I respect your opinion but I can't agree with it. What if you make two mistakes that cancel each other out? You get the correct answer but should you get full

I respect your opinion but I can't agree with it. What if you make two mistakes that cancel each other out? You get the correct answer but should you get full points? In my opinion: no. > First of all, should we ask such long calculations in an exam situation without access to a computer? That's not real anyway. First of all, students have pretty fancy calculators these days. And one sheet full of equations is not that much for a practical, applied problem. Testing only mundane math skills (simplify, differentiate, solve, etc) doesn't test the ability to apply the skills to any real world problems. There are short problems too, it's not all long problems. If it was only about the correct answer, the grading might as well be 0 to 1 points. Now there are questions worth 1, 2, or 6 points. The first being "simplify this equation" and the last being an applied problem. And learning how to do math without the aid of a computer is a very valuable skill. In practice you have the aid of computers, books and collections of formulae but in my experience, there's no substitute for pen and paper practice. Learning to solve math problems is a skill, not a piece of knowledge. If you don't know some things by heart, and know how to attack a problem, a computer will not help you. > 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? The expectation, of course, is that a student will be able to complete the whole thing. But the longer the calculation, the higher the chance of making a simple stupid mistake. The reviewer will evaluate whether or not the student showed that he understands the problem and the solution. If there's obviously no idea what is going on, it's going to be zero points. Even one point requires a partial solution. > 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. No, that's not the case at all. Getting partial credit is completely worthless, you need to have at least 50% of the score to pass. Trying to "game" the exercises won't take you far. For a point of reference, when I did my finals more than a decade ago, you needed 57/60 points (ie 10 problems) to get the highest grade. That means making at most three trivial mistakes during 6 hours.