Hacker News Reader

Comment by jupp0r | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand your point. If creating understanding is the point, why don't we test for understanding having been created but instead test for "bullshit activities" being successfully performed?

In your weight lifting analogy: why don't we test for outcome based fitness metrics (VO2max for runners, 1RM for weight lifters) and let students learn to choose the best ways to achieve those goals?

View on HN

You seem to have solved the fundamental challenge with examinations of any kind. Please elaborate, teachers that for millennia have settled with compromises are eager to learn about your watertight solution.

Yeah I guess it's too hard for teachers to actually interact with their students to get an idea of their understanding of a subject. Let's do standardized multiple choice tests that only require you to learn how to pass tests. Who cares about the actual knowledge, right?

How do you test that a kindergartener understands addition without asking them for things a calculator can do?

Or do we just think it’s not important for people to understand addition at this point?

You give them a bag of marbles and tell them to show you 5 marbles and 3 marbles and then show you how much there are when you put them all together. That's how I taught my kids addition.

You are missing the parent comment's point. Your question can also be answered using a calculator.

Don't tell my kids.

Your solution is to take away tools and ask to do a task under constant supervision? People take exams like this every day.

The point, I believe, is that sometimes generating bullshit requires some understanding, so it is a worthwhile exercise. Just like running: you end up where you started, so it may seem that you did nothing. But obviously you exercised.

Asking a student to write an essay is similar: it is an exercise. Of course that essay won't be published or read by anyone else, but that was not the point. Just like you were not running somewhere, you were just running for running.

> why don't we test for understanding having been created

What it means for understanding to have been created is a fascinatingly complex problem in philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/understanding/

If you have an straightforward test for this, you may wish to consider contributing to the field.

For athletes its bad form that will limit your ability to reach the top levels of your domain. We then test for the top levels of these domains, like the Olympics or Tour de France. We don't test VO₂ max since it is boring. In education we don't test understanding because it is hard to write those tests in many domains.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com