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Comment by cwal37 | Hacker News Reader

I took a class which had a short quiz/test at the beginning of each meeting. It was just a handful of questions that covered the assigned reading for that date. The reading in question wasn't out of a book, but was always a single review article, or 2-4 smaller academic papers. Together these quizzes represented a significant chunk of your grade.

I learned more, and more quickly, in that class than probably any other I've ever taken. It was mixed between grad/undergrad (I was undergrad at the time), but because everyone "had" to do the reading for each class everyone was on a more or less equal footing, and the discussion was fantastic.

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This is a fantastic way to teach courses, and is in some sense the canonical seminar.

The model works very well for upper-level courses, but not so well at the first 2 or 3 years, which is where most drop out of college.

edit: the short pre- and post-tests are pretty effective, if you can afford the time, at every level of the curriculum. I'm not sure why they aren't more prevalent, except that it's very time consuming for the course staff.

This works for more than just discussion based classes, as well; one of the best classes I ever took in college was a CS Theory course; every single day, the class started off with a quiz on the material we had covered in the previous class. Immediately after finishing the quiz, we'd go over the answers in class together.

The end result was that you were constantly getting immediate feedback about how well you understand the material; if you thought you knew what you were doing and you were actually totally lost, you found out the very next day and were presented with an opportunity to ask for clarifications. And since there were so many quizzes, there was no need for larger tests (because the professor constantly felt like he had a good handle on how people were understanding the material) and you never got stressed out about bombing a quiz or two (because there were thirty other quizzes that would go into calculating your grade, plus the workshop scores and homework scores).

It really removed the stress of the class and gave me an opportunity to focus on the material itself, instead of worrying about how I would do on the tests. Weirdly, when every day was a quiz, it seemed like there were never any quizzes.

>'The end result was that you were constantly getting immediate feedback about how well you understand the material...It really removed the stress of the class and gave me an opportunity to focus on the material itself, instead of worrying about how I would do on the tests.'

Interestingly, this is exactly what I like so much about the best MOOCs I've completed. Assigned exercises typically allow multiple attempts and provide immediate feedback during and after completion.

This is in stark contrast to my local University experience where everything is single attempt with the exception of papers where a single draft submission might be allowed.

Needless to say, I find the former far superior for learning.

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