Comments on: Timed exams

By: Jon Dron

Jon Dron — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:32:35 +0000

I’d agree with you John that there are occasions that exams make perfect sense and actually offer some pedagogical benefits. There are plenty of skills where performance under stressful conditions is precisely what is required (e.g. music, drama, face-to-face teaching and even things like programming or lab work in some instances) so we have to provide opportunities to discover, in safety, how to perform. I also take the point that expertise and mastery are often typified by the ability to do things as though they were second nature (though might object that, despite our aspirations, our expectations of students are not always that they should be experts or masters, at least not right away). However, except where the ability to perform on demand is the intended outcome, we generally judge ability in the real world on the outputs, not the process, and therefore it is still at least worth reflecting on alternative approaches to enabling that.
As an aside, I’d also argue that lectures to large groups are sometimes a good idea, that there are probably occasions that punishment can be an effective pedagogy, that there is a place for simply dumping lecture notes on an LMS and it is not always wrong to read out lecture notes while averting your eyes from the audience. It is a wonderfully diverse world in education, where the expected norm is to find a myriad of different contexts, different teachers, different students, different needs. The problems only arise when we adopt processes unreflectively out of habit or laziness rather than things like the real needs of learners or the constraints of the subject domain and context.
@Laura – I guess the big point behind my initial post is that if a system makes it pragmatic to do in-class exams then we need to tear down the system.
The issue of cheating arises because we have reversed the priorities of assessment and accreditation, encouraging a focus on inauthentic and generally useless goals that not only fail to reflect real life but actually encourage a way of thinking and learning that is positively dangerous, manifestly unfair and prone to abuse. Most of us in the educational system and its surrounding ecosystem (including students, and I too have played my part) are responsible for perpetuating this and the way we use exams is as much a symptom as a cause. Stopping that particular infection won’t cure the system of all its ills, but we have to start somewhere!

By: Laura

Laura — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:00:34 +0000

First Disclaimer: As an instructor, I prefer in-class exams because they are easier to grade. This isn’t laziness, it’s pragmatism.

Second disclaimer: What kind of work ethics do you want to encourage? Take-home exams encourage cheating, and that is always a challenge to deal with.

Given unlimited time and no worries of cheating, I’d give take-home exams exclusively. But for the time being, I prefer in class exams.

The problems with in class exams that you’ve outlined become a big problem at the graduate level. In class exams do not prepare students for performing research and writing a thesis. Many grad students are horribly shocked when they realized that they can’t cram and churn out a thesis. I have a list of advice that I give to new grad students to prepare them for this unsettling piece of reality.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:53:33 +0000

My mentor at MIT, the late Gian-Carlo Rota, assigned grueling take-home problem sets (with open problems for extra credit!) but nonetheless used timed exams. Those exams were deliberately easy–they were intended as basic competency tests for the material. I see merit to his approach: there is basic material that you need to have handy in order to do advanced work. Much to his credit, he did not use timed exams to test people’s creativity under time pressure.

ps. Cross-posting this at Daniel Lemire’s blog, since I’m not sure where the discussion will evolve.

By: Daniel Lemire

Daniel Lemire — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:47:36 +0000

Great post John.

I would argue though that you have to watch out of causality arguments. You say “if you are good, you will pass the exams”. Fine. Eventually, if you work on enough Quantum Mechanics, you will find the Quantum Mechanics exams easy. But the reverse causality does not hold… you can do well on exams without mastery of the material.

I can prove that I got A+ in all Quantum Mechanics classes I took. And I took them all. I could also prove that I am incompetent at all but elementary Quantum Mechanics. I passed tests where I was asked to give the energy levels of the helium atom. I have no idea how to do this, I never knew… but I was able to fake it during a test.

There is also a deeper question, beyond basic competency… and that’s “what kind of work ethics do you want to encourage?”. Take-home exams encourage students to take the long view, it discourages cramming. Also, to succeed in life, you must take the long view… work over the long term. Cramming will only buy short-term success.

We are both people who work over the long term (our long-standing blogs are proof enough)… but the average undergraduate student wants quick rewards. That’s how we train them: work 2 days, get a good grade, go on. That’s not how life works.