The things I don’t like about putting too much weight in the exams are:

* 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.

▲

II2II an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> It’s pretty artificial in general; in “real life” you have the ability to go around online and look for sources.

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.

▲

acbart 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Exams happen all the time in real life. Or rather, situations where you can't just look up fundamental knowledge. Job interviews, presentations, even mundane work tasks - all these require you to know the basics quickly "The basics" are relative, of course, but I often point out to my students: "you don't care if your doctor needs to look up the specific interactions of your various meds. You do care if you see them googling 'what is an appendix'." 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. 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.

▲

deepsun 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think it's all about speed. In "real life" everything can be looked up, but exam optimizes to not even having to look it up. Then any research becomes much faster.

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.

	▲	eichin 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		One of the reasons I've always encouraged software people to learn to touch type has nothing to do with typing speed - it's about reducing/eliminating the cognitive load of typing, you want to be thinking in expressions (sentences) not letters. (The increase in effectiveness comes from not getting distracted by the mechanics of typing...)

▲

simpaticoder 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In real life you need to know the options and their trade-offs to solve a given problem. You don't need to know all the techniques perfectly, but you do need to be able to characterize them and compare them, from rote memory.

	▲	acbart 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree, I think many people who rail against exams underestimate how important memory is to more complicated skills. How can you debug a complex application if you have to keep looking up every operator and keyword in the language you're using? It'd be like trying to interpret poetry in a foreign language but you have to look up every single noun. I'm not saying people can't do it, but it's tedious, slow, and you probably wouldn't think of them as a "professional worth paying for their service". Some amount of memorization is key.

▲

dublinstats 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

High stakes artificial exams can help prepare you for artificial stakes at job interviews where you need to crank out a working solution in 30 mins with jet lag and someone looking over your shoulder

▲

ssl-3 4 hours ago | parent [-]

That's true. They do better-prepare an applicant for a job that filters on a person's ability to accomplish arbitrary things in a vacuum that is completely disconnected from the real world.

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.

	▲	dublinstats 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Obviously they're both supposed to be proxy measures, not realistic scenarios. I was mostly joking before but I do think exams provide a pretty good proxy for ability in the subject if the teacher is decent. Interviews not so much unless the applicant is similarly prepared with foreknowledge of what they will be tested on and had some time to prepare and given recent practice.

▲

zamadatix 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is where the alternative of a course with the other (still monitored for graded activities) option comes in. The downside of that tends to force in person synchronous rather than custom scheduling of regular tests.

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.