7 ms·

> Another big accommodation request is extra time on tests. Maybe the real problem is we are testing people on how fast they can do something not if they can d

by bawolff 11mo ago

> Another big accommodation request is extra time on tests. Maybe the real problem is we are testing people on how fast they can do something not if they can do something. In general, being good at academics require you to think carefully not quickly. I suspect there is a correlation between people who think things through and people who do well in school.

jbullock35 11mo ago
> In general, being good at academics require you to think carefully not quickly. Yes, but to go even further: timed tests often test, in part, your ability to handwrite quickly rather than slowly. There is great variation in handwriting speed — I saw it as a student and as a professor — and in classrooms, we should no more be testing students for handwriting speed than we should be testing them on athletic ability. In general, timed tests that involve a lot of handwriting are appalling. We use them because they make classroom management easier, not because they are justifiable pedagogy.
- AlexandrB 11mo ago
  This is true about other things like reading speed as well. It still doesn't mean that time limits are useless. These are skills you can develop up to a reasonable level through practice if they're lacking, not something fixed like height. And if it takes you 12 hours to get through a 2 hour test because of these factors it's a sign that you're not going to be a very effective employee/researcher. Being able to read/write with some haste is not unrelated to job/academic performance.
  - jbullock35 11mo ago
    > Being able to read/write with some haste is not unrelated to job/academic performance. Yes, I agree. But my point is about handwriting, rather than writing in general. Handwriting speed is something that we are effectively testing with many in-class exams. And handwriting speed - unlike reading or writing speed - is indeed unrelated to job performance. It is also unrelated to any reasonable measure of academic performance.
    - neltnerb 11mo ago
      It is an interesting point about handwriting as distinct from reading or writing alone. I appreciate it, thank you. I would not concede that speed is not as important as doing it correctly in the context of evaluating learning. There are homework, projects, and papers where there is a lot of time available to probe whether they can think it through and do it correctly with no time limit. It's ideal if everyone can finish an exam, but there needs to be some kind of pressure for people to learn to quickly identify a kind of problem, identify the correct solution approach, and actually carry out the solution. But they shouldn't be getting penalized for not doing a page of handwritten linear algebra correctly, I totally agree that you need to make sure you're testing what you think you're testing.
- HDThoreaun 11mo ago
  I can not think of a single test I have ever taken where I could be limited by handwriting speed. Most of the time on tests is spent thinking, not writing.
  - bawolff 11mo ago
    I had a test once where we had to do RSA by hand (with 4 digit numbers), no calculators allowed. There was a lot of handwriting on scrap pieces of paper. Do humanities have to do handwritten essay tests in the modern world. I had to do those in middle school/high school. No idea if that is still a thing.
    - WalterBright 11mo ago
      > scrap pieces of paper The exams I took were done in blue books where you were required to show your work.
      - peterfirefly 11mo ago
        You didn't have both? Scrap for trying out ideas, double-checking, making mistakes and then "blue books" for the stuff you hand in (with the answers + all the steps you choose to show).
        WalterBright 11mo ago
        No need. I just X'd out failed approaches. There were always plenty of pages in the blue book.
  - jbullock35 11mo ago
    When I was a student in the United States in the 1990s, I took many tests in which handwriting speed limited me. It was purely a physical problem. When I was permitted to type, there was no issue. To be clear, I'm speaking of tests in the humanities and social sciences, for which students must write short essays. Later, when I was a professor in the United States, I saw some of my students grappling with the same problem. I don't think that my students and I are extraordinary. Other people were, and are, limited by slow handwriting when they are required to handwrite their exams. You could try to identify these people and give them extra time. But the better move would be to stop requiring students to handwrite essays under a time constraint.
ajsnigrutin 11mo ago
I mean... usually those tests check the correctness of answers too, so you're comparing students under the same circumstances, evaluating how much (writing, calculations.... whatever) they're able to do, correctly of course, within an alotted time period. If someone can correctly solve 17 math problems in that time and someone else can do 21, the second one is "better" than the first, since they're both faster and their answers are still correct. They could extend the test time for everyone, but in reality, you won't get many time extensions in real life, where speed is indeed a factor. If someone can do 21 correct answers in an hour and someone else needed two hours to do the same, due to a faked disability, it's unfair both to the 1-hour student and an actually disabled student who might be missing a hand and needing more time to write/type with a prosthetic.
- kenjackson 11mo ago
  But where is that level of speed distinction important? I just don't know anywhere where being 10% faster translates into much actual real value. If you can write a function in five minutes and it takes this other person 5.5 minutes -- do you really view that as the key difference in ability? Even in time constrained situations, compute/processing speed is almost never the issue.
  - ajsnigrutin 11mo ago
    I mean.. if you can finish a task for a client in a day, and someone else needs two days, isn't that a huge difference? Or to turn it around, if someone does 10%, 20%, 50% more in the same time period, isn't that significant? I mean.. we are comparing students abilities here, and doing stuff fast is one of those abilities. Even potato peelers in a restaurant are valued more if they're faster, why not programmers too? Or DMV workers?
    - bawolff 11mo ago
      I don't think test speed is correlated with that. Like anything i had to do in a test when i was taking my CS degree is maybe 5% if not less of the portion of my real job tasks. Even if i was triple as fast at taking those tests, i think that would be a neglibile increase in on the job speed.
WalterBright 11mo ago
Caltech had timed exams (2-3 hours) and infinite time exams, at the discretion of the professor. The students hated the infinite time ones, because nobody knew how much time other students spent on the test so one felt obliged to spend inordinate amounts of time on it. Besides, if you couldn't solve the exam problems in 2 hours, you simply didn't know the material.
- ghaff 11mo ago
  That's basically a take-home at that point (assuming open book--or at least honesty) and, yes, you're now computing with classmates who will spend a weekend on it. It's the same problem as companies giving take-home interview problems that you should only spend an hour or two on.
  - WalterBright 11mo ago
    At Caltech, exams were take-home, with a 2 hour time limit. It was on your honor to abide by the 2 hour rule. I used my alarm clock. Ya know, the funny thing about students - if you presume they are honest, they tend to be honest. The students loved it, I loved it. If anyone cheated, the students would turn him in. Nobody ever bragged about cheating, 'cuz they would have been ostracized. Besides, I actually wanted to learn the stuff.
    - will4274 11mo ago
      > if you presume they are honest, they tend to be honest. The students loved it, I loved it. If anyone cheated, the students would turn him in. Nobody ever bragged about cheating, 'cuz they would have been ostracized. I think if you look at the 2012 Harvard cheating scandal, it's clear that this isn't true. There, the professor presumed honest students, hundreds cheated, and no student reported. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Harvard_cheating_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Harvard_cheating_scandal
      - WalterBright 11mo ago
        It doesn't always work, that's for sure. I suspect one of the things the admissions committee did was try to filter out the cheaters. Explaining how the honor system worked was part of the freshman orientation camp (held on Catalina Island). One reason it did work is the students liked being trusted, and they did not like anyone that would threaten the system, and would turn them in. BTW, that was 50 years ago. I have no information on how the honor system is fairing today.

