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> Foreign exams: "you have an chance of scoring a few points even if the final answer is incorrect". In this respect, the foreign exams are giving you credit fo

by exDM69 12y ago

> Foreign exams: "you have an chance of scoring a few points even if the final answer is incorrect". In this respect, the foreign exams are giving you credit for being wrong but well-intentioned. Is that a desirable quality? This is definitely a desirable quality in math/physics/chemistry exams. If you make a very long calculation (some of the exam questions require a full sheet of paper to calculate) almost perfectly but make a mistake on the second-to-last row, you should get your 4 out of 6 points or so. Good point about language barriers, though. There are lots of smart people who have to participate in a test that is not their native language, in the US and elsewhere. History exams should be about knowledge and understanding of history - if your language skills aren't that great, you'll inevitably lose a few points because of the poor quality essay you can produce. > The fact that the test is standardised and asks questions from a basic and fixed set of knowledge means that universities know exactly what set of things the arriving undergraduates will know, Our tests are standardized too (and same questions nationwide, changing every year). They're just not multiple choice questions. You make a good point about flexibility too. Our education in the few years preceding the exam were a bit too focused on the finals. I guess in that respect the SAT has a small advantage if they allow a more flexible curriculum in the preceeding years.

learnstats2 12y ago
> This is definitely a desirable quality in math/physics/chemistry exams. If you make a very long calculation (some of the exam questions require a full sheet of paper to calculate) almost perfectly but make a mistake on the second-to-last row, you should get your 4 out of 6 points or so. I question this. (I have worked as a teacher and as a practitioner) First of all, should we ask such long calculations in an exam situation without access to a computer? That's not real anyway. Second of all, if we are asking the long calculation with the expectation that students won't be able to complete it, why are we asking that question? Why don't we ask shorter questions that match the expectations we have? If we are asking the long calculation because we expect students should complete it, why should they get partial credit for failing to meet that expectation? That's what you're testing them on - and they haven't truthfully shown they were better than someone who wrote nothing. They've failed at completing the task, and/or at checking their work. It really shows they were better (or better trained) at gaming the exam - knowing exactly what to write to satisfy the examiner and gain partial credit. This training is very well paid, by the way. >Our tests are standardized too (and same questions nationwide, changing every year). They're just not multiple choice questions. Even if the questions are consistent nationwide, if the pass mark is low enough (or with partial credits), students can arrive at university with wildly different knowledge, having passed via different sections of the course, if not via luck. The university will naturally assume that the student knows all of those sections well, which many students will not. This creates an obvious problem of services being inadequate for first year undergraduates. Where I live this is readily apparent, but few people have noticed and nobody is dealing with it.
- krisoft 12y ago
  It's not really partial credit for failing to meet expectations. Just an example. A 'complicated' geometry problem. Our expectations is that the student understands the text, draws a draft of the shapes. She then recalls the appropriate two or three equitations. Formulates a plan to solve them (first this eq, which gives that info, with which I can ...), then she executes that plan and writes down the result. Student A does a neat drawing, marks the important measurements, uses those same markings to note the equitations down and sets out to solve them. During a substitution she mistakes one of her 3-s to a 2, therefore the result is completely wrong. She completed 3 of our expectations and failed the last one. Student B draws a happy seal and takes a nap. 0 out of 4 completed goals. I would argue that the first students deserves more credit, and those are full credits not partials.
  - learnstats2 12y ago
    This is a fair comment, that a single question can be used test several different aspects of a topic. However, unless you are specifically testing the student's ability to string the different aspects together precisely, I don't believe that to be an optimal exam question. Here, for example, you are seem to be allowing the student a 50% passing grade (2/4 expectations met) if they show they understand the text by drawing it out, and remember the formulas from the syllabus sufficiently to write them down without starting to apply them. That maybe isn't your intent, and maybe your ideal mark scheme would try to avoid over-crediting something like that. But even if that's not what you intended, that has become the reality: setting expectations for partial credit has led to increasingly simplistic expectations of students and this in turn to rampant grade inflation. Grade inflation has been strongly encouraged by institutions' statistical collation, but has been mostly avoided by the SAT. I'm not sure that I want students to have access to good grades even if they consistently give wrong final answers, transposing digits and so on. It shows a lack of precision and a lack of full understanding of the question (not able to do effective sanity checking). Precision is a skill that mathematics can help people to learn, in my opinion. The SAT being multiple choice means you have a fair opportunity to correct this type of mistake - a typographical error typically won't fit with any of the multiple choice answers and you'll have the chance to correct it (costing you only the correction time - and teaching you that precision is of some importance). The wrong multiple choice answers tend to fit deliberately with common conceptual errors. This actually illustrates a useful element of the SAT exam design.

