9 ms·

Why Flunking Exams Is Actually a Good Thing

63 points by uger 12y ago

JetSpiegel 12y ago
Worked for Holden Caulfield...
jimcsharp 12y ago
Isn't this the point behind Quizzes? You don't treat them like tests, you bomb what you're gonna bomb, and you improve for the real thing.
- LanceH 12y ago
  The primary purpose quizzes as they are generally applied to to check to make sure you've been attending lectures, reading the material, doing the homework, etc... They may indirectly prepare a student for a test, but mostly it is to enforce the work plan (which should help a student on the test).
- ionforce 12y ago
  Quizzes measure that the material you just learned was properly memorized. That's not the same as a pre-test.
WalterBright 12y ago
> believing that because facts or formulas or arguments are easy to remember right now, they will remain that way tomorrow or the next day. This is sad, it confuses education with memorization. I was fortunate in winding up at Caltech, which had a policy of open book / open note exams. The idea wasn't to memorize formulae, it was to learn how derive the formulae and then apply them properly. For example, in AMA95 one of the lectures went through deriving the fourier transforms. On the final exam one of the questions was to derive the hyperbolic transforms. If you understood the fourier ones, you could derive the hyperbolic ones. If not, well, you were lost. In Physics 2, one lecture showed how the characteristics of magnetism could be derived from the idea of electric charges. An exam question was to show the characteristics of electric fields given the existence of magnetic monopoles. Anybody can look up a formula in a book, and then misuse it.
- rayiner 12y ago
  I think the premise of the article is even more relevant for material that requires analysis and application, not just memorization. It's easy to get yourself in a situation where you think you know the material because you have some formulas memorized, but it's not until you get to the exam that you realize you don't understand the contours of how to apply the rules you learned.
  - j2kun 12y ago
    Unfortunately all of the science referred to in the article is about memorization and not analysis, so this claim is hard to justify.
- song 12y ago
  I had the same experience when I was studying in France. All of my exams were open book and I found that the exams actually reflected understanding of the subject instead of rote memorization. I was an exchange student at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) and was very disappointed by the number of exams that graded rote memorization. Glad to see that Caltech is not like this.
  - WalterBright 12y ago
    When I worked at Boeing on gearboxes, I did some work to calculate the loads when the gear drive ran into the stops. To do that, I had to calculate the rotating moment of inertia of the gear train. Another engineer looked over my work, and asked "what book did you get these formulas from?" I said the shape of the gear wasn't in a book, so I had to derive it. He was shocked. I was shocked that he was shocked :-(
  - jacalata 12y ago
    Wow. That's like the opposite of the exams I took in France, which were closed choice multiple choice questions asking for memorized facts.
    - song 12y ago
jere 12y ago
In college, I had a fairly consistent habit of bombing the first exam in a class and then going on to ace the class anyway. I got a 50 on my first exam in my very first class, Calc III. It's like I didn't take a class seriously until I was in panic mode. There are some parallels between my struggles with procrastination I think.
- icebraining 12y ago
  http://morganalyx.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/ch-last-minute-panic.gif http://morganalyx.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/ch-last-minute...
j2kun 12y ago
What is up with the questions used in the pretest? From the article: > Which of the following is true of scientific explanations? > a. They are less likely to be verified by empirical observation than other types of explanations. > b. They are accepted because they come from a trusted source or authority figure. > c. They are accepted only provisionally. > d. In the face of evidence that is inconsistent with a scientific explanation, the evidence will be questioned. > e. All of the above are true about scientific explanations. If I were taking this pretest, it would be accompanied by the realization that most of my work in the class would be dealing with a mountain of oversimplifications and generalizations. So maybe the goal of the pretest is to inhibit my critical thinking to the point where I just think the way the professor expects and try to maximize my chance of filling in the right bubble. A better question might be something describing historical evidence rather than forcing the respondent to make a claim about truth. Like: according to the research of [researcher and colleagues], 80% of survey respondents said their primary reason for accepting a scientific explanation was... These would be much better at providing cues for the student later on, since they now have a name and a number to attach to the claim being made.
- igravious 12y ago
  Judging from the questions these are probably first year college students. What the question is trying to elucidate here is if the student has a working conception of how scientific explanations work. I'm not sure how you are getting from there to "a mountain of oversimplifications and generalizations". I know from personal experience tutoring first year students that they can have a very (and I mean very) shaky grasp of what it even means for something to be scientific rather than unscientific. This groundwork has to be in place before students can proceed to digest any science, in this case psychology no doubt. If anything knowing about the ways in which our beliefs can be (rightly or wrongly) formed will only aid critical thinking. I think the question is an OK question and that the question you would replace it with obscures what the student needs to learn about. In fact, if you don't mind me saying, I think your replacement question quite odd.
  - j2kun 12y ago
    My problem is that the question is entirely unscientific. There are reasonable interpretations and arguments for both sides of every potential answer. This is why basing a question on actual facts (such as, what was this particular scientist's argument, or what was found in that study) is a better idea.
joshstrange 12y ago
This isn't too surprising, I remember before taking the ACT (or any test with some sort of a "Reading Comprehension" section) I would read the questions before I read the selected reading so that I knew what I was looking for.
- baddox 12y ago
  From what I remember, the reading section of the ACT has its questions ordered roughly in the same order as the relevant reading material. That made it almost trivial to just alternate between reading a question and reading the material until you find the answer.
  - joshstrange 12y ago
    That was my experience as well.
lazyant 12y ago
training as close as the real thing is the best kind of practice, see sports training for ex.
gone35 12y ago
I'm disappointed this kind of disingenuous Gladwellese keeps making its way to the HN front page. Despite what the article claims, "pretesting" is not a thing (yet) in psychology. The whole premise of the article hinges on one unpublished study by a single research group [1], one that didn't even administer a full "prefinal" at that. The effect is intriguing and might or might not be "significant" (no way to verify oneself); but either way a single, unpublished, unreplicated study does not an "exciting development in learning science" emerging from "a variety of experiments" make, as the article pretends. But then it wouldn't make as clean a narrative, would it. [1] http://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/ http://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/
- sesqu 12y ago
  I've only ever encountered pre-tests on Udacity. For what it's worth, my experience of them was entirely negative. That said, I've encountered several variations on the theme that lead me to believe there is a wider "thing" in education about activation and reinforcement.
quarterwave 12y ago
Years ago in college, for the toughest course I'd carefully pick an advanced textbook - something one or two levels ahead of the current one - and soak myself in that. Example: for an introductory quantum mechanics course I read Dirac's book, then supplemented this with Russian problem books - they were the best & came with answer gists. I would freely look up answers for the tough problems, then go back and see if I could come up with a better way. After this regimen, the course itself became a minor formality. I realized only much later that this was an obsessive approach, like buying chess books after losing early in one's first tournament. There was no sense of carpe diem, it was about owlishly building up a 10:1 advantage before closing in.

