Hacker News Reader

Comment by iwr | Hacker News Reader

And at the end of it all, a student will come out of a business school sporting a shiny degree, but not much else. If he didn't cheat on his tests, he would be surely cheated out of an education.

This professor places more emphasis on a test with recycled questions than practical work.

View on HN

No kidding. Every question on that midterm came out of a test bank. Why didn't the professor come up with the questions himself?

If his "team" was able to write a new midterm exam in a few days without any recycled questions, I'm not sure why his "team" couldn't do this for every exam. This would ensure that no student would be able to cheat even if they wanted to.

Using standardized questions for part of the academic evaluation gives the schools and students some sort of objective benchmark. If all I know is that 'X% of students passed a test set by Professor Y,' it's not very informative, because I have no idea how rigorous or easy that test was.

Schools competing for student applicants want a meaningful way to measure the performance of their faculty against those of other schools, so as to attract more students and thus more funding. The same is true for students who work to achieve a good score on exams such as the LSAT or MCAT which can aid them in getting a scholarship; graduates competing for jobs want to demonstrate good performance at a school which is known for high standards. Academic brands can have a considerable impact on graduates' future earning potential, and so the tuition fees a school can charge, and the quality of the applicants for admission, are heavily dependent on how well its brand stacks up against those of its competitors in academic rankings.

Unless a school already has a good academic reputation - either because it is considered elite, or as a new school hiring a demonstrably well-qualified faculty - it may well be more effective to outsource part of their evaluation process than to spend years trying to improve their reputation by word of mouth. Excellent schools will tend to graduate excellent students who go on to do well in their academic or professional fields; but it takes a long time for such a pattern to become apparent. An external evaluation tool provides results within a single semester.

Nice theory, I've never heard of anyone caring how students performed against a test bank.

I wonder what percentage of the students might delay collecting their diploma until next year even if they have to spend money on a few extra classes. A business degree from the UCF class of 2011 may be regarded as irreparably tainted now, in a sort of academic guilt-by-association. UCF advertises its business school as a new but rising college, whose graduates get the best career ROI of any business school. Mind you, since attendance there is heavily subsidized by the state of Florida, this tells you more about the cost of attendance than lifetime earning potential.

http://news.ucf.edu/UCFnews/index?page=article&id=002400...

This professor places more emphasis on a test with recycled questions than practical work.

Actually, the syllabus for the course shows the midterm and final exams being worth 200 points each, out of 1000 available. The other 600 are split up between various individual and group projects. Success in one of the competitive practical projects exempts the winning students from taking the final exam.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/12ikyDBGZvhpqxPEloRLNPlwv...

from http://www.bus.ucf.edu/capstone/fall/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com