Why Flunking Exams Is Actually a Good Thing
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This is sad, it confuses education with memorization. I was fortunate in winding up at Caltech, which had a policy of open book / open note exams. The idea wasn't to memorize formulae, it was to learn how derive the formulae and then apply them properly.
For example, in AMA95 one of the lectures went through deriving the fourier transforms. On the final exam one of the questions was to derive the hyperbolic transforms. If you understood the fourier ones, you could derive the hyperbolic ones. If not, well, you were lost.
In Physics 2, one lecture showed how the characteristics of magnetism could be derived from the idea of electric charges. An exam question was to show the characteristics of electric fields given the existence of magnetic monopoles.
Anybody can look up a formula in a book, and then misuse it.
Probably 80% of the physics courses I've taken (and people that I know have taken) are almost all like this. Open Note and/or Open Note+Homework and/or Open Book (and occasionally open laptop), typically with a class averages of around 40-70% on the exam
In grad school as classes got more difficult, we had take home exams even. I always dreaded these because they were substantially more difficult than a regular exam. Generally if you didn't have the concepts down, having an entire library at your disposal was not helpful in that case.
It often turned into an exercise in finding the extreme bottom limit to how small one could write (and turned me into a fan of Pilot Hi-Tec 0.25mm pens!), so I always wondered how carefully considered the limitation to one sheet was... did they actually try out different limits and choose the one that worked best?
More limitation forces students to think about what they're including instead of just copying the textbook onto paper, but even a slight relaxation to 4-5 pieces of paper would have really helped in many cases, and allowed us to focus more on the material and less on the physical chore of preparation...
The idea was 1) in the real world, you have reference material which you should know how to use, and 2) test length did NOT include any extra time to look things up.
If you knew the material and just needed a quick check of some detail, you could look it up without any problem because you didn't have to search. On the other hand, if you were trying to teach yourself some concept during the test, the wasted time would probably impact how much of the test you were able to complete.
I liked that system - it seemed rather generous coming from "nothing allowed" tests in earlier schooling, and it had a side benefit of reducing the number of profs that badly reused exam questions or lazily used textbook-provided questions.
/* Yes, this policy caused some of us to find the one printer on campus that printed on A3 paper with duplex support, so we could print an electronic-only reference book at 24 pages/sheet (if I remember correctly...) */
Creating a LaTeX template that fits everything on to the sheet was an amazing time saver.
I did great in exams with cheat sheets, but poorly in the few truly "open book" exams, because I didn't know how to properly prepare for an open book exam. My silly undergrad brain thought "Woohoo, open book, I guess I don't have to study all this stuff, I can just look it up when I get there" which led to two hours of feverishly flipping back and forth in the book.
I also majored in ME. Caltech requires 2 years of Physics for everyone.
Would you really want formula pluggers designing life critical systems? Not me.
Book values, however, provide valuable feedback on whether an answer is correct or not. While the book may not provide the right formula for the job, it often provides formulas that "bracket" the right answer, and so can be used as a reasonableness check.
A central part of engineering design are reasonableness checks.
They do use formulas and calculate things, but they do NOT recalculate the constants, even though they may be derived each time. The tensile strength for steel is just assumed, from what I can tell, even though it falls out of tests and formulas itself.
In fact, I would trust the computer better than the deriver. The guy that just plugs it in, in a proven system, is safer to my ears. The guy that recalculates everytime is bound to have false positives and negatives and whatnot in the calculations. A good aphorism is 'A man that has one watch knows the time, a man with 2 is never sure.'
I do agree on the standard values though, it does give a ball park, and that is valuable.
One thing to keep in mind is that the brain power required to do all these calculations simply does not exist. Physicists typically are less then 5% of a undergraduate class, I'd actually argue for less, but I haven't a source. These are the guys that can run the calculations through everytime. However, the need for the various jobs is FAR outstripped by the output. Hence you get engineering and the margin of safety, as we know you can't get the proper people in there, but you have to get someone to check at least something otherwise the people will just make it regardless of safety. And then boom, bob's your uncle, you get the casualty differences between Chinese earthquakes and the 6er in Napa.
Yes, it's not much, but it's better than nothing.
Back in high school (in India), Physics used to be my favorite subject. It demystified the underpinnings of natural phenomena. In fact, Electromagentism was the main reason I decided to major in Electrical Engineering. Unfortunately, the Physics courses in college left a really bad taste in my mouth.
I don't remember that as being policy. I definitely had several closed book exams, including one memorable pass/fail final first year that I failed by one question that I could have easily answered if I could have just looked for 5 seconds in the book. It was tempting...I was taking the exam in my room, with the door closed, and the book was sitting closed within arms reach on my desk from my pre-test study session. I knew exactly where to turn to in the book to get what I needed. But taking a peek would violate the Caltech honor code, so it was or course out of the question.