63 points by uger 12y ago

Worked for Holden Caulfield...

Isn't this the point behind Quizzes? You don't treat them like tests, you bomb what you're gonna bomb, and you improve for the real thing.

LanceH 12y ago
The primary purpose quizzes as they are generally applied to to check to make sure you've been attending lectures, reading the material, doing the homework, etc... They may indirectly prepare a student for a test, but mostly it is to enforce the work plan (which should help a student on the test).
ionforce 12y ago
Quizzes measure that the material you just learned was properly memorized. That's not the same as a pre-test.

WalterBright 12y ago

> believing that because facts or formulas or arguments are easy to remember right now, they will remain that way tomorrow or the next day. This is sad, it confuses education with memorization. I was fortunate in winding up at Caltech, which had a policy of open book / open note exams. The idea wasn't to memorize formulae, it was to learn how derive the formulae and then apply them properly. For example, in AMA95 one of the lectures went through deriving the fourier transforms. On the final exam one of the questions was to derive the hyperbolic transforms. If you understood the fourier ones, you could derive the hyperbolic ones. If not, well, you were lost. In Physics 2, one lecture showed how the characteristics of magnetism could be derived from the idea of electric charges. An exam question was to show the characteristics of electric fields given the existence of magnetic monopoles. Anybody can look up a formula in a book, and then misuse it.

rayiner 12y ago
I think the premise of the article is even more relevant for material that requires analysis and application, not just memorization. It's easy to get yourself in a situation where you think you know the material because you have some formulas memorized, but it's not until you get to the exam that you realize you don't understand the contours of how to apply the rules you learned.
- j2kun 12y ago
  Unfortunately all of the science referred to in the article is about memorization and not analysis, so this claim is hard to justify.
song 12y ago
I had the same experience when I was studying in France. All of my exams were open book and I found that the exams actually reflected understanding of the subject instead of rote memorization. I was an exchange student at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) and was very disappointed by the number of exams that graded rote memorization. Glad to see that Caltech is not like this.
- WalterBright 12y ago
  When I worked at Boeing on gearboxes, I did some work to calculate the loads when the gear drive ran into the stops. To do that, I had to calculate the rotating moment of inertia of the gear train. Another engineer looked over my work, and asked "what book did you get these formulas from?" I said the shape of the gear wasn't in a book, so I had to derive it. He was shocked. I was shocked that he was shocked :-(
- jacalata 12y ago
  Wow. That's like the opposite of the exams I took in France, which were closed choice multiple choice questions asking for memorized facts.
  - song 12y ago

jere 12y ago

In college, I had a fairly consistent habit of bombing the first exam in a class and then going on to ace the class anyway. I got a 50 on my first exam in my very first class, Calc III. It's like I didn't take a class seriously until I was in panic mode. There are some parallels between my struggles with procrastination I think.

