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Comment by chollida1 | Hacker News Reader

My wife is a teacher of physics and math for an online highschool. Its very common for kids to go into the in person exam with a mark in the 80s and 90s and get a failing grade on the exam.

The web wasn't alwasy that useful for cheating on timed exams as it was essentially like being able to bring in a formula sheet.

LLM's changed this such that you can type in the question and get a fully correct answer in a lot of cases.

The only solution that I see in education is that in person exams start to represent a larger and larger portion of a students grade such that the mid term and final will be more than 50% of a students grade for most classes going forward due to the gratuitous use of llms by students.

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This was going on long before LLMs.

When I took quantum mechanics in grad school, I struggled through the weekly (and intense) homework sets. My TA was a hardass, I’d spend hours on some problem, several few pages of math work just for one problem, and make some dumb mistake in an integral somewhere, being off by a factor of 2 at the end and only getting 2 of 4 points.

It was painful, and I felt like a dumbass seeing the other kids regularly getting perfect scores.

Then the midterm came and I blew them all out of the water. I hadn’t realised they somehow had the solutions manual so just got perfect scores all along but clearly didn’t learn the material like I did.

Yeah, I'm not a frat guy, but don't groups like Fraternities build "Study Guides" that are often just brain dumps of tests with correct answers?

We called them "bibles" in undergrad and they were collections of homework and tests from previous terms.

Yeah, I had this happen to me in an algorithms course. Tests were 80% of the grade and we had the guy who had been organizing mass homework "study" groups taking up increasingly larger sections of the class time desperately trying to figure out how to convince the professor to switch up the grading to be more homework based.

I figure that the professor had to know what was going on because he kept giving the same philosophical handwavey reasons for why the tests were staying at 80%.

80-100% of the grade imo. You could always tell which teachers were serious and teaching serious subjects by how little they cared about your attendance and homework assignments. In math classes, you could tell in an instant when they only assigned the problems that had answers in the back of the book. Not doing your homework in a serious subject is just punishing yourself when the exam comes in and it looks like it's written in a different language.

If you don't do your homework, or show up to class, but you ace the exams, you were just paying for the certification and to me that's totally legitimate.

I went to school with a bunch of working class immigrants who were working full time and going to school full time. If they had to miss every other class because of work but wanted to make up for it by studying all night, that seemed admirable to me. Nothing I hated more than participation points. It reminds me of management desperate to increase their headcount. It's the insistence that the focus of the class is the master-shifu at the front and center. It's a 300-level math class, dude; it's nothing that most people couldn't learn on their own.

having "homework / coursework" count for the final score is what surprised me the most when learning about schooling in the US, in my university 100% of the score was the final, typically written test first, then oral in front of a blackboard (and usually the oral portion could move the needle of the written only +20%, but could definitely have you fail completely).

The one course that had something similar was microelectronics where during Christmas holidays we were given an optional assignment where we could design IIRC a NAND gate (2um process I think, most people ended up with a 5ft x 5ft sheet of paper at the end) which took a long time, but would give you up to +5% at the final (only one person got the full 5%, due to their creative use of the diffusion layer for interconnects). I don't remember any other course having anything along those lines, although to be honest you could slightly influence the difficulty of the oral final questions depending on how hard you worked / your behavior in class (of course only in years 4-5 where courses had only 20-30 students, no chance in year 1-2 with 400+)

It was extremely high stress, as you can imagine, but basically impossible to cheat. Every year a significant percentage of the students had to drop out, so by the time the 5th year thesis came around I think less than 20% of first years graduated at all. You were allowed to retake course finals if you wanted a different score (available 3x year typically, no guarantee you'd do better tho), but if you failed enough times you had to retake the course from scratch. You also were not allowed to enroll in the next year's courses until you passed all the prerequisites.

This comment made me laugh, because I was looking into doing an online highschool, and while looking for discussions on the pros/cons, I stumbled upon the Reddit, which was all "Does anybody have the answers to the Unit 3 test for Mr. ${LAST_NAME}'s MCR3U class? I have $20." or "Selling the answers to the Unit 4 test for Mrs. ${LAST_NAME}'s ENG4U class for $30." That scared me off of doing high school online.

That last sentence reminded me of a story one of my religion teachers told us last year: he was in university, and the way the course was structured was something like there were two exams, mid-term and final, each worth like 50%, but you could choose to not do the mid-term, and have the final be worth 100%. He chose the latter, and ended up being stressed out of the mine preparing for the exam. I can't remember if there was supposed to be a moral to the story, but it was a funny story, at least. It was probably funnier in-person than it will be for the person reading this comment.

stressed out of the mine

Never heard that, some deep Yorkshire saying? Or typo?

Oops, didn't get enough sleep last night, it should be stressed out of his mind.

I don't know, I've known many people that struggle with exams even if they know the material and even more people that excel with exams that learn nothing. Falling back on any kind of exam is just a recipe for more rote learning and that doesn't create better people (although possibly better readers, which we need).

(Preface: I am not a teacher, and I understand this is a hot take). At the end of the day there's an unwillingness from every level of education (parents, teachers, administrators, school boards, etc) to fight against the assault on intelligence by tech.

