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The problem is the exam structure. The first half is written questions, but typically accounts for somewhere between 50% and 66% of the exam. The remainder is n

The problem is the exam structure. The first half is written questions, but typically accounts for somewhere between 50% and 66% of the exam. The remainder is negative marking MCQs. Therefore, you can either get 100% on the first half and 0% of the second half or get relatively high marks in both. The MCQs are normalized according to some normal distribution. Therefore, the worst you can get is 0. However, if you score > 0, but you get the lowest mark in the class, you receive 0 marks. To make matters worse, much of the questions are written in such a way that, if you have in-depth knowledge of the subject area, the questions become ambigious, because the examiner might not have fully considered all the ways in which the true/false statement can be interpreted or reasoned (I think this would require some kind of perfect human being?). In effect: mess up on the MCQ's and you're toast. Hope that makes sense!

japhyr 11y ago
I don't understand why grad exams are graded on a normalized scale. Why do they want some people to fail every semester? (That grading structure sounds set up to fail some students.)
- masterme 11y ago
  It eventually degrades into game theory where you're trying to predict how your classmates are going to answer the questions. If you play it too safe and only answer questions you are 100% confident in, you might not get a lot of marks. But you won't lose any marks either. If you friends play it more dangerously and answer questions they are 70% confident in, they could either get all those wrong (boosting your mark) or get them all right (lowering your mark). On the one hand it's fascating. Yet on the other, it's absolutely terrifying.
  - japhyr 11y ago
    You're explaining a student's response to the exam structure, but you're not explaining why the institution wants to fail some students every year. If you care about student learning, you do a criterion-referenced assessment. If you want to compare students to each other, you do a norm-referenced assessment. Why is a grad institution more interested in comparing students to each other than in assessing whether people learned what they were supposed to learn?

japhyr 11y ago

I don't understand why grad exams are graded on a normalized scale. Why do they want some people to fail every semester? (That grading structure sounds set up to fail some students.)

masterme 11y ago
It eventually degrades into game theory where you're trying to predict how your classmates are going to answer the questions. If you play it too safe and only answer questions you are 100% confident in, you might not get a lot of marks. But you won't lose any marks either. If you friends play it more dangerously and answer questions they are 70% confident in, they could either get all those wrong (boosting your mark) or get them all right (lowering your mark). On the one hand it's fascating. Yet on the other, it's absolutely terrifying.
- japhyr 11y ago
  You're explaining a student's response to the exam structure, but you're not explaining why the institution wants to fail some students every year. If you care about student learning, you do a criterion-referenced assessment. If you want to compare students to each other, you do a norm-referenced assessment. Why is a grad institution more interested in comparing students to each other than in assessing whether people learned what they were supposed to learn?