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Comment by aaplok | Hacker News Reader

> Students don’t seem to mind this reversion.

Those I ask are unanimously horrified that this is the choice they are given. They are devastated that the degree for which they are working hard is becoming worthless yet they all assert they don't want exams back. Many of them are neurodivergent who do miserably in exam conditions and in contrast excel in open tasks that allow them to explore, so my sample is biased but still.

They don't have a solution. As the main victims they are just frustrated by the situation, and at the "solutions" thrown at it by folks who aren't personally affected.

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It is always interesting to me when people say they are "bad test takers". You mean you are bad at the part where we find out how much you know? Maybe you just don't know the material well enough.

caveat emptor - I am not ND so maybe this is a real concern for some, but in my experience the people who said this did not know the material. And the accommodations for tests are abused by rich kids more than they are utilized by those that need them.

As a self proclaimed bad test taker, it's not that I don't know the information. It's that I am capable of second guessing myself in a particular way in which I can build a logical framework to suggest another direction or answer.

This presents itself as a bad test taker, I rarely ever got above a B+ on any difficult test material. But you put me in a lab, and that same skillset becomes a major advantage.

Minds come in a variety of configurations, id suggest considering that before taking your own experience as the definitive.

datum: I'm ND, but I'm a good test-taker. There were plenty of tests for subjects where I didn't need to study because I was adept at reading the question and correctly assuming what the test-creator wanted answered, and using deduction to reduce possibilities down enough that I could be certain of an answer - or by using meta-knowledge of where the material from the recent lectures was to narrow things down, again, not because I knew the material all that well but because I could read the question. Effectively, I had a decent grasp of the "game" of test-taking, which is rather orthogonal to the actual knowledge of the class material.

Tests are just a proxy for understanding and/or application of a concept. Being good at the proxy doesn’t necessarily mean you understand the concept, just like not being good at the proxy doesn’t mean you don’t. Finding other proxies we can use allows for decoupling knowledge from a specific proxy metric.

If I was evaluating the health of various companies, I wouldn’t use one metric for all of them, as company health is kind of an abstract concept and any specific metric would not give me a very good overall picture and there are multiple ways for a company to be healthy/successful. Same with people.

There are lots of different ways to utilize knowledge in real world scenarios, so someone could be bad at testing and bad at some types of related jobs but good at other types of related jobs. So unless “test taking” as a skill is what is being evaluated, it isn’t necessary to be the primary evaluation tool.

I think the reverse exists as well. I think I am a much better test taker than average, and this has very clearly given me some advantages that come from the structure of exam-focused education. Exam taking is a skill and it's possible to be good at it, independent of the underlying knowledge. Of course knowing the material is still required.

However you are correct in noticing that there are an anomalously high number of "bad test takers" in the world. Many students are probably using this as a flimsy excuse for poor performance. Overall I think the phenomenon does exist.

I don't think I understand, as a terrible test taker myself.

The solution I use when teaching is to let evaluation primarily depend on some larger demonstration of knowledge. Most often it is CS classes (e.g. Machine Learning), so I don't really give much care for homeworks and tests and instead be project driven. I don't care if they use GPT or not. The learning happens by them doing things.

This is definitely harder in other courses. In my undergrad (physics) our professors frequently gave takehome exams. Open book, open notes, open anything but your friends and classmates. This did require trust, but it was usually pretty obvious when people worked together. They cared more about trying to evaluate and push us if we cared than if we cheated. They required multiple days worth of work and you can bet every student was coming to office hours (we had much more access during that time too). The trust and understanding that effort mattered actually resulted in very little cheating. We felt respected, there was a mutual understanding, and tbh, it created healthy competition among us.

Students cheat because they know they need the grade and that at the end of the day they won't won't actually be evaluated on what they learned, but rather on what arbitrary score they got. Fundamentally, this requires a restructuring, but that's been a long time coming. The cheating literally happens because we just treated Goodhart's Law as a feature instead of a bug. AI is forcing us to contend with metric hacking, it didn't create it.

> Many of them are neurodivergent who do miserably in exam conditions

Isn't this part of life? Learning to excel anyway?

Life doesn't tend to take place under exam conditions, either.

The important parts of life (like interviews) do.

