Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

My favorite history professor in college gave open book essay exams.

He asked your opinion on topics, "what were the motivations of the leaders of the US revolution?" Even better were the questions that ended in "why or why not?"

There were no right or wrong answers, if you could justify your answer in a reasonable manner, you got full points.

Some students hated his tests, some students loved his tests. The students who hated his tests really hated them, the students who loved them, really loved them. (I was in the loved them group!)

Getting a Computer Science degree felt awfully similar, especially in higher level classes. Students of course had to do a senior project, 6 months to make something real in a group of 5. One group of students spun their project out commercially and and made some good money off of it.

My group make a photo library management app that was designed to allow for rapidly tagging hundreds to thousands of photos, utilizing custom experimental UI concepts. (This is when Google Picassa was still a big deal) When we started out we didn't know if we'd succeed, after all "experimental UI", "handles libraries with thousands of photos" and "desktop app written in Java" weren't typically phrases that went hand in hand back in the mid 00s.

But we did it! Which kind of summarizes my entire career in software engineering. If I'm not scared and uncertain of how I am going to do something, of if something is even possible, than I probably am not tackling a hard enough problem.

I would hate open-ended questions like that if I didn't know the professor and I didn't know the grading, because it relies on the professor's ability to evaluate what is reasonable justification. I'm sure if the professor was great, this strategy is wonderful, but it also relies on a leap of faith in terms of the student. For example, if I was a black man and the teacher was white, my essays about slavery would be not about if I learned the material but my trying to work around determining how racist a teacher might be.

That's rough, since getting to the point of being able to answer and evaluate answers to those kinds of questions is, like, a really big part of working in the humanities. It's probably the single most important skill for an undergrad in humanities courses to pick up.

> For example, if I was a black man and the teacher was white, my essays about slavery would be not about if I learned the material but my trying to work around determining how racist a teacher might be.

That would be a valid concern regardless or your or professor’s race.

And even if we take into account that people are more biased towards opinions that elevate them, we should also take into account what an average college history teacher believes in. At that point you should probably be worried that your view isn’t Marxist enough.

That's an interesting take, one that I don't believe is backed up by the data.

Show me an economics program in the US pushing Marxist theory throughout.

We're not talking about an economics program - that would not likely have a Marxist professor - but rather a history class, which could easily have one.

Do economics programs ever push a single theory? They're supposed to teach you about the whole field, no?

While my Economics courses did offer insight into various schools of economic thought and different teachers had slightly different views on various topics, the basic premise that "Capitalism is awesome" was pretty much treated as axiomatic in every course I took.

Economics stands apart from other social sciences in its culture. It has pivoted quite heavily when it was transformed from political economy into economics during the marginal revolution. And while Marx can be jokingly referred as "a minor post-Ricardian" by some economists, he is considered a father of sociology alongside Comte, Weber, Durkheim and Spencer.

Data on Marxist self-identification among professors, table 12: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287093322_The_socia...

Or how many programs in general push Marxist theories in the US.

Quite a few undergrads come in thinking they've discovered the One True Path and of course it's—sigh—one myopic brand of libertarianism or another. Social science professors get pretty sick of that shit and I'm sure some of those students take the irritated rejection of their tired failing-to-engage-with-the-material crap as "Marxist professors pushing their ideology" but for the professors it's like if physics professors had to deal with every incoming freshman class having a few kids per hundred who are dead certain they've discovered the secret to perpetual motion, are in fact basically experts on it, and are very resistant to learning that they may not have the full picture.

They'd probably also try to temper the enthusiastic incorrectness of freshman coming in as full-on 1930s-throwback "Stalin was awesome, actually" tankies, but there just aren't that many of those. The confidently-wrong freshmen tend to all fit a similar mold, and it's not leftist.

Believe it or not, professional historians are more than capable of effectively grading undergrad essays that don't contain anticapitalist screeds.

I believe it. Why would you assume I don’t?

> I'm sure if the professor was great, this strategy is wonderful, but it also relies on a leap of faith in terms of the student.

He was a quality professor who gave full marks to answers that disagreed with what he presented in class, so long as the answers were well justified.

You are right though, these types of exams can easily end up becoming a game of "can I answer how the professor wants me to answer".

Replace professor with TA. But yea, bias on subjective questions is a thing for sure. Racism is probably the big one, though in your scenario, a white student could wonder, if you, a theoretical black student, got a better grade because the professor didn’t want to appear racist. You can drive yourself insane thinking about it.

>I would hate open-ended questions like that if I didn't know the professor and I didn't know the grading, because it relies on the professor's ability to evaluate what is reasonable justification.

After my first stint in college I took about a decade off before returning for graduate school. I made it a policy to research all of my professors before classes began. If they had a book published, I bought it, and read it. It gave me remarkable insight into all of my professors (at least the ones who had published) before class actually began, and made it much easier to navigate the subjective grading minefield that so often exists.

I had a teacher that did that in high school, but they were clearly looking for certain answers to open ended questions. An aspect of the class was determining just what kind of answers the grader would grade highly over other equally valid answers.

At least with other kinds of tests, there's much less room for bias or interpretation, even if it still exists.

Faced with such situations, tended to write out what seemed expected, then followed up with other considerations or why it was wrong[1]. Even more so, if the "question" was actually a seven question prompt [2].

[1] Sometimes simply due to the wording of the prompt having an error that should provoke an answer which, given the prior presentation of the topic, can't be what the teacher intended.

[2] Because telling us we're having a 10-question pop quiz that is really a mis-numbered 37-question essay test is an evil up with which we shall not put. (-:

A similar phenomenon I’ve found, is if I know something can be done, I will work at it until it is done. For example, I’ve come up with solutions in interviews that I thought were the best, and then the interviewer says, “can it be done in O(n) time?” At that point, something clicks in my brain that says, “oh, of course it can!” If only I could find a way to tap into that in advance.

There is a possibly apocryphal story of Heisenberg and the other German a-bomb scientists basically doing this in captivity upon learning of the success of the Manhattan Project (not building a working bomb, but reasoning out how it was done!)

This is the Farm Hall transcripts, and it really happened. (I don't know if they fully worked out how the bomb worked, but they at least discussed it).

The time complexity is real. I always say that I can give you an algorithm in any complexity you want- so make sure you don't give me any lower than is possible, or the garbage I put out won't work.

I really think all engineering exams should be open book, it's how we work. Bonus: suddenly much of 'cheating' is no longer a concern.

You can ask harder questions! But when I know the technique I should be allowed to look up the formula.

(Except I graduated years ago...)

> If I'm not scared and uncertain of how I am going to do something, of if something is even possible, than I probably am not tackling a hard enough problem.

I like that sentence a lot. I'm working on something new at my job that's hard and uncertain, and it's the most fun and motivated I've been in my (fairly short) career as a software engineer. I might keep that idea around as a heuristic.

> asked your opinion on topics

This is how International baccalaureate, french baccalaureate, and English A-levels courses generally go.

In my country, the system to access university includes a philosophy exam that works similarly. You are given a text to understand, summarise, discuss, and compare with a different author.

They are testing for reading skills, reasoning and expression, so there is no good answer - knowing the works of different authors just makes it more likely that you'll know some ideas similar to the text at hand, but if you don't happen to know something similar you can, say, get a text by Marx and compare it to Plato, as long as you make a decent argument on the connection.

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