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Comment by vezycash | Hacker News Reader

I've given the same tests to my students 3 times - word for word and many students still failed. The good students who cared raised their scores with each repeat. The non-nonchalant students sometimes, managed to score less.

I don't keep my intention to repeat test questions secret. I do this to prepare them for pre-uni, university and professional exams which always reuse questions.

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I'm curious: In what way do you think this is preparing students, if they - in your judgement - do not appear to be learning from it.

Is the statement below true?

>pre-uni, university and professional exams ALWAYS reuse questions.

Is solving past questions a useful SKILL / hack for student to learn?

If you don't agree with these, then nothing else I say would matter.

If other teachers repeated test questions, it would take less time for all students to adapt and benefit. I only taught in the first school for a term, the owner wanted me to stay but I had a better paying offer. Second school, two terms. By the second term, only 3 students consistently scored below 50% in tests. And of these three, one was extremely nonchalant. And remaining two were just slow.

Make no mistake about it - all teachers repeat questions. It's just that it takes too long for a test question to show up in exam - so most would see the exam questions as fresh ones.

So... you include a discussion of getting "better offers" to indicate that your services are in high demand, as a signal that your teaching style must be good. You can leave that part out next time if you want to be taken seriously, because teaching for 3 terms at 2 different schools is hardly something to brag about.

But I'm afraid it doesn't really address the problem at hand. What if your first exam was bad, and by repeating it, you were just repeating the same bad questions, teaching a useless skill of memorizing questions instead of understanding the material?

>because teaching for 3 terms at 2 different schools is hardly something to brag about

Context

>What if your first exam was bad

Good question but irrelevant. You ignored my questions. I want to believe that, I'm not the only one who sees that entrance exams to universities, university exams and professional exams repeat over 80% of their questions?

If all your exams were all freshly set questions, say so. If not, what wrong with preparing my students for reality?

Students should be aware that teachers can be lazy (like everyone else), and may repeat exam questions. It's an important part of exam strategy to teach that - by telling students. But this is a hack, as you say: it's not learning the material. If you don't have the understanding, then this hack is not valuable and may be very dangerous to rely on.

You are not preparing the students for an appropriate diversity of exam questions if you ask the same questions each time.

The students are perhaps doing worse because they have understood, probably correctly, that your testing is not a worthwhile exercise for them.

If you don't have novel questions, you are only demonstrating that it is unimportant to learn new material, or unimportant to find a deeper understanding of the existing material.

Wonder if you would have the same opinion if you taught in a poor neighborhood, kids who have English as a second or third language.

I would gladly admit that my method is shitty if:

They only failed my subjects

Some still couldn't answer copy&paste kinda questions - open book quizzes

Other teachers didn't pad their scores at the end of the term

I'm done with this thread.

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