The only exam policy I remember was that exams were required to be take home exams rather than in-class exams. A professor needed to get special permission if he wanted to give an in-class exam. I never had an in-class exam at Caltech.
That the data are also out there, available in books and on the internet doesn't matter much.
Let's put it this way: a surgeon is someone that has, through training, memorized and internalized all sorts of facts, procedures and notions to be able to perform (and respond to anything that might go wrong).
The fact that I have full access to all the kinds of books and info that he had read, doesn't make me a surgeon.
And it's not just practice either. E.g. I wouldn't sit on the table of some surgeon who doesn't know the necessary stuff of his trade by heart but "can look it up on his iPad if he needs it".
When you understand something, it prepares you better for the situations you haven't faced before, since you can formulate results for the new set of conditions. Also, when you look up something frequently enough, it's going to get committed to your memory automatically.
While I agree that the medical profession requires a higher degree of memorization, the context of my comment (and most others here I'm assuming) is more geared towards engineering. For example, if I was developing a course on programming, my focus wouldn't be on making the students memorize syntax and language quirks, since they can always look those up, and internalize them over time. My focus would be on developing their way of thinking, what's the right data structure to use for this problem, should I move this piece of code out as a reusable function, should I return the reference to this object or a copy, etc. This is based on my personal experience - I hardly remember anything from the 'plug-and-chug' classes which forced memorization.
tldr: the focus of education should be to cultivate and encourage understanding concepts, not rote memorization of facts and figures. Some memorization is nice for that extra bit of efficiency, but that is going to happen automatically, so no point going out of your way to do it.
That's not a real dichotomy though, as to know the different organs and how they work with each other, he also has to know their names, and memorize tons of information about them (namely, how they work with each other).
And of course, he would have to describe it to some other assistant on the operation, and "you know, that boney thing that is on the middle of the leg, and is kinda curved, and serves for stabilizing body pressure is cracked" doesn't really cut it compared to "the X bone is cracked".
I was an exchange student at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) and was very disappointed by the number of exams that graded rote memorization. Glad to see that Caltech is not like this.
Another engineer looked over my work, and asked "what book did you get these formulas from?" I said the shape of the gear wasn't in a book, so I had to derive it.
He was shocked. I was shocked that he was shocked :-(
I failed a number of exams and classes, but none of them which I can recall were because they gave me way too many things to memorize. I failed Physics because I failed Calculus... I failed Calculus because the professor had a thick Hungarian accent until she went out on maternity leave and was replaced by a man with an even thicker Hungarian accent. In fact maybe I'm just not good at Calculus...
I failed Programming Skills electives because I had moved off campus and got a crappy part-time job, eventually lost my car, and no longer had the time to "live the life" and learn the lessons you learn from diving into the labs and the projects, working them over for dozens of hours until you get all of what ideas you are supposed to get. Actually I had a lot of 4.0 quarters until I moved off campus.
I got A's across the board in all of my Arabic classes (ok, one B) which is the only place I remember having to memorize a lot of things, except for one or two Art History classes. I had one professor in particular who I wound up grading for later, who was a master at writing tests that made you prove your actual understanding of the subject matter. He was also a master lecturer, we would often say "you only have to show up to Phil's classes and listen to be able to pass the exams."
I remember one of the exam in Computer Graphics asking me when the OpenGL consortium was formed and other bit of useless trivia.
That said I did have a few interesting classes with much more interesting exams but they were in the business department.
I am a graduate student in Physics, and admittedly not in Caltech or one of it's peers, but I find that "memorization" (or, as I would put it, familiarity) is very important for understanding. I can't spend my time looking up formulae, I have to be able to just pull it out, or visualize it, at least. As the content I work with becomes more complex, I need to have more and more of the things I'm working on as part of my knowledge, ie., I need to memorize. If it isn't in my head, how can I put it all together?
You get from students what you test for. Testing "what is the formula relating volts vs resistance vs current" means the student can regurgitate V=IR. Understanding what that formula means is something else entirely.
Nonetheless, you are right to persecute those who emphasize memorization over understanding, formula plugging over understanding what a formula means because that seems to be the direction of education that is most threatening nowadays. And yes, memorization is easier than understanding.
There is a widespread miscoception that openbook exams are somehow more better and forward thinking. You don't have memorize the exact formula but you still have to memorize where that formula is, one is just memorizing different kind of information.
Learning is about learning how to learn a particular subject . A good exam should test you on weather or not you can pick up/learn a new (slightly advanced) topic on your own based on your current knowledge. It should test you on what you can learn not on what you have already learnt. Open book exams don't address this fundamental flaw.
I don't recall a single exam question that was merely "plug the numbers into a formula and write down the answer" which is what you seem to be implying.
Open book / open note changed the focus of trolling (studying) for exams. Instead of using flash cards to memorize formulas, one made sure one understood all of the homework solutions and previous exam solutions, A-Z.
