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Comment by tremon | Hacker News Reader

in the past where you could consult colleagues

Perhaps tests are to make sure that you are a going to be colleague worth consulting then? Yes, pure memorization and recall of facts is less valuable now than before, but knowing how to apply the facts available to you is still a skill worth having, and similarly worth testing. Those skills can also be assessed using written tests, and the potential for cheating is just as on memory tests.

what is the point in artificially creating a test situation where the student is isolated from resources she'll have at her disposal in real life

Let's take language learning as an example: do you consider a foreigner with a dictionary to be just as expressive as a native speaker? Perhaps there is value in testing the immediate knowledge of the student rather than their lookup skills?

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Language learning is actually a good example.

Words are rarely restricted to their denotative (dictionary) meanings. There are often abstract, connotative meanings attached to them by speakers. For example, consider the following list of words.

Hello. Hi. Hey.

These words all have the same basic denotative meaning. They're all a greeting. Yet, there is a subtle connotation of formality which is rarely described in a dictionary.

These types of connotation are not often understood by beginning language learners. It's something they acquire with time and experience in using the language. While a teacher or search could share about the formalities, the language learner is still going to require time in applying those words in different contexts to fully understand these subtleties.

I want to test their ability to perform a task - rather than how well they memorized things. Which is not to say that memorization is not important, but it's just one piece of the Puzzle. So when it comes to language tests, rather than having the candidate fill in prepositions into blanks, let's have an actual conversation with them in which they apply their combined skills.

I actually adhere to this philosophy when hiring candidates as well. Rather than having them explain how to reverse binary trees on a whiteboard, I have them sit down and do a mini version of the actual task they will have to do in their job later. And, unsurprisingly, knowing how well they do the actual task is a much better indicator of how well they perform at doing the actual task later.

I think this is a good philosophy for hiring employees, but when it comes to education, we wish to go beyond training employees, and what your capabilities are is not the only thing that matters. We should test practical capabilities, but we should test more abstract skills like how many facts you've ingested as well.

When I tell people a story about the history of the french revolution or something, I don't have the opportunity to go research it beforehand. I've already done that research, and I've already thought about those events for months or years, which gave me the opportunity to synthesize an insight or opinion I wish to share.

You don't get that if you don't know things in your head.

I understand what the halting problem implies, what complexity is, what Turing machine means and why they are an abstraction for algorithms, and the basic common memes of programming such as using a stack and a heap, IEEE 754 floating point numbers, 2s complement binary numbering, and so on and so forth.

Yet I don't know a lick of Go. If I were to open up a Hello World tutorial for Go during the interview, would I honestly still have a shot?

I think people who are really into "do the job for an hour" interviews don't understand this. Some skills (particularly programming languages) are just really easy to learn. I learned go in a week for a consulting job. If I had to do an interview in go, I would not have gotten the job.

Then how about you spent the week learning Go and then come interview?

Because there's a big difference between doing a week of unpaid work hoping to get a job and doing a week of paid work after you already have it.

> Let's take language learning as an example: do you consider a foreigner with a dictionary to be just as expressive as a native speaker? Perhaps there is value in testing the immediate knowledge of the student rather than their lookup skills?

You may be well aware of this, but you've essentially converged on the classical Chinese Room thought experiment [0]. It's usually applied to the philosophical question as to what does and does not constitute intelligence in the context of AI, but it's interesting how it is also applicable to what does and does not constitute knowledge in the context of learning.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

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