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Why would you want "interesting problems that require you to think further" to be on exams?! That should be the entire point of lectures, office-hours, group p

Why would you want "interesting problems that require you to think further" to be on exams?! That should be the entire point of lectures, office-hours, group problem solving, etc...

Jensson 3y ago
Because they test if students understand the material well enough to apply it to nonstandard problems. A person who can solve nonstandard problems is much more valuable than a person who can just solve standard problems.
- beambot 3y ago
  Curious. I always assumed the primary purpose of an exam was to demonstrate proficiency, not mastery -- especially for undergraduate coursework. If you want mastery, you look at other work product: Projects, research, letters of recommendation, etc. Pedantry and intellectual hazing seem endemic in academia -- from the perspective of someone who spent entirely too many years in the sector (all the way through postdoc).
  - Jensson 3y ago
    Practicing to solve tons of standard problems is a waste of time, it doesn't help you grow much, which is why having interesting problems on exams is way better since it gives students a better goal to aim towards. It also gives a fairer view of each students understanding, since students tend to forget everything they crammed to pass the standard questions. > Pedantry and intellectual hazing seem endemic in academia I wouldn't call interesting test questions pedantry or intellectual hazing. Giving tons of basic easy questions is pedantry and intellectual hazing to me, I'd rather just have the harder questions.
    - beambot 3y ago
      Exams designed to have a 60% median score with subsequent curve adjustment are (a) wildly common in elite colleges, and (b) certainly classify as hazing in my book.
      - swatcoder 3y ago
        For people pursuing personal growth rather than a starry transcript, challenging tests are more like "lifting to failure" or "grinding the boss on hard mode" than hazing. But on the other hand, yeah, for fragile egos and given the very high stakes associated with one's transcript, not everyone is there to get good and it can absolutely be devastating to never ace tests like you did in earlier years. Different programs/eductators may have more sympathy for one group than the other, but there's no viciousness involved.
  - MrJohz 3y ago
    This is pretty common in education, at least in the teacher circles I've known. I know in Germany, they talk about the "Anforderungsbereiche", or requirement levels, where the first level is being able to repeat facts, do calculations, etc; the second level is understanding when you apply those facts or formulas; and the third level is understanding why those formulas work, or being able to escalate why some knowledge is relevant to a subject. I would understand the third level (possibly even the second level) as including that ability to apply knowledge in nonstandard contexts that the previous poster was talking about - being able to see not just how to perform a calculation, and how to use it in a given context, but also how to create that context when necessary - seeing that the question on how humans move in groups could be modelled as a fluid dynamics problem, for example. The general wisdom amongst teachers is that most exams should be able to differentiate between these three levels of understanding, so you want questions where the student can just follow the line and do the right thing, but also questions where they're being asked to apply knowledge in different contexts, prove why something is true, or explain why some fact is valuable or relevant in a given context. This isn't about grading on a curve, it's about differentiating between how far different students have come in their understanding. (And the corollary if that differentiation is that if all the students have the same understanding, it's likely that the course wasn't challenging enough, and many of the more advanced students could have been pushed more.) That said, these regions are more about assessment in general than specific written exams, and the third level will be easier to test in some exam formats than others - a multiple choice exam leaves little opportunity to demonstrate that understanding, whereas an oral exam allows the examiner to explore the subject a bit more deeply. I studied in the UK where a single end-of-unit written exam is mostly the norm, and so these exams had to test all the different levels of knowledge, but if you're gathering results over the course of a year or semester, that might look differently.

Why would you want "interesting problems that require you to think further" to be on exams?! That should be the entire point of lectures, office-hours, group problem solving, etc...

Jensson 3y ago

Because they test if students understand the material well enough to apply it to nonstandard problems. A person who can solve nonstandard problems is much more valuable than a person who can just solve standard problems.

beambot 3y ago
Curious. I always assumed the primary purpose of an exam was to demonstrate proficiency, not mastery -- especially for undergraduate coursework. If you want mastery, you look at other work product: Projects, research, letters of recommendation, etc. Pedantry and intellectual hazing seem endemic in academia -- from the perspective of someone who spent entirely too many years in the sector (all the way through postdoc).
- Jensson 3y ago
  Practicing to solve tons of standard problems is a waste of time, it doesn't help you grow much, which is why having interesting problems on exams is way better since it gives students a better goal to aim towards. It also gives a fairer view of each students understanding, since students tend to forget everything they crammed to pass the standard questions. > Pedantry and intellectual hazing seem endemic in academia I wouldn't call interesting test questions pedantry or intellectual hazing. Giving tons of basic easy questions is pedantry and intellectual hazing to me, I'd rather just have the harder questions.
  - beambot 3y ago
    Exams designed to have a 60% median score with subsequent curve adjustment are (a) wildly common in elite colleges, and (b) certainly classify as hazing in my book.
    - swatcoder 3y ago
      For people pursuing personal growth rather than a starry transcript, challenging tests are more like "lifting to failure" or "grinding the boss on hard mode" than hazing. But on the other hand, yeah, for fragile egos and given the very high stakes associated with one's transcript, not everyone is there to get good and it can absolutely be devastating to never ace tests like you did in earlier years. Different programs/eductators may have more sympathy for one group than the other, but there's no viciousness involved.
- MrJohz 3y ago
  This is pretty common in education, at least in the teacher circles I've known. I know in Germany, they talk about the "Anforderungsbereiche", or requirement levels, where the first level is being able to repeat facts, do calculations, etc; the second level is understanding when you apply those facts or formulas; and the third level is understanding why those formulas work, or being able to escalate why some knowledge is relevant to a subject. I would understand the third level (possibly even the second level) as including that ability to apply knowledge in nonstandard contexts that the previous poster was talking about - being able to see not just how to perform a calculation, and how to use it in a given context, but also how to create that context when necessary - seeing that the question on how humans move in groups could be modelled as a fluid dynamics problem, for example. The general wisdom amongst teachers is that most exams should be able to differentiate between these three levels of understanding, so you want questions where the student can just follow the line and do the right thing, but also questions where they're being asked to apply knowledge in different contexts, prove why something is true, or explain why some fact is valuable or relevant in a given context. This isn't about grading on a curve, it's about differentiating between how far different students have come in their understanding. (And the corollary if that differentiation is that if all the students have the same understanding, it's likely that the course wasn't challenging enough, and many of the more advanced students could have been pushed more.) That said, these regions are more about assessment in general than specific written exams, and the third level will be easier to test in some exam formats than others - a multiple choice exam leaves little opportunity to demonstrate that understanding, whereas an oral exam allows the examiner to explore the subject a bit more deeply. I studied in the UK where a single end-of-unit written exam is mostly the norm, and so these exams had to test all the different levels of knowledge, but if you're gathering results over the course of a year or semester, that might look differently.