Many of the formulas were far more complex than one could conveniently memorize anyway, such as the equations for jet turbine performance. And like I mentioned, none of the exam questions required mere formula plugging or had answers one could pluck out of the notes or book.
I'm not sure if this is the right approach, either, especially when materials get harder. It sometimes takes a lecture or two to fully teach a concept. You don't usually have that kind of time when you write an exam.
What I really enjoyed are my fluid dynamics exam. We learned all the theories in class + a handful of example scenarios. The exams had radically different scenarios than what we are used to (although if you look through it, it's the same and you apply the same principles to solve them).
I don't know if that's the right approach either, but it was fun to think about.
the best professors at my school made the tests hard and the average scores pretty low. It wasn't graded on a curve but more of an "I expect A level grades to be around here, B level around here, etc...".
One question that pops into my mind: can considered analytical skills actually be taught? I'm not sure they really can, they might be just plain old innate, in which case perhaps classes should focus on the thing that can be taught, which is stuff.
Yup. I came out of college far better at that than going in.
There also is no one "why", it's subjective. For example, what were "Hitler's biggest mistakes"? Ask 5 historians, and you'll get 5 different answers. A grade would be based on how well and insightfully you justified your answer.
Maybe you knew those things already before you started the class, which is nice, but no doubt there's a lot of other facts out there which you could have memorised which would help you in piecing together the historical narrative.
People criticise the rote-learning approach to things, but I think it's possible to go too far in the other direction. If, for instance, you teach your eight-year-old kids to memorise the capital cities of all the countries in the world, then that's not a huge deal of information right there, but at least you can guarantee that they've heard of every country on Earth, which puts them ahead of most adults.
Furthermore, they'll have noticed a bunch of patterns, like all the places starting with "San" or all the places ending with "-town" which can help them piece together things like which countries were Spanish or British colonies, which leads to an understanding of the history and culture of these countries, and so forth.
Why having to look things up makes a bad historian, but not a bad physicist?
Despite what the article claims, "pretesting" is not a thing (yet) in psychology. The whole premise of the article hinges on one unpublished study by a single research group [1], one that didn't even administer a full "prefinal" at that. The effect is intriguing and might or might not be "significant" (no way to verify oneself); but either way a single, unpublished, unreplicated study does not an "exciting development in learning science" emerging from "a variety of experiments" make, as the article pretends.
But then it wouldn't make as clean a narrative, would it.
That said, I've encountered several variations on the theme that lead me to believe there is a wider "thing" in education about activation and reinforcement.
> Which of the following is true of scientific explanations?
> a. They are less likely to be verified by empirical observation than other types of explanations.
> b. They are accepted because they come from a trusted source or authority figure.
> c. They are accepted only provisionally.
> d. In the face of evidence that is inconsistent with a scientific explanation, the evidence will be questioned.
> e. All of the above are true about scientific explanations.
If I were taking this pretest, it would be accompanied by the realization that most of my work in the class would be dealing with a mountain of oversimplifications and generalizations. So maybe the goal of the pretest is to inhibit my critical thinking to the point where I just think the way the professor expects and try to maximize my chance of filling in the right bubble.
A better question might be something describing historical evidence rather than forcing the respondent to make a claim about truth. Like: according to the research of [researcher and colleagues], 80% of survey respondents said their primary reason for accepting a scientific explanation was...
These would be much better at providing cues for the student later on, since they now have a name and a number to attach to the claim being made.
What the question is trying to elucidate here is if the student has a working conception of how scientific explanations work. I'm not sure how you are getting from there to "a mountain of oversimplifications and generalizations". I know from personal experience tutoring first year students that they can have a very (and I mean very) shaky grasp of what it even means for something to be scientific rather than unscientific. This groundwork has to be in place before students can proceed to digest any science, in this case psychology no doubt. If anything knowing about the ways in which our beliefs can be (rightly or wrongly) formed will only aid critical thinking.
I think the question is an OK question and that the question you would replace it with obscures what the student needs to learn about. In fact, if you don't mind me saying, I think your replacement question quite odd.
Not everything that is not covered by science is bad.
Some of the things that are not covered by science are bad: these include pseudo-scientific beliefs like astrology, religious belief, and so on.
The question here is to do with knowledge and scientific explanation. This is the subject matter of epistemology (the study of knowledge in and of itself) and philosophy of science (how something gets to be scientific in the first place). You are right that it is entirely unscientific but you are wrong that think that as a result it should be rejected. Not everything that is unscientific should be rejected, this is one instance of that. You need to learn the distinction between science and philosophy of science.
I realized only much later that this was an obsessive approach, like buying chess books after losing early in one's first tournament. There was no sense of carpe diem, it was about owlishly building up a 10:1 advantage before closing in.