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> Students don’t seem to mind this reversion. Those I ask are unanimously horrified that this is the choice they are given. They are devastated that the degree

• math_dandy 1y ago
  We have an Accessible Testing Center that will administer and proctor exams under very flexible conditions (more time, breaks, quiet/privacy, …) to help students with various forms of neurodivergence. They’re very good and offer a valuable service without placing any significant additional burden on the instructor. Seems to work well, but I don’t have first hand knowledge about how these forms of accommodations are viewed by the neurodivergent student community. They certainly don’t address the problem of allowing « explorer » students to demonstrate their abilities.
  • aaplok 1y ago
    Yes I think the issue is as much that open tasks make learning interesting and meaningful in a way that exams hardly can do. This is the core of the issue really. If we are in the business of teaching, as in making people learn, exams are a pretty blunt and ineffective instrument. However since our business is also assessing, proctoring is the best if not only trustworthy approach and exams are cheap in time, effort and money to do that. My take is that we should just (properly) assess students at the end of their degree. Spend time (say, a full day) with them but do it only once in the degree (at the end), so you can properly evaluate their skills. Make it hard so that the ones who graduate all deserve it. Then the rest of their time at university should be about learning what they will need.
    • const_cast 1y ago
      Exams aren't for learning, they're for measuring. Projects and lecture are for learning. The problem with this "end of university exam" structure is that you have the same problems as before but now that exam is weighted like 10,000% that of a normal exam.
    • Aeolun 1y ago
      You can’t expect all students to learn without being forced to, no matter how much that’s literally the point of them being there. They’re kids, and they should be treated as such, in both good and bad ways. You might want to make exceptions for the good ones, but absolutely not for the average or bad ones.
      • zmgsabst 1y ago
        How many people would work their current job if money wasn’t a thing? People of all ages seek rewards — and assessments gate the payoffs. Like a boss fight in a video game gates the progress from your skill growth.
    • djoldman 1y ago
      > If we are in the business of teaching, as in making people learn, exams are a pretty blunt and ineffective instrument. I'm curious: what is fulfilling in your job as a math teacher? When students learn? When they're assigned grades that accurately reflect their performance? When they learn something with minimal as opposed to significant effort? Some combination? I always thought teacher motivations were interesting. I'm sure there are fantastic professors who couldn't care less as to what grades they gave out at the end.
      • aaplok 1y ago
        > what is fulfilling in your job as a math teacher? Many things. The most fulfilling for me is taking a student from hating maths to enjoying it. Or when they realise that in fact they're not bad at maths. Students changing their opinions about themselves or about maths is such a fulfilling experience that it's my main motivation. Then working with students who likes and are good at maths and challenging them a bit to expand their horizon is a lot of fun. > When students learn? At a high level yes (that maths can be fun, enjoyable, doable). Them learning "stuff" not so much, it's part of the job. > When they're assigned grades that accurately reflect their performance? Yes but not through a system based on counting how many mistakes they make, like exams do. If I can design a task that enables a student to showcase competency accurately it's great. A task that enables the best ones to extend themselves (and achieve higher marks) is great. > When they learn something with minimal as opposed to significant effort? Not at all. If there is no effort I don't believe much learning is happening. I like to give an opportunity for all students to work hard and learn something in the process no matter where they start from. I only care about the grade as feedback to students. It is a way for me to tell them how far they've come.
  • BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
    I’ve had access to that at my school and it’s night and day. Not being as stressed about time and being in a room alone bumps me up by a grade letter at least.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
  > Many of them are neurodivergent who do miserably in exam conditions Isn't this part of life? Learning to excel anyway?
  • JoshTriplett 1y ago
    Life doesn't tend to take place under exam conditions, either.
    • Aeolun 1y ago
      The important parts of life (like interviews) do.
      • JoshTriplett 1y ago
        > The important parts of life (like interviews) Interviews shouldn't be "exam conditions" either. See the ten thousand different articles that regularly show up here about why not to do the "invert a binary tree on a whiteboard" style of interview. There are much better ways to figure out people's skills. And much better things to be using in-person interview time on.
        • ecb_penguin 1y ago
          You're confusing the way things are with the way things ought to be. The reality is life is full of time boxed challenges.
          • JoshTriplett 1y ago
            Other than a subset of interviews, what do you have in mind that has a structure similar to an exam? Because I'd agree with the comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44106325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44106325 .
            • ecb_penguin 1y ago
• jay_kyburz 1y ago
  I think having one huge exam at the end is the problem. An exam and assessment every week would be best. Less stress at the end of the term, and the student can't leave everything to the last minute, they need to do a little work every week.
  • QuarterReptile 1y ago
    Too much proctoring and grading, not enough holding students' hands for stuff they should have learned from reading the textbook.
