The reason was less for myself and more because anything group related suddenly shot up in quality when the other individual work classmates were graded on couldn't be fudged.
* It’s sort of unnecessarily high stakes for the students; a couple hours to determine your grade for many hours of studying.
* It’s pretty artificial in general; in “real life” you have the ability to go around online and look for sources. This puts a pretty low ceiling on the level of complexity you can actually throw at them.
Whether it's good or bad I don't know, I think US higher education focuses too much on ability to produce huge amounts of mediocre work, but that's the idea behind exams.
When I sit down to debug a complex application, I'm drawing my prior 25+ years of experience. While I certainly would rather fix the problem faster rather than slower, I don't have a time limit, and usually taking my time (or even leaving the problem alone for hours or days) can be more effective than trying to work quickly and get everything done immediate.
The last time I sat for an exam was in 2003, and I honestly have not experienced anything in life since then that feels like that. Even job interviews have not felt similar enough to me to evoke that same feeling. (Frankly, I've enjoyed most job interviews; I don't think I've ever enjoyed an exam.) That's just my experience, of course, but I don't feel like an outlier.
The point is more about whether the graded work is actively reviewed than which individual choice is ideal or not though. Whether it's electronic or written, remote or in person, weighted towards exams vs continuous are all orthogonal debates to the problem of cheating/falsely claiming work.
I had attended a few courses over a decade ago and just completed a degree recently. The methods of cheating have changed, but not because of pencils vs keyboards.
For presentations, usually you spend a lot of time preparing for them (similar to exams), building a slide deck or pages of notes that you refer to while giving the talk (not similar to exams). Sure, you do have to be able to think on your feet, but I don't think the comparison to a sit-down exam is all that apt.
For mundane work tasks, you have the internet and whatever reference materials you want (including LLMs, these days); this sort of thing is so different from a sit-down exam that it's almost comical that you'd try to equate the two.
I'm not saying I know of a better way to evaluate learning than proctored, in-person exams, but suggesting that sort of situation is particularly relevant to real life... no, no way.
The software engineer one: here is a takehome assignment. One week later: finished!
To be fair, they both represented pretty well what work I'm going to do. The data analyst didn't show that well how much I'd also be data engineering, but whatever, I was a SWE before having a DA stint. Back to SWE again though.
> Proctored, in-person exams are the only reliable mechanism we have for ascertaining if a specific individual has mastered key fundamentals and can answer relevant questions about them in a relatively timely fashion. Everything else is details and thresholds - how fast do you need to be able to recall, how deep, what details are fundamental.
I don’t think this is how people actually engage with exams. I had a lot of folks in office hours who treat the exam as the ceiling of their competence, rather than the floor, and do things like cram or try to figure out exactly what topics will be on the test to study just those. If the goal is to establish a 100% solid foundation for things you have to know to be a professional (which I think is a great goal), I prefer something like Mastery Learning to the conventional exam process. (Maybe we could call Mastery Learning conventional exams a different set of thresholds, unusual thresholds if we want to look at it that way).
> From there, I think it's fine to hate poorly made exams, and it's a given that many folks making exams have no idea what they're doing (or don't have the resources to do it right). But the premise of an exam is not completely divorced from reality.
I worked with some professors who I thought gave good exams, some who gave less good ones, so I don’t think the premise is completely divorced from reality. But it seems more like something the good instructors overcame, rather than a construct that is really helpful.
Sounds like you're saying that it's acceptable to be a little foggy about the limits of your knowledge, as long as you remember the core foundations. For a first year medicine student, the edge of their knowledge will include things that are the core foundation of a practicing doctor. Why should such a student be tested as if he already had several years of familiarity with the subject when this is all relatively new material to him?
That's probably a good thing to filter on for, say, the navigation role on all kinds of crafts (from land to sea to space). There are naval roles where navigating with a sextant and memory is an important skill to have, and to test for.
But that operating-in-a-vacuum skill doesn't relate well to roles that don't need to exist in a vacuum. In most of the jobs in the real world, we get to use tools -- and when the tools go out to lunch, we don't revert to the Old Ways.
When an accountant's computer dies, they don't transition back to written arithmetic and paper ledgers. Instead, someone who fixes computers gets it going again, and they get back to work as soon as that's done.
Sort of. In real life, you are expected to have immediate knowledge of your field and (in some environments) be able to perform under pressure. I'm not going to pretend the curriculum is a perfect match for what people should know, but it does provide a common baseline to be able to have a common point of reference when communicating with colleagues. I would suggest the most artificial thing about exams is the format.
> It’s sort of unnecessarily high stakes for the students; a couple hours to determine your grade for many hours of studying.
I don't like dismissing the ordeal of people who face test anxiety, but tests are not really high stakes. There is a potential that a person will have to repeat a course if it is a requirement for their degree. At least at the institutions I attended, the grade distribution across exams and assignments, combined with a late drop date, meant that failing a course was only an option if you choose it to be. A student may be forced to face some realities about their dedication/priorities, work habits, time management, interests, abilities, etc.. It may force a student to make some hard decisions about where they want their life to lead, but it does not bar them from success in life. And those are the worse case scenarios. A more typical scenario is that you end up with a lower GPA.
How is that not high stakes? The result of several months worth of effort hinges on what they do during a 2-3-hour window. If you had to build something and the last step involved a procedure that could potentially tear down everything you made, you would try to find a way to redesign it so that didn't happen, or to limit the scope of the damage.
I dunno how you work, but I'd be getting raised eyebrows from people watching my hit google for any question required of my role.
I mean, we're not talking about using calculators here, and we're not talking about vocational training (How do I do $FOO, in docker? In K8s? How do I write a GH runner? Basically any question that involves some million-dollar company's product).
We're talking about college stuff; you absolutely should not be allowed to look up linked lists for the first time during an exam, copy the implementation from wikipedia, port it to your language and move on.
In the real world, we want people who mostly know what to do. The real world is time-constrained (you could spend 2 hours learning to do what they thought you could do based on your diploma, but they'd be pissed to find out that you need to look up everything because that's how you coasted through college).
Exam situations are more like the real world than take-home assignments: High-stakes, high-pressure, timeboxed.
If your real world does not have high-stakes, high-pressure, timeboxed tasks, then you really haven't had much contact outside of your bubble.
If you, on the other hand, attend meetings, you will need both deep knowledge (requires many hours of styding) and fast thinking, and the questions will make you realize you know little about many things. You need to have general knowledge of many things, not just whatever you are building at the moment. If you are successful on these meetings, your salary can and will grow.
Also, some meetings will make you realize that college and/or university are life in easy mode. Very few things you consider hard in college will be work-level hard.