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The advantage with standardized tests is that they are a less biased assessment than school grades, which can vary wildly by teacher, school, and district. The
by itronitron 2y ago
The advantage with standardized tests is that they are a less biased assessment than school grades, which can vary wildly by teacher, school, and district.
The disadvantage with standardized tests is that it's an unrealistic work experience in which the student has no access to tools and reference materials that they would ordinarily be able to leverage.
- WalterBright 2y agoIf a reference is needed to do simple arithmetic, algebra, and trig, then you never learned it in the first place.
- michaelt 2y agoAt least when I was in college, there was an approved formula book that was allowed in exams. Need the formula for the moment of inertia of a shell sphere? The coefficient of linear expansion of gallium? Fourier series of a sawtooth wave? If you've somehow forgotten the formula for the mean of a sample? It's all in there. There were of course some things that weren't in the formula book - and if you had to look up every last thing, you'd face a lot more time pressure in exams.
- WalterBright 2y agoCaltech exams were open book / open note. The books didn't help much :-/ as the exams were not about regurgitating knowledge. I never bothered to memorize anything at Caltech, yet I wound up with an encyclopedic knowledge of things like trig identities. Sort of like I wound up knowing most of the x86 opcode encodings, although since I later abstracted that, it has slipped my mind a bit.
- professoretc 2y agoPrefixes come first, 1 byte each, order doesn't matter except that REX, if present, must come last. Then the opcode, 1-3 bytes. Followed by Mod R/M byte, if present. Followed by SIB byte, if present. Followed by address/immediate, 1, 2, 4, or 8 bytes, if present. Ugh; there's a reason why I'm switching my architecture course to MIPS32.
- WalterBright 2y agoOne day I realized I could just look at a hex dump and see some (not all) of the instructions in my head.
- itronitron 2y agoPeople regularly memorize knowledge that they need to apply, and an intelligent person can learn what they need to know as they need to know it. How many people will ever have a need to know the derivatives of the inverse trigonometric functions?
- WalterBright 2y agoScientists and engineers will need to. Just like if you're a C programmer and have to look up what a for-loop is - eh, you haven't learned much of any C.
- bishbosh 2y ago>Scientists and engineers will need to. No, they wont.
- WalterBright 2y agoYeah, I worked with some that weren't able to do that. They were better off leaving the math part to others.
- swatcoder 2y agoThe other disadvantage with many standardized tests is that they appear less biased while not being very unbiased at all. Anyone who's taught test prep knows that "modest"/lazy students can achieve huge returns from being coached to exploit patterns in test structure and test content without actually becoming any more qualified as a student and without developing any kind of transferable knowledge. But it requires investing money in private test prep tutors, many of whom are themselves capable of good-paying opportunities elsewhere, so it's largely not available to earnest and hopeful students of lesser means. This impacts SAT, ACT, GMAT, LSAT, and plenty of other common tests.
- rufus_foreman 2y ago>> But it requires investing money in private test prep tutors Or checking out a book from the library and reading it.
- swatcoder 2y agoOh, that can work too, for sure, but the folk who improve from self-studying a test prep book probably are the ones you mean to be looking for in the first place.