I don't think kids should have access to the public internet until they're adults, and certainly should never have it in schools except in controlled environments. Schools could create a private networks of curated sites and software. Parents don't have to give their kids unfettered access to computers. It's entirely in the realm of possibility to use computers and information networks in schools, accessed by children, designed to make it impossible to cheat while maximizing their ability to learn in a safe environment.

We don't build it because we don't want to. Parents don't care enough, teachers are overworked, administrators are inept, and big tech wants to turn them into little consumers who don't have critical thinking and addicted to their software.

Re: test anxiety

I see this line of argument more and more over the last decade and it makes me feel heartless for my opinion.

But if you know the material but cannot apply it in an examination then you either don't actually know the material or don't have the emotional (for lack of better term) control to apply it in critical situations. Both are valid reasons to be marked down.

> don't have the emotional (for lack of better term) control to apply it in critical situations

No, not really, it just means you couldn't apply it in this one particular anxiety-inducing situation.

If someone finds it easier to display their knowledge in a certain way then school should strive to accommodate that as best they can (obviously there are practical limitations to this).

Mental health should be left to mental health professionals because you won't achieve anything by punishing students for their mental health struggles, you just make them hate you, hate school, and make their anxiety even worse.

I would argue that "knowledge" is an almost meaningless concept on its own. What assessments measure is a more complex form of "competency", and the competency of being able to write an essay on a topic is different from the competency of passing an MCQ quiz about it and both are different from being able to apply it in the field.

I don't have a clear solution, other than to have the assessments depend on what we're preparing people for. As an extreme example, I don't care how good of an essay a surgeon or anesthesiologist can write if they can't apply that under pressure.

You're replying to something I didn't say.

But on the topic of test anxiety: I think intentionally causing emotional distress to children for the purposes of making a bad evaluation of their studies is cruel. It's a kind of cycle of trauma - "I did this, so you must to." We use grades to make value judgements of the quality of our children, when what we should be measuring is the ability of our schools to educate them and not how well-educated _the kids are_. The system is backwards, basically, and the fact it causes distress as a side effect is something that _should_ be managed - not ignored.

However anxiety exists and teaching children not to manage it is also bad. One of the really good things I've seen locally is that my school districts (the same that I went through as a child) focus on emotional education at the grade school level much more than when I was a kid, and I notice that the kids have much better emotional regulation than my generation.

Apologies I must have misinterpreted what you were getting at.

> I think intentionally causing emotional distress to children for the purposes of making a bad evaluation of their studies is cruel.

Is this ever the intended purpose?

This is mostly on the parents.

Children should and must be allowed to fail. In fact, failure is the default outcome most of the time.

I wish I had learned in childhood that doing my best was enough. Not being the best, just doing my best.

But no, this is a lesson I learned from sim racing, as an adult, during the COVID-19 quarantine, as there was not much else to do.

What did I learn from sim racing:

— If I make a mistake, and I keep thinking about that mistake, I will just make more mistakes. Mental recovery, and not punishing myself, is a must. I must go back to mental clarity as fast as possible, to avoid making another mistake.

— Sometimes, doing my best is not enough. It can even be worthless. Other people make mistakes and that will ruin your race. In a long season, this can be offset by consistently good results. “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.” — Jan Luc Picard

— I should not respect this driver because he has a famous last name or so. But I must respect that he did 600 laps preparing for the race. And my respect should be that I also practice as much. Preparation is important, we can't just go to a new track and expect to win. The winner is usually the best combination of general experience and event preparation.

— Nothing feels better than a victory that's hard-earned, against a talented group. Easy victories just feel cheap in comparison.

I'm kind of the opposite, and it concerns me. Not much, just a little.

I react very well in tests and work tasks if I have some level of anxiety. What I want, is to do the same but feeling calm and happy.

I don't want increased cortisone levels to get excellent results.

> I've known many people that struggle with exams even if they know the material and even more people that excel with exams that learn nothing.

This point is overstated. The former did not knew the material as well as they think and frankly, unless the exam was super badly done dont exist.

There are some people who fail in stress situation, but not that many of them. If you have met many people like that, you was most likely in a culture where people did not learned well and then blamed inability to test.

But even more importantly, the people who pass tests again and again without learning anything are not a thing. There are some badly designed tests here and there, occasionally. But in most cases, even if the test is not measuring the correct thing, you wont pass it without learning and knowing things.

> But even more importantly, the people who pass tests again and again without learning anything are not a thing.

I simply cannot count the number of times I have to reteach fundamentals to people that must have passed tests on those fundamentals.

Forgetting is normal. And it is not the same thing as never knowing in the first place or learning nothing for the test.

I failed one exam in my final year of uni (marginally), but passed the module because of excellent coursework. I put in an order of magnitude more work into the coursework for that class than I did any other class because I knew I was going to struggle in the exam.

In all honesty I shouldn’t have passed that course but it is what it is - and as far as I was (and still am) concerned, it was a bolt on course that I am ok being limited in my knowledge of.

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