by bawolff 11mo ago

jbullock35 11mo ago

> In general, being good at academics require you to think carefully not quickly. Yes, but to go even further: timed tests often test, in part, your ability to handwrite quickly rather than slowly. There is great variation in handwriting speed — I saw it as a student and as a professor — and in classrooms, we should no more be testing students for handwriting speed than we should be testing them on athletic ability. In general, timed tests that involve a lot of handwriting are appalling. We use them because they make classroom management easier, not because they are justifiable pedagogy.

AlexandrB 11mo ago
This is true about other things like reading speed as well. It still doesn't mean that time limits are useless. These are skills you can develop up to a reasonable level through practice if they're lacking, not something fixed like height. And if it takes you 12 hours to get through a 2 hour test because of these factors it's a sign that you're not going to be a very effective employee/researcher. Being able to read/write with some haste is not unrelated to job/academic performance.
- jbullock35 11mo ago
  > Being able to read/write with some haste is not unrelated to job/academic performance. Yes, I agree. But my point is about handwriting, rather than writing in general. Handwriting speed is something that we are effectively testing with many in-class exams. And handwriting speed - unlike reading or writing speed - is indeed unrelated to job performance. It is also unrelated to any reasonable measure of academic performance.
  - neltnerb 11mo ago
    It is an interesting point about handwriting as distinct from reading or writing alone. I appreciate it, thank you. I would not concede that speed is not as important as doing it correctly in the context of evaluating learning. There are homework, projects, and papers where there is a lot of time available to probe whether they can think it through and do it correctly with no time limit. It's ideal if everyone can finish an exam, but there needs to be some kind of pressure for people to learn to quickly identify a kind of problem, identify the correct solution approach, and actually carry out the solution. But they shouldn't be getting penalized for not doing a page of handwritten linear algebra correctly, I totally agree that you need to make sure you're testing what you think you're testing.
HDThoreaun 11mo ago
I can not think of a single test I have ever taken where I could be limited by handwriting speed. Most of the time on tests is spent thinking, not writing.
- bawolff 11mo ago
  I had a test once where we had to do RSA by hand (with 4 digit numbers), no calculators allowed. There was a lot of handwriting on scrap pieces of paper. Do humanities have to do handwritten essay tests in the modern world. I had to do those in middle school/high school. No idea if that is still a thing.
  - WalterBright 11mo ago
    > scrap pieces of paper The exams I took were done in blue books where you were required to show your work.
    - peterfirefly 11mo ago
      You didn't have both? Scrap for trying out ideas, double-checking, making mistakes and then "blue books" for the stuff you hand in (with the answers + all the steps you choose to show).
      - WalterBright 11mo ago
        No need. I just X'd out failed approaches. There were always plenty of pages in the blue book.
- jbullock35 11mo ago
  When I was a student in the United States in the 1990s, I took many tests in which handwriting speed limited me. It was purely a physical problem. When I was permitted to type, there was no issue. To be clear, I'm speaking of tests in the humanities and social sciences, for which students must write short essays. Later, when I was a professor in the United States, I saw some of my students grappling with the same problem. I don't think that my students and I are extraordinary. Other people were, and are, limited by slow handwriting when they are required to handwrite their exams. You could try to identify these people and give them extra time. But the better move would be to stop requiring students to handwrite essays under a time constraint.

