Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

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My AP (Advanced Placement) Chemistry teacher noticed some cheating on a major chemistry test we took. The cheating was pretty obvious; some kids just decided they were going to fail the test so they might as well have some fun. A week later, after a week of lecturing on a new section of the chemistry book and no mention of our scores, a student asked. No, he hadn't graded the tests. He was sorry, he had been really busy. After that, students started asking him every day if he had graded the tests.

Two weeks after we had taken the test, he said, "I have to come clean. The reason I have not graded your tests is that I lost them and have been trying to find them for the last two weeks. I'm very, very sorry, it was entirely my fault, and as a result" (he produced stack of paper from behind his back) "you all have to retake the test right now. Put your books away, take a test and two sheets of scratch paper, and start working."

We didn't have as many students sign up for the second semester of AP Chemistry. Not many people failed the first semester, and scores in AP classes were given a full letter grade boost compared to regular classes, but students knew he wasn't messing around. As a result, it was one of the best AP classes we had, and lots of kids got good scores on the AP test.

I wonder how many perfectly honest students did worse on the impromptu re-take two weeks later, with entirely new material on their minds.

In terms of actual learning, rather than the sort of grade optimization, it probably was valuable in terms of spaced repetition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

That would only make sense if he did that for all his tests.

As a one-off stunt to punish the students in his class, that clearly wasn't his intent (or any plausable effect).

Good question -- I honestly don't remember. He only wanted to punish the cheaters, so I imagine he curved the test. He often added a fixed number to everyone's score to bring the best or second-best score up to 100. (It's not really "curving," but that's what we called it.)

Agreed it seems that it is always the honest students who gets the short end of the stick.

Thats a good thing though - it prepares the students for the real world.

I think it perpetuates the ideas of how to wield authority. The concept of enticing people to cheat in order to be able to catch people at cheating is of a piece with "anti-terror" operations where federal agents set up fake terrorist cells, recruit feckless malcontents, and guide and cajole them until they can get them to do something illegal.

How is doing this preparing the students for the real world (I'm being serious and not condescending or anything)? I don't see the real world being particularly more difficult than normal high school. Example - didn't file or pay taxes on time? No problemo - just take a penalty and finish up your work late.

Because it causes them to loose (hopefully) any idea that they get anything out of being honest, except shafted.

You've got it backwards: the students who studied honestly had much better retention after two weeks than the kids who wasted time trying to cheat or game the test. It was the teacher's intention to reward honest work by giving the hard-working kids a big advantage over the cheaters, and that's exactly what he accomplished. If only life was always so fair!

Your explanation is for a fantasy-land. Studying honestly in many AP classes comes down to cramming. Here's how Semiapies summed it up in a comment in this thread:

"In high school and particularly AP, those courses are blatant cycles of 1) cram, 2) test, and 3) forget all but the core of what that section was about.

(If you want to say, "You should learn it all for the final" keep in mind nobody does, nor are final exams built around remembering everything from the whole course.)"

--

It's not like the crammers are even bad kids. A lot of them have no choice because if they didn't study that way they wouldn't have enough time to study and will end up getting worse grades.

This would mainly show people that the world screws you over and people who are part of crappy systems will go ahead and screw you over on top of the crappy system. I see little fairness in this situation.

Semiapies' description of AP classes is really bizarre and can only reflect a situation in which the teachers did not give a rat's ass about their students' AP scores. The nice thing about an AP class versus a non-AP class is that the AP test gives teachers an excuse to care whether their students are actually learning or not. Naturally that means the kids end up working a lot harder, but teachers who care at all about the scores at the end of the year (and mine did) will do everything they can to discourage cramming and other fake learning.

Kids who can't pass the class without cramming and who aren't going to retain the material shouldn't be in an AP class in the first place. They're going to run into a concrete wall at the end and waste their money (or the school's money) taking a test they aren't prepared for. Some students can handle it, and that's who the class is for. In my graduating class, there were maybe a dozen kids who got a 5 on at least one AP test, and I think there were two dozen who got a 3 on at least one AP test. That's out of a graduating class of a little over 300. (The entering class was over 400, so you can tell I didn't go to an especially good school.)

The dishonest kids got it much, much worse, though. Personally, as one of the ones who didn't cheat, that's what I cared about.

Prepares them for a life time of being good little DRM'd content consumers?

Oh yes!

I think that's a great thing — not only have you caught and disadvantaged the cheaters, but you've also screwed the crammers as well.

You either know the material, or you don't know the material. The timing, location or preparation for the test is irrelevant. The test is irrelevant.

It's great for a teacher to screw over the people who've learned to study in exactly the way teachers like him have trained them to study?

That's a long way to go for a little intellectual arrogance.

If the new material built on the old, shouldn't the old material be a solid lock?

Only then, and most courses are not straight progressions.

In high school and particularly AP, those courses are blatant cycles of 1) cram, 2) test, and 3) forget all but the core of what that section was about.

(If you want to say, "You should learn it all for the final" keep in mind nobody does, nor are final exams built around remembering everything from the whole course.)

Good AP courses are completely the opposite, and I had several in high school. We had regular reviews to make sure we refreshed and retained the material until the end of the year.

The great thing about AP classes was that the teachers could really teach, and they could justify themselves by pointing to the AP test if anyone complained about the rigor of the work. The students were game, too, at least the ones who didn't drop the classes. Everybody sincerely tried to understand what they were doing instead of just trying to make the right pencil marks on the test paper, since understanding was the most efficient way to retain something for months at a time. The test looming at the end of the year rendered cramming pointless -- you could cram for one test, but you would have to eventually learn the material anyway in order to take the AP exam, so cramming for a test actually felt like the failure that it was.

When I took mine, they were exactly what they were commonly considered - cram-fests to get out of some first-year coursework and bump up your grades.

I still wish I'd taken more; I could have gotten out of more dull first-year classes.

By "cramming" most people mean the kind of studying that enables you to remember information for one or two days, which would not result in good AP scores. Are you sure by "cramming" you don't just mean "intense studying?" If you and your classmates got good AP scores, then you must have understood most of the material well enough to retain it, since you would only have had time to cram a small amount before the test.

You misunderstand. Please note that from the start, I've allowed that people do retain some knowledge from cramming-based classes. (For that matter, someone writing notes to sneak into a test probably gained some small benefit from the act of writing the notes.)

But no, there's no mistake, here. Much like other high school classes, the AP classes I took were sequences of sections followed by intense "reviews" the day prior to each test. They were the very model of how schools encourage cram-and-forget education.

I really don't understand how it could be "cram-and-forget" unless the students failed the AP tests. If they did well on the AP tests -- covering an entire year's worth of material in one day -- it was more like "cram-and-remember" and it was apparently a good way to learn the material.

I'm not sure what your difficulty is in understanding this. They cram before the tests in the class, then they cram before the final exam (or AP exam). The "forget" is after the AP test.

This naturally made students who crammed have a tougher time in later classes in college. I wasn't one of them, but I refuse to look down on the people who were behaving exactly as the teachers were training them to behave.

I've taken 5 APs and none of them were cram/test/dump. There's one large test at the end of the season. It would be counterproductive to forget each chapter as you go.

And the AP courses I took were and had multiple tests, like the example given.

my university's general chemistry series had a problem with kids loading their TI-83s with "notes" to remember what oxidized and what reduced (and much, much more).

it was crude and pretty obvious but extremely effective and no one in my class was ever caught.

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