• godelski 1y ago
  I don't think I understand, as a terrible test taker myself. The solution I use when teaching is to let evaluation primarily depend on some larger demonstration of knowledge. Most often it is CS classes (e.g. Machine Learning), so I don't really give much care for homeworks and tests and instead be project driven. I don't care if they use GPT or not. The learning happens by them doing things. This is definitely harder in other courses. In my undergrad (physics) our professors frequently gave takehome exams. Open book, open notes, open anything but your friends and classmates. This did require trust, but it was usually pretty obvious when people worked together. They cared more about trying to evaluate and push us if we cared than if we cheated. They required multiple days worth of work and you can bet every student was coming to office hours (we had much more access during that time too). The trust and understanding that effort mattered actually resulted in very little cheating. We felt respected, there was a mutual understanding, and tbh, it created healthy competition among us. Students cheat because they know they need the grade and that at the end of the day they won't won't actually be evaluated on what they learned, but rather on what arbitrary score they got. Fundamentally, this requires a restructuring, but that's been a long time coming. The cheating literally happens because we just treated Goodhart's Law as a feature instead of a bug. AI is forcing us to contend with metric hacking, it didn't create it.
• GeoAtreides 1y ago
  >Many of them are neurodivergent if "many" are "divergent" then... are they really divergent? or are they the new typical?
  • aaplok 1y ago
    Many of the students I talk to. I don't claim they form a representative sample of the student cohort, on the contrary. I guess that the typical student is typical but I have not gone to check that.
• aketchum 1y ago
  It is always interesting to me when people say they are "bad test takers". You mean you are bad at the part where we find out how much you know? Maybe you just don't know the material well enough. caveat emptor - I am not ND so maybe this is a real concern for some, but in my experience the people who said this did not know the material. And the accommodations for tests are abused by rich kids more than they are utilized by those that need them.
  • doctorwho42 1y ago
    As a self proclaimed bad test taker, it's not that I don't know the information. It's that I am capable of second guessing myself in a particular way in which I can build a logical framework to suggest another direction or answer. This presents itself as a bad test taker, I rarely ever got above a B+ on any difficult test material. But you put me in a lab, and that same skillset becomes a major advantage. Minds come in a variety of configurations, id suggest considering that before taking your own experience as the definitive.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • eutropia 1y ago
    datum: I'm ND, but I'm a good test-taker. There were plenty of tests for subjects where I didn't need to study because I was adept at reading the question and correctly assuming what the test-creator wanted answered, and using deduction to reduce possibilities down enough that I could be certain of an answer - or by using meta-knowledge of where the material from the recent lectures was to narrow things down, again, not because I knew the material all that well but because I could read the question. Effectively, I had a decent grasp of the "game" of test-taking, which is rather orthogonal to the actual knowledge of the class material.
  • 542354234235 1y ago
    Tests are just a proxy for understanding and/or application of a concept. Being good at the proxy doesn’t necessarily mean you understand the concept, just like not being good at the proxy doesn’t mean you don’t. Finding other proxies we can use allows for decoupling knowledge from a specific proxy metric. If I was evaluating the health of various companies, I wouldn’t use one metric for all of them, as company health is kind of an abstract concept and any specific metric would not give me a very good overall picture and there are multiple ways for a company to be healthy/successful. Same with people. There are lots of different ways to utilize knowledge in real world scenarios, so someone could be bad at testing and bad at some types of related jobs but good at other types of related jobs. So unless “test taking” as a skill is what is being evaluated, it isn’t necessary to be the primary evaluation tool.
• armchairhacker 1y ago
  IMO exams should be on the easier side and not require much computing (mainly knowledge, and not unnecessary memorization). They should be a baseline, not a challenge for students who understand the material. Students are more accurately measured via long, take-home projects, which are complicated enough that they can’t be entirely done by AI. Unless the class is something that requires quick thinking on the job, in which case there should be “exams” that are live simulations. Ultimately, a student’s GPA should reflect their competence in the career (or possible careers) they’re in college for.
  • kaashif 1y ago
    > They should be a baseline, not a challenge for students who understand the material. You've made this normative statement but not explained why. I think exams should not require huge amounts of computation (I agree) but should contain a range of questions - from easy to very difficult - so that the best and average students can be differentiated.
    • armchairhacker 1y ago
      Specifically, I think they should minimally penalize students who know the material and could apply it professionally, but don't do well on exams in general. Otherwise GPA isn't a useful metric for employers* (and I don't know who else would it be a metric for), because the best students are the best test-takers, not the best employees. So, maybe not a baseline. The exam could have some difficult knowledge-based questions, as long as that "knowledge" when memorized would make the student a better professional; or if the exam is open-book, it can have knowledge that would be difficult to search for. It shouldn't require students to memorize obscure things that are unlikely to be used professionally (e.g. unimportant dates for history, or complex formulas for math that one would look up or reference by name), because then you're prioritizing students who handle rare edge-cases over those who probably accomplish more amortized. * "Employer" and "professional" also including "PI" and "academic"
• thatfrenchguy 1y ago
  > Many of them are neurodivergent who do miserably in exam conditions I mean, for every neurodivergent person who does miserably in exam conditions you have one that does miserably in homework essays because of absence of clear time boundaries.
  • BeFlatXIII 1y ago
    Autism vs. ADHD
    • ecb_penguin 1y ago
      There is nothing to suggest that it is autism or ADHD.