ajsnigrutin 11mo ago

I mean... usually those tests check the correctness of answers too, so you're comparing students under the same circumstances, evaluating how much (writing, calculations.... whatever) they're able to do, correctly of course, within an alotted time period. If someone can correctly solve 17 math problems in that time and someone else can do 21, the second one is "better" than the first, since they're both faster and their answers are still correct. They could extend the test time for everyone, but in reality, you won't get many time extensions in real life, where speed is indeed a factor. If someone can do 21 correct answers in an hour and someone else needed two hours to do the same, due to a faked disability, it's unfair both to the 1-hour student and an actually disabled student who might be missing a hand and needing more time to write/type with a prosthetic.

kenjackson 11mo ago
But where is that level of speed distinction important? I just don't know anywhere where being 10% faster translates into much actual real value. If you can write a function in five minutes and it takes this other person 5.5 minutes -- do you really view that as the key difference in ability? Even in time constrained situations, compute/processing speed is almost never the issue.
- ajsnigrutin 11mo ago
  I mean.. if you can finish a task for a client in a day, and someone else needs two days, isn't that a huge difference? Or to turn it around, if someone does 10%, 20%, 50% more in the same time period, isn't that significant? I mean.. we are comparing students abilities here, and doing stuff fast is one of those abilities. Even potato peelers in a restaurant are valued more if they're faster, why not programmers too? Or DMV workers?
  - bawolff 11mo ago
    I don't think test speed is correlated with that. Like anything i had to do in a test when i was taking my CS degree is maybe 5% if not less of the portion of my real job tasks. Even if i was triple as fast at taking those tests, i think that would be a neglibile increase in on the job speed.

WalterBright 11mo ago

Caltech had timed exams (2-3 hours) and infinite time exams, at the discretion of the professor. The students hated the infinite time ones, because nobody knew how much time other students spent on the test so one felt obliged to spend inordinate amounts of time on it. Besides, if you couldn't solve the exam problems in 2 hours, you simply didn't know the material.

ghaff 11mo ago
That's basically a take-home at that point (assuming open book--or at least honesty) and, yes, you're now computing with classmates who will spend a weekend on it. It's the same problem as companies giving take-home interview problems that you should only spend an hour or two on.
- WalterBright 11mo ago
  At Caltech, exams were take-home, with a 2 hour time limit. It was on your honor to abide by the 2 hour rule. I used my alarm clock. Ya know, the funny thing about students - if you presume they are honest, they tend to be honest. The students loved it, I loved it. If anyone cheated, the students would turn him in. Nobody ever bragged about cheating, 'cuz they would have been ostracized. Besides, I actually wanted to learn the stuff.
  - will4274 11mo ago
    > if you presume they are honest, they tend to be honest. The students loved it, I loved it. If anyone cheated, the students would turn him in. Nobody ever bragged about cheating, 'cuz they would have been ostracized. I think if you look at the 2012 Harvard cheating scandal, it's clear that this isn't true. There, the professor presumed honest students, hundreds cheated, and no student reported. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Harvard_cheating_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Harvard_cheating_scandal
    - WalterBright 11mo ago
      It doesn't always work, that's for sure. I suspect one of the things the admissions committee did was try to filter out the cheaters. Explaining how the honor system worked was part of the freshman orientation camp (held on Catalina Island). One reason it did work is the students liked being trusted, and they did not like anyone that would threaten the system, and would turn them in. BTW, that was 50 years ago. I have no information on how the honor system is fairing today.