> In general, being good at academics require you to think carefully not quickly.

Yes, but to go even further: timed tests often test, in part, your ability to handwrite quickly rather than slowly. There is great variation in handwriting speed — I saw it as a student and as a professor — and in classrooms, we should no more be testing students for handwriting speed than we should be testing them on athletic ability.

In general, timed tests that involve a lot of handwriting are appalling. We use them because they make classroom management easier, not because they are justifiable pedagogy.

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AlexandrB an hour ago | parent [-]

This is true about other things like reading speed as well. It still doesn't mean that time limits are useless. These are skills you can develop up to a reasonable level through practice if they're lacking, not something fixed like height. And if it takes you 12 hours to get through a 2 hour test because of these factors it's a sign that you're not going to be a very effective employee/researcher. Being able to read/write with some haste is not unrelated to job/academic performance.

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jbullock35 35 minutes ago | parent [-]

> Being able to read/write with some haste is not unrelated to job/academic performance.

Yes, I agree. But my point is about handwriting, rather than writing in general. Handwriting speed is something that we are effectively testing with many in-class exams. And handwriting speed - unlike reading or writing speed - is indeed unrelated to job performance. It is also unrelated to any reasonable measure of academic performance.

	▲	neltnerb 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It is an interesting point about handwriting as distinct from reading or writing alone. I appreciate it, thank you. I would not concede that speed is not as important as doing it correctly in the context of evaluating learning. There are homework, projects, and papers where there is a lot of time available to probe whether they can think it through and do it correctly with no time limit. It's ideal if everyone can finish an exam, but there needs to be some kind of pressure for people to learn to quickly identify a kind of problem, identify the correct solution approach, and actually carry out the solution. But they shouldn't be getting penalized for not doing a page of handwritten linear algebra correctly, I totally agree that you need to make sure you're testing what you think you're testing.