> The important parts of life (like interviews)

Interviews shouldn't be "exam conditions" either. See the ten thousand different articles that regularly show up here about why not to do the "invert a binary tree on a whiteboard" style of interview.

There are much better ways to figure out people's skills. And much better things to be using in-person interview time on.

You're confusing the way things are with the way things ought to be.

The reality is life is full of time boxed challenges.

Other than a subset of interviews, what do you have in mind that has a structure similar to an exam? Because I'd agree with the comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44106325 .

> what do you have in mind that has a structure similar to an exam?

All of life! An exam is a time boxed challenge. Sometimes it's open notes, sometimes it's not. I've had exams where I have to write an essay, and I've had exams where I've had to solve math problems. All things I've had to do in high pressure situations in my job.

Solving problems with no help and a clock ticking happens a million times per day.

We even assign grades in life, like "meets expectations" and "does not meet expectations".

Even still, you missed the point of my comment. You keep focusing on how interviews should be done, not how they're conducted in reality.

I understood the point of your comment; I disagreed with it. I think there's a meaningful distinction between high-pressure situations at work and exams in school, sufficiently so that the latter is poor preparation for the former. More to the point, everyone is subjected to the latter, while "thrives under pressure" is not a universal quality everyone is expected to have or use. It's a useful skill, and it's more useful to have than to not have, but the same can be said of a thousand skills, and many of them are things I'd prioritize higher in a colleague or employee, given the choice.

> I think there's a meaningful distinction between high-pressure situations at work and exams in school

Sure, in school there is no real consequence. That's why it's important. School exams are orders of magnitude easier than the real world.

> "thrives under pressure" is not a universal quality everyone is expected to have or use

School isn't intended to imbue everyone with universal qualities. Some people will excel and some wont. The ones that excel will go on to work in situations where you must thrive under pressure.

> It's a useful skill, and it's more useful to have than to not have, but the same can be said of a thousand skills

This is a different discussions then.

It seems like you have equated "excel" with "must thrive under pressure". That is precisely the point I am disputing. It's a skill, like any other. It is not the single most important skill everyone must have and everyone must be filtered on.

> It seems like you have equated "excel" with "must thrive under pressure"

Thriving and excelling are not that far apart :).

Thrive: grow or develop well Excel: be exceptionally good at or proficient in an activity

> It is not the single most important skill

Nobody said it was!

> everyone must be filtered on

It's a data point. Exam scores don't matter when you apply for a job, or do anything else in life.

It’s really just interviews, and even those are nothing like any exam I’ve ever taken. They’re closest, in terms of the kind of stress and the skills required to look good, to some kind of solo public speaking performance.

… which most people come out of 17+ years of school having done very little of, with basically a phobia of it, and being awful at it.

They are probably something like oral exams that a few universities use heavily, or the teaching practices of many elite prep schools.

[edit] oh and interviews in most industries aren’t like that. Tech is especially grueling in the interview phase.

I believe parent is making a more general point, and as someone who would also be considered "neurodivergent" I would agree with that point. There were plenty of times growing up where special consideration would have been a huge help for me, but I'm deeply grateful that I learned in a world where "sometimes life is unfair" was considered a valuable lesson.

In my adult life I had a coworker who constantly demanded that she be given special consideration in the work environment: more time to complete tasks, not working with coworkers who moved too quickly, etc. She was capable but refused to recognize that even if you have to do things in a way that don't work for you, sometimes you either have to succeed that way or find something else to do.

Today she's homeless living out of her car, but still demands to that be hired she needs to be allowed to work as slowly as she needs and that she will need special consideration to help her complete daily tasks etc.

We recently lived through an age of incredible prosperity, but that age is wrapping up and competition is heating up everywhere. When things are great, there is enough for everyone, but right now I know top performers that don't need special consideration when doing their job struggling to find work. In this world if you learned to always get by with some extra help, you are going to be in for a very rude awakening.

Had I grown up in the world as it has been the last decade I would have a much easier adolescence and a much harder adult life. I've learned to find ways to maximize my strengths as well as suck it up and just do it when I'm faced with challenges that target my weaknesses and areas I struggle. Life isn't fair, but I don't think the best way to prepare people for this is to try to make life more fair.

