4 ms·

I've been educated in and am studying in the UK at the moment, and for us exams are meant to examine how well you know the content of the course (or so we're to

I've been educated in and am studying in the UK at the moment, and for us exams are meant to examine how well you know the content of the course (or so we're told). If the students are correct in saying that the exam contained questions regarding things they'd never seen or had experience of before, then in my opinion the exam was unreasonable. Throughout my entire academic career exams have worked this way, so regardless of whether they ought to know it for The Real World, if they haven't been taught it then it shouldn't have been on the exam.

deong 12y ago
My first impression looking at the questions was that they were intended to take the knowledge they had gained during the course and apply it to what may have been an unfamiliar circumstance. Done correctly, that's a completely fair exam. I'm sort of inclined to think that if there's this much smoke, something's probably on fire though. I know my own students will complain about silly things, but if they all complain about something, invariably I end up agreeing with them.
- basseq 12y ago
  That's an apt comparison: if no (or painfully few) students were able to give at least a reasonable answer, the problem lays in the teaching curriculum or methodology. (This may not be the course itself, it may be a broader question about hand-holding an academia or similar, but the question remains.) I remember a particular instance in Geometry in high school. Everyone did poorly, so the teacher allowed us to work together to answer the questions again. My group was stuck on a particular question, so I asked the teacher to clarify. She refused, saying we were taught it. I retorted that since everyone was struggling, clearly the problem was on the other side of the desk. (It went over about as well as you might expect.)
arethuza 12y ago
Well my experience getting a degree in the UK in the 1980s was that exams would often contain questions in a different form from what you had seen before - you did know how to answer them but it definitely wasn't trivial to identify what techniques to apply to solve each question. I get the feeling that people now expect questions to be of the form "apply technique X to data A,B,C" which is what I used to expect of secondary school level exams.
aquadrop 12y ago
Didn't they experience exponents? Maybe multiplication should also be out of questions? Its their final year, I don't think phrases like "third question could be as well in chinese" is suited here.

deong 12y ago

My first impression looking at the questions was that they were intended to take the knowledge they had gained during the course and apply it to what may have been an unfamiliar circumstance. Done correctly, that's a completely fair exam. I'm sort of inclined to think that if there's this much smoke, something's probably on fire though. I know my own students will complain about silly things, but if they all complain about something, invariably I end up agreeing with them.

basseq 12y ago
That's an apt comparison: if no (or painfully few) students were able to give at least a reasonable answer, the problem lays in the teaching curriculum or methodology. (This may not be the course itself, it may be a broader question about hand-holding an academia or similar, but the question remains.) I remember a particular instance in Geometry in high school. Everyone did poorly, so the teacher allowed us to work together to answer the questions again. My group was stuck on a particular question, so I asked the teacher to clarify. She refused, saying we were taught it. I retorted that since everyone was struggling, clearly the problem was on the other side of the desk. (It went over about as well as you might expect.)

arethuza 12y ago

Well my experience getting a degree in the UK in the 1980s was that exams would often contain questions in a different form from what you had seen before - you did know how to answer them but it definitely wasn't trivial to identify what techniques to apply to solve each question. I get the feeling that people now expect questions to be of the form "apply technique X to data A,B,C" which is what I used to expect of secondary school level exams.

aquadrop 12y ago

Didn't they experience exponents? Maybe multiplication should also be out of questions? Its their final year, I don't think phrases like "third question could be as well in chinese" is suited here.