even laptops, which would make the open internet test difficult. Even if it was a open-book test, if the student were substantially poor to a point where he/she was sharing a book with a friend? And there is also an element of luck with it comes to open-notes tests. If the teacher only allow a single page of notes, what are the chances that the question might be on a subject that you omitted to put on your notes? I've only listed tech-savvy, income, and luck as a potential way to make the test unfair, but I'm sure there are plenty more if you include any other element that is not the study material itself other than memory. I agree that in real life we don't have to memorize everything (matter of fact I'm all for critical thinking than memorization in schools), but there are certainly some benefit to the traditional test taking methods.
• derda 15y ago
  Some exams at my university do allow you to bring all the notes and books you wish (no internet though). Although that sounds like a great deal, I don't really like those exams. Normally if professors let you bring all your notes, they increase the complexity of the tasks and maybe even cut the time. So unless you wrote yourself a good summary or index to your notes, you will spent too much time looking through your stuff and won't be able to complete the test. If you however wrote a good summary, chances are that you wont actually need it, since thats pretty much the best way to learn. But still the exam is harder than it would have been without books, so you are off worse.
  • blahedo 15y ago
    > thats pretty much the best way to learn. But still the exam is harder than it would have been without books, so you are off worse. So... they're the best way to learn, but you're worse off for getting them? Think about this argument a little more critically---I think what you're trying to say is that such exams are harder (which is true), but what is the purpose of the exam, and of the course itself? Surely an exam structure that is more effective at causing you to learn the material is better for you, not worse, not despite but because of the fact that it makes you synthesise a better understanding of the material.