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Comment by adam419 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I actually advocate for the moderate form of what you're expressing.

My issue with single, high-worth exams was that sometimes I would screw up, have some misconception in my head, and if it wasn't cleared up until the exam I was done.

I think you should be examined on a semi-regularly basis where each exam is worth an equal amount of grade.

That way the effects of various externalities, like I was sick, had something bad happen that week, or just didn't learn the material as well as I thought could be smoothed out of a period of time.

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How about a ton of exam opportunities that are entirely optional and are just for preparation, giving you time to understand the material with checks from the teacher, followed by two tests at the end, with the greater of the two scores being the one that decides your grade?

(1) That's a lot of work for the prof. (2) Grade inflation is part of the problem. I don't see how taking only the higher grades helps this.

Increased work for the prof should of course be balanced by decreasing work somewhere else. How many courses could have (some or all) video lectures recorded beforehand and assigned to watch as homework, thus saving the teacher lecture time and allowing the students who need extra help (and who otherwise would slow the whole class down by interrupting non-video lectures) to visit during office hours, or ask during a smaller lecture Q/A time slot of normal class, and point out exactly what parts of the recorded lecture they struggled to follow? And those who don't speak up their questions will get frequent feedback on their misconceptions anyway from the optional tests and determine if they should try harder or just drop the course.

As a prof, pre-recording video lectures doesn't save time -- it's a lot of work. And then you can't see the faces of students and react to their current state of understanding. Students "slowing down the class" are about 80% of the time providing the primary value of in-person instruction: they're creating the interaction that makes a lecture valuable.

What you suggest has essentially been done, with "book" substituted for "video". That's why all those profs wrote books -- they figured the students could read beforehand, thus saving the teacher lecture time and allowing students who need extra help to visit during office hours. That's the dream; video is simply a change in format. I point out to students often what parts of the book they should return to when they struggled to follow.

The most interesting question for me is what new technology adds or allows beyond old technologies. Analogize: what were the elements that changed from reading a serial in the paper to watching a show on TV to listening to a serial podcast to watching a YouTube series? As someone currently employed as a "prof who makes videos" I refuse to do any video unless I think it adds something beyond simply changing information format!

This is pretty much how some of the better known standardized testing regimes work - SATs and the British O and A level exams.

There are things that can be done within exams to counter those issues. For instance, the exams I set are heavily scaled. There may be 200 points available to be earned across 15 short essay questions. The raw scores generally fall between 45-90, which I then scale to set an acceptable average. So you can bomb or even skip questions and still be top of the class.

Not much can be done if a student is sick on the day, but I would argue that multiple tests on multiple days only increases the likelihood of sickness during at least one test.

I have never understood scaling, exams are meant to provide employers and yourself with a rating of how well you know the subject, ideally in comparison to everyone else in the field. So if you fail, but everyone else fails too, you get an A. If yo do 'well' but a group of 5 out of 30 excel, you get a lower than representative grade (representative of your knowledge). How about making the questions worth points and the 100 points = 100%? 93+ = A, 80-93 = B etc. That's how all 3 of my undergrad degrees worked. I knew what I needed to do for a grade and damn everyone else.

Normalisation makes more sense over larger populations. If most people across a large group do much worse on a particular exam, is it more likely that everyone screwed up, or that the exam was unusually hard?

Universities I have attended have procedures to deal with those instances in which everyone performs equally badly. It is almost always an indication that something else is amiss. Your answer has not convinced me that giving an A to a student who got 55% correct on a test displays a command of the subject simply because everyone else got 30% correct.

Sure, in exceptional cases investigation is probably necessary. But there are still more marginal cases where one exam gets worse results than another.

>Your answer has not convinced me that giving an A to a student who got 55% correct on a test displays a command of the subject simply because everyone else got 30% correct.

The point is that it's just as unconvincing to say the student that got 55% is comparable to another student that got 55% in an exam where that was the lowest score. Exams are not perfectly comparable measures of absolute "mastery", so we have to use statistics to try and derive as much information as we can from their results.

If students in one cohort consistently perform worse, it's probably their fault, but if students in one exam perform worse, it's more likely the examiner's fault.

A lot of professors in my field (physics) see tests as a learning tool where one is presented with new things to be figured out. In my undergrad, exams were typically open-book and consisted of a few long, multipart problems. It does not make sense to scale such exams to 100%.

Anyway, by setting the expected mean to around 50%, you get a more accurate evaluation of people's understanding (by minimizing truncation at the limits).

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