IAmA HS teacher. This is a list of "suggestions" we got in our mailboxes today | Hacker News Reader

IAmA HS teacher. This is a list of "suggestions" we got in our mailboxes today

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30 pointsjackowayed23 comments

When I was in college, many exams allowed the student to bring in a single sheet of paper with notes. You knew such tests would be hard, because they wouldn't be testing your knowledge (since you had that written down); they'd be testing your understanding.

There were apocryphal stories of years past, when the rule had sometimes been "you can bring anything you can carry" (this was decades before WiFi). Supposedly, one test taker carried in a grad student on his back.

These hard open book test stories are great, but taken in the context of it being high school and the other suggestions ("Weigh the merit of using any essay questions at all", "Offer a maximum of 3 choices", etc), it's pretty clear that the suggestion of open book tests with page number references is not meant to ensure that teachers give tests that you can only pass if you actually understand the material--it's made so that people will do better on the tests because they'll be easier.

On the CS course I did we had a few "open book" exams where you could pretty much take along anything you wanted - these were by far the most difficult exams as you were generally given rather open ended design questions where having a set of notes with you didn't really help that much - unless you were familiar with the relevant concepts and strategies involved you were going to fail.

In my upper-level physics courses, where the exams were mostly derivations and intense problem-solving, we had a rough guide to exam difficulty:

* One sheet of notes allowed: expect to take close to the full 2 hours alloted.

* Open notes and book: expect not to finish at all, and recalibrate to 75%==A+.

* Take-home exam: feel free to spend 40 hours on this. No one in this class is going to get over a 50% anyway.

I remember one particular take home test, 25 questions and the prof handed it to us and said "if any question takes you more than 5 hours you should probably move on and come back to it later." She full expected us to spend 80-100 hours on the thing (the week before finals too, oh we hated her). I don't actually know any college student who doesn't cringe at the thought of take home tests.

EDIT: just to be clear this is meant as commiseration not as a misery dick waving contest. It was the largest time requirement of any undergrad class I took in the 5 years I was there.

Most of Stanford's CS exams are open-book and/or open-note. (There's even had one where we were allowed to browse and search a PDF of the course text on our laptops, on our honor not to use our laptops for anything else.)

Helpful, but as others have said, most of what it means is that the exam questions are much harder.

Let's hope future test packets come with a generic, tear-off job application form accepted by fast-food chains and the welfare office.

WTF?

On the other side of the spectrum; Cambridge's A-Level course in pure maths didn't allow us to use nothing more sophisticated than a 4-function calculator. The test authority gave us trigonometric and logarithmic tables.

For English, you're given just three (3) questions. You had to choose two and write an essay response for each. You took 2-3 papers.

Here is the list of subjects, look at the curriculum for your favorite subject and remember this is for high-school students:

http://www.cie.org.uk/qualifications/academic/uppersec/aleve...

I tremble in fear every time I remember those days. I went to prep-school after 2-years of American high school and was crushed by the sadistic priestess that is British schooling.

As a recent HS grad, these suggestions disgust me. I would have learned absolutely nothing all four years if these guidelines were followed.

As it is, I could make it through a multiple choice/free response test (with 4 or 5 choices, and open-ended questions) in many subjects knowing less than half the material going in. Getting an A, mind you. Granted, I'm not the typical case, but the point is not to have everyone getting easy A's. That's not why we have school.

School is supposed to be a place to learn to challenge yourself continuously. It should teach the value of persistence and hard work, because those are skills that can be learned and will seriously affect the life potential of an individual [1]. This is a separate consideration than intelligence, which according to some studies (that happen to agree with my point... don't you love selection bias?) has a fixed, unchangeable component [2]. The effect of these suggestions would be to lower the effort bar - more students will be like me, and have to put very little effort into their schoolwork to get the grades they want. I did not learn how to work hard (at least from school), and neither will they.

[1] [pdf] duende.uoregon.edu/~hsu/blogfiles/sat.pdf according to University of Oregon researchers, high college GPAs are not correlated with high SAT scores. If we assume the SAT tests what it intends to, the implication of this study is that hard work can lead to mastery at least as well as intelligence, in most fields.

[2] http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20020017191357data_trunc_sy... Neural plasticity implies that you can learn new things, and the rate at which connections can change determines a "general intelligence factor" commonly called G.

I'm a community college teacher and a member of the Board of Regents for my system wanted to make our pay dependent upon how many people pass the class. I was praying that his proposal went through.

We get pressure all the time to increase student success. There's no real push to make sure people know what they are supposed to know. The administration just wants a high passing rate. Every year my tests get easier. I let people turn in late work. I give retakes on tests. I'm getting to the point where I just want to give everyone an 'A' and not give any homework or tests.