I really like your take on this, but disagree with your conclusion. I do think that trying to "make life more fair" is essentially the main goal of civilization, codified as early (and probably much earlier) as The Code of Hammurabi.

My take is that we need to tread a thin line such that we teach young people to accept that life is inherently unfair, while at the same time doing what we can as a society to make it more fair.

> My take is that we need to tread a thin line such that we teach young people to accept that life is inherently unfair, while at the same time doing what we can as a society to make it more fair.

Agreed. Teaching that life is unfair (and how to succeed despite that) is an important lesson. But there's an object-meta distinction that's important to make there. Don't teach people that life is unfair by being unfair to them in their education and making them figure it out themselves. Teach a class on the topic and what they're likely to encounter in society, a couple times over the course of their education.

On the other hand, I look at it in a more “a rising tide raises all boats” situation. Learning how to accommodate people who fall outside the norm not only helps them, but helps everyone, much like the famous sidewalk “curb cuts” for wheelchairs ended up helping everyone with luggage, strollers, bikes, etc.

We as a society have a lot of proxies for evaluating real world value. Testing is a proxy for school knowledge. Interviews are a proxy for job performance. Trying to understand and decouple actual value from the specific proxies we default to can unlock additional value. You said yourself that you do have strengths, so if there are ways society can maximize those and minimize proxies you aren’t strong in, that is a win win.

Your coworker sounds like they have an issue with laziness and entitlement more than an issue with neurodivergence. Anyone can be lazy and entitled. Even if someone has a weakness with quick turn production but excels in more complex or abstract long-term projects could be a value added for a company. Shifting workloads so that employees do more tasks they are suited towards, rather than a more ridged system, could end up helping all employees maximize productivity by reducing cognitive load they were wasting on tasks they were not as suited for, but did just because that was the way it was always done and they never struggled enough for it to become an actual “issue”.

It's more about the meta-skill of learning to adapt. Learning to be uncomfortable sometimes.

Right. The hardest things you encounter in your life will not adapt themselves to make you more comfortable, so it's critical that you gain experience in doing things outside of your comfort zone. Getting stressed during an exam is nothing compared to some of the bumps life will throw at you.

And it'll make you happier in the long run.

I don't think so? I teach maths, not survival or social pressure. If a student in my class is a competent mathematician why should they not be acknowledged to be that?

real life first, math second. taking tests is a skill that must be learned, especially now with AI faking quite literally everything that can be shown on a screen. (unless your students are learning purely for the joy of it and not for having a chance to get hired anywhere.)

> taking tests is a skill that must be learned

Why? It's a useless skill that you will literally never have to use after your schooling.

and job interviews.

Depends on the type of interview I guess.

If the company asks leet code problems, I guess they are making the same mistake as schools do.

>taking tests is a skill that must be learned

"I had to suffer so you must too."

"I'm hiring and want to see if his resume checks out"

A one-on-one interview is completely different from a paper-and-pencil exam though.

You understand the world actually has difficult problems, right? Like life and death challenges, without video game restarts. You don't get to pause things when it gets hard.

Yes, working under pressure is a skill that should be learned. It's best to learn it on a history exam when nobody is at risk.

IMO exams should be on the easier side and not require much computing (mainly knowledge, and not unnecessary memorization). They should be a baseline, not a challenge for students who understand the material.

Students are more accurately measured via long, take-home projects, which are complicated enough that they can’t be entirely done by AI.

Unless the class is something that requires quick thinking on the job, in which case there should be “exams” that are live simulations. Ultimately, a student’s GPA should reflect their competence in the career (or possible careers) they’re in college for.

> They should be a baseline, not a challenge for students who understand the material.

You've made this normative statement but not explained why.

I think exams should not require huge amounts of computation (I agree) but should contain a range of questions - from easy to very difficult - so that the best and average students can be differentiated.

Specifically, I think they should minimally penalize students who know the material and could apply it professionally, but don't do well on exams in general. Otherwise GPA isn't a useful metric for employers* (and I don't know who else would it be a metric for), because the best students are the best test-takers, not the best employees.

