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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 subje
by 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 agoWhen 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 agoWow. 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 agoI was in a grande école and it was their policy not to have multiple choice questions and for all of the exams to be open book. I do believe that there are differences between schools and universities in France and I was pretty lucky to be where I was.
- yebyen 12y agoWhat program were you in? I was an RIT Computer Science undergrad and (given this is one of the programs that RIT is known for) this was not my experience at all. I failed a number of exams and classes, but none of them which I can recall were because they gave me way too many things to memorize. I failed Physics because I failed Calculus... I failed Calculus because the professor had a thick Hungarian accent until she went out on maternity leave and was replaced by a man with an even thicker Hungarian accent. In fact maybe I'm just not good at Calculus... I failed Programming Skills electives because I had moved off campus and got a crappy part-time job, eventually lost my car, and no longer had the time to "live the life" and learn the lessons you learn from diving into the labs and the projects, working them over for dozens of hours until you get all of what ideas you are supposed to get. Actually I had a lot of 4.0 quarters until I moved off campus. I got A's across the board in all of my Arabic classes (ok, one B) which is the only place I remember having to memorize a lot of things, except for one or two Art History classes. I had one professor in particular who I wound up grading for later, who was a master at writing tests that made you prove your actual understanding of the subject matter. He was also a master lecturer, we would often say "you only have to show up to Phil's classes and listen to be able to pass the exams."
- song 12y agoI studied at RIT for 6 months as an exchange student in the Software Engineering department. The worst classes in term of rote memorisation were AI, Graphics Programming, Cryptography (the teacher was actually quite good though, just the exams were really bad) and Networking. I remember one of the exam in Computer Graphics asking me when the OpenGL consortium was formed and other bit of useless trivia. That said I did have a few interesting classes with much more interesting exams but they were in the business department.
- yebyen 12y agoAh... there you have three elective classes I don't think I took, and one I did fail (AI). For the record I don't like memorizing things either.