Hacker News Reader

> The number of students I have that actively presume I am trying to trick them is truly astonishing.

> I've put parts of answers in the question text, underlined them, and then had students tell me they thought it was a trick.

Why wouldn't they assume that?

Tests are nothing but games where students figure out what answers you want. They can do that by learning the material, but there's a metagame. What were you thinking when you wrote down this question on the exam?

For example, once I took a english test which asked me the correct pronoun for ships. Choices: he, she, it, they. I know that "she" is almost always used to refer to ships, but I also know that "it" is also grammatically correct. So which is it? Is the teacher trying to test my understanding of this historical tradition? Does the teacher think "she" is antiquated? Will I lose if I pick "she"? There's enough uncertainty here for me to pause even though it's an absurdly simple question. I know the answer but I'm not 100% sure what will happen if I choose it.

There are serious consequences to getting these answers wrong and students simply can't afford to trust you.

Entire books could be written about this teacher-student metagame. Another example: choice order. Suppose the choices to the above english question were ordered so:

  Which pronoun is used to refer to ships?

  A. It
  B. He
  C. They
  D. She

Deliberately positioning an almost correct answer as the first choice was extremely common in the schools I attended. A student who's overly anxious or running low on time might read that, pick choice A without even reading the other options and move on. The second we noticed this, "letter A is never right" became a meme and to this day I feel uncomfortable choosing the first option presented to me in any context. Preparatory schools actually offered test taking classes where we were taught to read questions backwards because of this.

Teachers eventually noticed that we noticed and suddenly the right answers were the first choices. Do you have enough confidence in your knowledge to assert that letter A is correct? Now it's a deeper level metagame: does this teacher know that I know?

This is what you get when education determines your future job prospects. It is no longer about "actual learning". It is a game and our future hangs in the balance.

I actually would have chosen "they" on that multiple-choice question, because it asks about ships, plural.

... And you would have been right.

I think we are on the same page.

My point wasn't that they shouldn't or should, its that they do. As you note it has been socialized into them. The problem is systematic, not something any one educator can fix. Bad teachers, and bad educational experiences create long term damage beyond not learning content.

Good tests actually assess learning - what you mentioned is not a good test. Just like a test that causes stress ends up measuring stress isn't measuring learning.

> The number of students I have that actively presume I am trying to trick them is truly astonishing.

Because we all have experience of you guys doing just that.

I once had a question on an exam for high voltage power “why do high voltage transmission lines have 3 wires”. The answer I put seemed obvious, that each wire is for one of the 3 phases of electricity. This is the standard config for HV lines in the US.

The answer was wrong, because the professor was talking about INSIDE the cable and wanted an answer relating to how the electromagnetic field rotates around the wire so they bunch wires inside each line to improve efficiency.

Professors, especially elite ones, have seemingly perfected the art of being vague. As a student you have zero recourse against them for their terrible communication skills, your only hope is to dodge the whacky ones by befriending upperclassmen/being in a frat.

> In the last one, I asked for three examples in a short answer problem...and gave one of them as a 'for example'. less than 10% of people used that. More than 10% told me they thought it was a trick.

What did you expect? To me, it would be painfully obvious that the already given example is void and no longer up for grabs. I would never construct such an exam question. Dangerous slope, but in this case obvious.