So, maybe not a baseline. The exam could have some difficult knowledge-based questions, as long as that "knowledge" when memorized would make the student a better professional; or if the exam is open-book, it can have knowledge that would be difficult to search for. It shouldn't require students to memorize obscure things that are unlikely to be used professionally (e.g. unimportant dates for history, or complex formulas for math that one would look up or reference by name), because then you're prioritizing students who handle rare edge-cases over those who probably accomplish more amortized.

* "Employer" and "professional" also including "PI" and "academic"

We have an Accessible Testing Center that will administer and proctor exams under very flexible conditions (more time, breaks, quiet/privacy, …) to help students with various forms of neurodivergence. They’re very good and offer a valuable service without placing any significant additional burden on the instructor. Seems to work well, but I don’t have first hand knowledge about how these forms of accommodations are viewed by the neurodivergent student community. They certainly don’t address the problem of allowing « explorer » students to demonstrate their abilities.

Yes I think the issue is as much that open tasks make learning interesting and meaningful in a way that exams hardly can do.

This is the core of the issue really. If we are in the business of teaching, as in making people learn, exams are a pretty blunt and ineffective instrument. However since our business is also assessing, proctoring is the best if not only trustworthy approach and exams are cheap in time, effort and money to do that.

My take is that we should just (properly) assess students at the end of their degree. Spend time (say, a full day) with them but do it only once in the degree (at the end), so you can properly evaluate their skills. Make it hard so that the ones who graduate all deserve it.

Then the rest of their time at university should be about learning what they will need.

Exams aren't for learning, they're for measuring. Projects and lecture are for learning.

The problem with this "end of university exam" structure is that you have the same problems as before but now that exam is weighted like 10,000% that of a normal exam.

You can’t expect all students to learn without being forced to, no matter how much that’s literally the point of them being there.

They’re kids, and they should be treated as such, in both good and bad ways. You might want to make exceptions for the good ones, but absolutely not for the average or bad ones.

How many people would work their current job if money wasn’t a thing?

People of all ages seek rewards — and assessments gate the payoffs. Like a boss fight in a video game gates the progress from your skill growth.

> If we are in the business of teaching, as in making people learn, exams are a pretty blunt and ineffective instrument.

I'm curious: what is fulfilling in your job as a math teacher? When students learn? When they're assigned grades that accurately reflect their performance? When they learn something with minimal as opposed to significant effort? Some combination?

I always thought teacher motivations were interesting. I'm sure there are fantastic professors who couldn't care less as to what grades they gave out at the end.

> what is fulfilling in your job as a math teacher?

Many things. The most fulfilling for me is taking a student from hating maths to enjoying it. Or when they realise that in fact they're not bad at maths. Students changing their opinions about themselves or about maths is such a fulfilling experience that it's my main motivation.

Then working with students who likes and are good at maths and challenging them a bit to expand their horizon is a lot of fun.

> When students learn?

At a high level yes (that maths can be fun, enjoyable, doable). Them learning "stuff" not so much, it's part of the job.

> When they're assigned grades that accurately reflect their performance?

Yes but not through a system based on counting how many mistakes they make, like exams do. If I can design a task that enables a student to showcase competency accurately it's great. A task that enables the best ones to extend themselves (and achieve higher marks) is great.

> When they learn something with minimal as opposed to significant effort?

Not at all. If there is no effort I don't believe much learning is happening. I like to give an opportunity for all students to work hard and learn something in the process no matter where they start from.

I only care about the grade as feedback to students. It is a way for me to tell them how far they've come.

I’ve had access to that at my school and it’s night and day. Not being as stressed about time and being in a room alone bumps me up by a grade letter at least.

> Many of them are neurodivergent who do miserably in exam conditions

I mean, for every neurodivergent person who does miserably in exam conditions you have one that does miserably in homework essays because of absence of clear time boundaries.

Autism vs. ADHD

There is nothing to suggest that it is autism or ADHD.

>Many of them are neurodivergent

if "many" are "divergent" then... are they really divergent? or are they the new typical?

Many of the students I talk to. I don't claim they form a representative sample of the student cohort, on the contrary. I guess that the typical student is typical but I have not gone to check that.

I think having one huge exam at the end is the problem. An exam and assessment every week would be best.

Less stress at the end of the term, and the student can't leave everything to the last minute, they need to do a little work every week.

Too much proctoring and grading, not enough holding students' hands for stuff they should have learned from reading the textbook.

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