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Comment by carlob | Hacker News Reader

When I was in high school my classmates and I found a document from a previous year that amounted to a superset of all the questions my philosophy teacher was going to put in test.

Since some of the questions were pretty hard we ended up studying really hard together to try and crack them before tests.

Though what we did was somehow against the rules I feel I learned a lot more by studying the questions collaboratively than by studying on my own.

I later found this form of collaboration extremely rewarding and effective during university. We spent many afternoon trying to crack hard problem sets and explaining them to one another.

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It has always puzzled me why a professor would be willing to repeat the answers from previous years. Some account that people that work "harder" would be solving previous exams, but this is given that the exams are available to all the class (which is a prerequisite for this argument to be true).

I've found myself in classes where a group had exams, problem sets and other information from previous years (and solved) and they hid and refused to share those.

I've found that in my grad-school years that most professors released a set of sample exams, usually with answers. For some this would be a made-up exam. For most it was a previous year's exam. For others it was all the exams presented to the class for the last ten years with answers.

It was quite productive to go over all these exams as a group and strive to understand the questions, and particularly to understand the patterns, these were the concepts that lay behind the questions and once you had those you could answer many questions.

These days it isn't hard to find example problems and exams on the internet for your class or similar ones.

It is hard to come up with entirely new problems for every exam every year. That doesn't mean that doing so isn't important, but it really is time consuming and a whole lot of work. It's also painfully easy to think that you've changed things enough for the question to be "new" compared with examples from class or homework or previous years' tests, only for some student to recognize it enough to regurgitate some memorized solution rather than actually thinking.

So while I'd never say that repeating questions is a good thing, I can't be too hard on folks who do (intentionally or not).

For some students it also can serve to mitigate exam shock (speaking to high school level anyway, which is my area). Finding a familiar, or even roughly familiar question can mean a nervous student has an entry point into the exam.

I quite liked the article. It'd be interesting to see if the benefits persisted over multiple groups though. I tend to see engagement increase when rules are changed and students need to figure out how to address the problem in a new way, regardless of whether they are collaborating or not. (anecdotal evidence there only sorry ;P)

I think that having a large set of possible exams questions is a problem only if the exercises are too formulaic. If knowing the answer is as easy as memorizing 1A 2D …, then repeating exams is a problem.

If exams are more problems than exercises, and you are able to solve most of them before the exam, then you've probably learned enough and the exam is mostly unnecessary.

I took an OO class once where the questions were verbatim for about 3 semesters prior, except for a simple find replace on the variable names in the code snippets. e.g. x = y became var1 = var2

Needless to say after I recognised the pattern from the first exam I got perfect scores for the rest of the semester.

I remember when I highschool, we had study class where we would just all sit together in a big room to study and do homeworks, in complete silence, alone. With some fellow students, we often just skipped this class to actually study altogether somewhere else. Indeed, we learned a lot more, or at least we were much more motivated to learn. When I lost those friends as our path went seperate ways, my grades dropped, so did my motivation. It's a competition, but a sane one.

Philosophy is meant to collaborated like that. Glad you figured it out early.

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