icebraining 12y ago
http://morganalyx.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/ch-last-minute-panic.gif http://morganalyx.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/ch-last-minute...

j2kun 12y ago

What is up with the questions used in the pretest? From the article: > Which of the following is true of scientific explanations? > a. They are less likely to be verified by empirical observation than other types of explanations. > b. They are accepted because they come from a trusted source or authority figure. > c. They are accepted only provisionally. > d. In the face of evidence that is inconsistent with a scientific explanation, the evidence will be questioned. > e. All of the above are true about scientific explanations. If I were taking this pretest, it would be accompanied by the realization that most of my work in the class would be dealing with a mountain of oversimplifications and generalizations. So maybe the goal of the pretest is to inhibit my critical thinking to the point where I just think the way the professor expects and try to maximize my chance of filling in the right bubble. A better question might be something describing historical evidence rather than forcing the respondent to make a claim about truth. Like: according to the research of [researcher and colleagues], 80% of survey respondents said their primary reason for accepting a scientific explanation was... These would be much better at providing cues for the student later on, since they now have a name and a number to attach to the claim being made.

igravious 12y ago
Judging from the questions these are probably first year college students. What the question is trying to elucidate here is if the student has a working conception of how scientific explanations work. I'm not sure how you are getting from there to "a mountain of oversimplifications and generalizations". I know from personal experience tutoring first year students that they can have a very (and I mean very) shaky grasp of what it even means for something to be scientific rather than unscientific. This groundwork has to be in place before students can proceed to digest any science, in this case psychology no doubt. If anything knowing about the ways in which our beliefs can be (rightly or wrongly) formed will only aid critical thinking. I think the question is an OK question and that the question you would replace it with obscures what the student needs to learn about. In fact, if you don't mind me saying, I think your replacement question quite odd.
- j2kun 12y ago
  My problem is that the question is entirely unscientific. There are reasonable interpretations and arguments for both sides of every potential answer. This is why basing a question on actual facts (such as, what was this particular scientist's argument, or what was found in that study) is a better idea.

joshstrange 12y ago

This isn't too surprising, I remember before taking the ACT (or any test with some sort of a "Reading Comprehension" section) I would read the questions before I read the selected reading so that I knew what I was looking for.

baddox 12y ago
From what I remember, the reading section of the ACT has its questions ordered roughly in the same order as the relevant reading material. That made it almost trivial to just alternate between reading a question and reading the material until you find the answer.
- joshstrange 12y ago
  That was my experience as well.

lazyant 12y ago

training as close as the real thing is the best kind of practice, see sports training for ex.

gone35 12y ago

I'm disappointed this kind of disingenuous Gladwellese keeps making its way to the HN front page. Despite what the article claims, "pretesting" is not a thing (yet) in psychology. The whole premise of the article hinges on one unpublished study by a single research group [1], one that didn't even administer a full "prefinal" at that. The effect is intriguing and might or might not be "significant" (no way to verify oneself); but either way a single, unpublished, unreplicated study does not an "exciting development in learning science" emerging from "a variety of experiments" make, as the article pretends. But then it wouldn't make as clean a narrative, would it. [1] http://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/ http://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/

sesqu 12y ago
I've only ever encountered pre-tests on Udacity. For what it's worth, my experience of them was entirely negative. That said, I've encountered several variations on the theme that lead me to believe there is a wider "thing" in education about activation and reinforcement.

quarterwave 12y ago

Years ago in college, for the toughest course I'd carefully pick an advanced textbook - something one or two levels ahead of the current one - and soak myself in that. Example: for an introductory quantum mechanics course I read Dirac's book, then supplemented this with Russian problem books - they were the best & came with answer gists. I would freely look up answers for the tough problems, then go back and see if I could come up with a better way. After this regimen, the course itself became a minor formality. I realized only much later that this was an obsessive approach, like buying chess books after losing early in one's first tournament. There was no sense of carpe diem, it was about owlishly building up a 10:1 advantage before closing in.