by exDM69 12y ago

learnstats2 12y ago

> This is definitely a desirable quality in math/physics/chemistry exams. If you make a very long calculation (some of the exam questions require a full sheet of paper to calculate) almost perfectly but make a mistake on the second-to-last row, you should get your 4 out of 6 points or so. I question this. (I have worked as a teacher and as a practitioner) First of all, should we ask such long calculations in an exam situation without access to a computer? That's not real anyway. Second of all, if we are asking the long calculation with the expectation that students won't be able to complete it, why are we asking that question? Why don't we ask shorter questions that match the expectations we have? If we are asking the long calculation because we expect students should complete it, why should they get partial credit for failing to meet that expectation? That's what you're testing them on - and they haven't truthfully shown they were better than someone who wrote nothing. They've failed at completing the task, and/or at checking their work. It really shows they were better (or better trained) at gaming the exam - knowing exactly what to write to satisfy the examiner and gain partial credit. This training is very well paid, by the way. >Our tests are standardized too (and same questions nationwide, changing every year). They're just not multiple choice questions. Even if the questions are consistent nationwide, if the pass mark is low enough (or with partial credits), students can arrive at university with wildly different knowledge, having passed via different sections of the course, if not via luck. The university will naturally assume that the student knows all of those sections well, which many students will not. This creates an obvious problem of services being inadequate for first year undergraduates. Where I live this is readily apparent, but few people have noticed and nobody is dealing with it.

krisoft 12y ago
It's not really partial credit for failing to meet expectations. Just an example. A 'complicated' geometry problem. Our expectations is that the student understands the text, draws a draft of the shapes. She then recalls the appropriate two or three equitations. Formulates a plan to solve them (first this eq, which gives that info, with which I can ...), then she executes that plan and writes down the result. Student A does a neat drawing, marks the important measurements, uses those same markings to note the equitations down and sets out to solve them. During a substitution she mistakes one of her 3-s to a 2, therefore the result is completely wrong. She completed 3 of our expectations and failed the last one. Student B draws a happy seal and takes a nap. 0 out of 4 completed goals. I would argue that the first students deserves more credit, and those are full credits not partials.
- learnstats2 12y ago
  This is a fair comment, that a single question can be used test several different aspects of a topic. However, unless you are specifically testing the student's ability to string the different aspects together precisely, I don't believe that to be an optimal exam question. Here, for example, you are seem to be allowing the student a 50% passing grade (2/4 expectations met) if they show they understand the text by drawing it out, and remember the formulas from the syllabus sufficiently to write them down without starting to apply them. That maybe isn't your intent, and maybe your ideal mark scheme would try to avoid over-crediting something like that. But even if that's not what you intended, that has become the reality: setting expectations for partial credit has led to increasingly simplistic expectations of students and this in turn to rampant grade inflation. Grade inflation has been strongly encouraged by institutions' statistical collation, but has been mostly avoided by the SAT. I'm not sure that I want students to have access to good grades even if they consistently give wrong final answers, transposing digits and so on. It shows a lack of precision and a lack of full understanding of the question (not able to do effective sanity checking). Precision is a skill that mathematics can help people to learn, in my opinion. The SAT being multiple choice means you have a fair opportunity to correct this type of mistake - a typographical error typically won't fit with any of the multiple choice answers and you'll have the chance to correct it (costing you only the correction time - and teaching you that precision is of some importance). The wrong multiple choice answers tend to fit deliberately with common conceptual errors. This actually illustrates a useful element of the SAT exam design.