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Multiple choice and true false questions were fairly common in my undergraduate experience, particularly in first year courses. Often they were Scantron forms f
by TheCycoONE 4y ago
Multiple choice and true false questions were fairly common in my undergraduate experience, particularly in first year courses. Often they were Scantron forms for maximum laziness.
- hgsgm 4y agoI never saw a scantron at my college. I thought UTAustin was an elite school.
- CrazyStat 4y agoUniversity prestige is primarily based on research productivity, which doesn't necessarily correlate positively with quality of teaching.
- hombre_fatal 4y agoEven so, I don't see what a scantron exam tells you about the quality of a professor and class.
- timy2shoes 4y agoThe enrollment at UT Austin is ~50K. No way you can grade that many tests by hand. Source: I went to UT for grad school and was a TA.
- MengerSponge 4y agoIt's safe to assume the enrollment of Prof. Aaronson's Quantum Computing course isn't 50k.
- timy2shoes 4y agoThank you Captain Obvious. The parent comment was about classes at UT in general, not about one specific class.
- MengerSponge 4y agoI suppose we can generalize my statement too. I imagine that most courses at UT have fewer than 50k students enrolled.
- sudosysgen 4y agoEnrolment at my uni is 70k. There is no real problem with long form questions on the test, even for first year classes. I was also a TA. You can have more correctors, and I'd assume a quantum computing class won't even have too many students.
- AlgorithmicTime 4y ago[dead]
- warner25 4y agoGood point. I was also thinking that I never saw a scantron while studying CS at two different American R1 research universities, but the CS departments were small with at most 25 people in a classroom. Peeking at some other universities now, it looks like some required undergrad CS classes have 500-1,000 seats. That's crazy, and clearly demands a different approach. True/False questions happened sometimes in my experience, but not in this quantity (20). I wouldn't say it's lazy. The questions can be clever and writing them, such that the answer isn't debatable and doesn't depend on a bunch of assumptions, is pretty hard. Lazy and terrible is where you have multiple choice questions for which 3/4 of the answers are throwaway nonsense, or the answers are numerical values that are definitively correct or incorrect but are trivia rather than anything conceptual.
- estomagordo 4y agoWell, if a uni with 5k enrolled can hand grade tests, then obviously UT Austin could, if they had 10x faculty of the first uni.
- bigbillheck 4y agoThe more you spend on faculty the less you can spend on sports.
- STM32F030R8 4y agoDo you honestly believe UT spends money on its sports? You realize their football team generates BILLIONS a year in sales and TV rights? Football isn’t why UT is overcrowded lol
- HDThoreaun 4y agoSTEM at large public schools is almost exclusively 100+ person classes with maybe 2 TAs, who are more interested in their research than grading exams. We end up with easy to grade exams. I went to a similarly, if not more, prestigious public school and cs exams were usually around 20 multiple choice and 2 or so extended response.
- professoretc 4y agoOne of my colleagues uses multiple choice exams for his classes (online and in-person) but he gives them a ton of questions. Something like 90 for a 2hr test. His theory was that, sure, you could look up the answers to a few questions, but if you're doing that for every question you'll run out of time.
- sudosysgen 4y agoYour colleague would be wrong. I've passed multiple exams this way (they allowed Internet access because the prof thought the same way). You can very likely answer around 1/4th of the questions immediately with less than passive participation in the course, so for the remaining 60 questions you'll get two minutes per question, which is completely manageable if you type and read fast enough. Multiple choice questions are universally terrible and lazy, and should not be more than a small part of the exam mostly meant to provide easy points.
- relaytheurgency 4y agoMaybe some STEM, maybe lower level courses. I went to a large school and there were maybe 14 people in most of my upper level classes for my degree.