Of course, you're adapting your behaviour to the the metric by which you're assessed.

Any rational person can determine that the metric is the wrong one.

Except it isn't because the stated goal is to pass as many students as possible. Probably because that is how the rewards up the chain are determined, and because there are school league tables whereby the further up the table you sit the more funding you receive. Or something like that.

Extrapolating your current course of action will result in you simply passing all students simply for signing up for the course. No need to attend. No need for the course. Job done.

When setting metrics it is critical to ensure that they provoke the wanted behaviour. In reality, they very rarely do. Determining people's behaviour is trickier than it looks.

For a good alternative, take a look at John Seddon's work and his System Thinking ideas.

Well, yes the metric is a bad one and has very bad consequences. But I'm not in a position to fight it. It's a fait accompli at this point. I've lodged my complaints with my superiors and will continue to lower my standards. Society - via our elected and appointed leaders - wants passing grades. They sign my paycheck so that's what they'll get.

I took a course in the first semester of my masters. The professor talked about the final being an open book exam and someone in the 1st row smiled happily as soon as she heard that. THe professor noticed it and said "Smile while you can. People who have taken my courses can attest that a smile's the last thing an open book exam means here"..

This was brutal to read. The adminisTRators are basically making it "easier" for students by doing things like changing the number of multiple choice answers from 4 options to 3 and other such nonsense.

That 4 to 3 option choice reduction, by the way, will increase test scores by 33% for a kid who was just randomly picking answers.

I think the most appalling to me was open book tests with page numbers! I've taken hard open book tests thanks to a combination of not knowing exactly where the information is and a serious time limit that doesn't allow you to spend much time thumbing through the book. But if the test gives you the page number (especially since teachers probably aren't encouraged to put too much time pressure on kids either), it's almost certain to be a joke

If you're testing comprehension, then having a page number doesn't matter. If you're testing recall, then having a page number hurts.

I mean heck, reading comprehension in standardize tests has the entire contents on the facing page! Get students used to the environment in which they'll be tested.

Instead of the environment in which they'll be living?

Feynman famously bashes recall with his "map of a cat" story (web copied, emphasis added):

The next paper selected for me was by Adrian and Bronk. They demonstrated that nerve impulses were sharp, single-pulse phenomena. They had done experiments with cats in which they had measured voltages on nerves.

I began to read the paper. It kept talking about extensors and flexors, the gastrocnemius muscle, and so on. This and that muscle were named, but I hadn’t the foggiest idea of where they were located in relation to the nerves or to the cat. So I went to the librarian in the biology section and asked her if she could find me a map of the cat.

“A map of the cat , sir?” she asked, horrified. “You mean a zoological chart !” From then on there were rumors about some dumb biology graduate student who was looking for a “map of the cat.”

When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.

The other students in the class interrupt me: “We know all that!”

“Oh,” I say, “you do ? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you’ve had four years of biology.” They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.

I for one support the suggestions and I don't have anything against implementing them in American high-schools, but that may be probably because I am not American.

Now I would request these people to stop saying that the Indians and the Chinese are taking their jobs. They are taking your jobs because they are apparently better educated (for the job). </generalisation>

The new suggestions include some fairly ridiculous points.

>Weigh the merit of using any essay questions at all

Objective-type answering system will seriously affect the way students learn. I suspect this will dampen creativity in students.

>Offer a maximum of 3 choices

This coupled with the suggestion to avoid negative-marking will make the exams just a waste of time for everyone involved.

>Now I would request these people to stop saying that the Indians and the Chinese are taking their jobs. They are taking your jobs because they are apparently better educated (for the job). </generalisation>

Wait, so are they, or aren't they? ;)

American here, and software developer specifically. 5-6 years ago there was a trend in the industry that companies thought off-shoring was the best way to get the same product for a fraction of the cost. Nowadays, I find that anyone who still believes that is probably not too bright themselves.

If teachers are relying on any of these techniques to make their tests difficult, they're missing the point of teaching altogether. You should be testing kids on their grasp of the subject matter and, if they demonstrate knowledge of that subject, they should receive full credit. Don't penalize kids for something you're not willing to teach them (complete sentences in a Chemistry course, etc).

No Child Left Behind aims to shed light on poor performing schools in part by requiring them to elevate graduation rates in order to meet "adequate yearly progress" goals.

Many schools are addressing the perceived urgency of these federal mandates by doing whatever they can to get the kids out the doors in four years.

Or even sooner, so they don't drag down the averages.

The suggestions seem absurd. Has anyone considered this being a hoax?

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