Comment by duped | Hacker News Reader

Comment by duped | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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