Timeline for Should students have access to past exams or an exam bank?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Aug 3, 2019 at 1:29 | comment | added | A Simple Algorithm | Students should be given representative questions to help them study, and know what are the potential questions they may be asked, regardless of whether past exams are shared or even exist. The exam itself should be a subset of what they might have expected to see, and works best as an estimator of their overall knowledge if they don't know which subset in advance. | |
| Aug 2, 2019 at 16:35 | comment | added | einpoklum | @anaximander: I know how to perform the calculation in a very specific scenario. But I might not know how to perform it generally, or how to adapt an unforeseen scenario to what I do know. | |
| Aug 2, 2019 at 15:56 | comment | added | Ian Sudbery | paul garrett (cc: @einpoklum) if it can be done mechanically, then it's a very poor "approximation" of understanding. Actually "understanding" is a word we are not allowed to use when specifying "learning outcomes" as it is too vague. | |
| Aug 2, 2019 at 7:54 | comment | added | anaximander | @einpoklum That's kind of my point. For example, I studied aerospace engineering, and on one paper, there was always a question where they showed you a jet engine, its characteristics, and a flight condition, and asked you to determine its thrust output. If, when faced with that, you "go through the motions" with the numbers on the page, and it gives you the correct answer, then congratulations, you know how to calculate the thrust of a jet engine. Yes, it'd be better if you understood how those formulae arise from the phsyics, but there are other questions to test that too. | |
| Aug 2, 2019 at 1:02 | comment | added | John Bollinger | Perhaps it depends on the field, @DreamConspiracy, but critical thinking, often in the form of problem-solving, is exactly what I expect examinations in my field and closely related ones to test. To that end, it is not uncommon for professors to provide formula sheets with the exam, or to allow students to being their own, precisely so that they don't have to memorize those. | |
| Aug 1, 2019 at 22:27 | comment | added | paul garrett | (@anaximander, just to ping you, I did respond to @einpoklum's comment-to-your-comment...) | |
| Aug 1, 2019 at 22:26 | comment | added | paul garrett | @einpoklum, perhaps that's a pretty good approximation of "understanding"? :) | |
| Aug 1, 2019 at 22:23 | comment | added | einpoklum | @anaximander: Not true. You can memorize the gist of the solution and then just go through the motions with different numbers. In fact, memorizing a bunch of specific numbers is kind of hard. | |
| Aug 1, 2019 at 17:52 | comment | added | DreamConspiracy | @IanSudbery if students are replacing memorizing with critical thinking then the test questions are insufficiently varied. Hopefully the topics an exam is covering are interesting enough that memorizing everything is not possible, in which case the Prof should ask questions that are representative of this fact | |
| Aug 1, 2019 at 15:32 | comment | added | anaximander | In STEM fields particularly, seeing past questions will not help you memorise this year's answers, because it's trivially easy to swap out the numbers to get a "new" question. Seeing past questions just lets the students memorise the procedure they should follow to figure out the answer... which is the whole point, isn't it? | |
| Aug 1, 2019 at 14:31 | comment | added | Ian Sudbery | I good exam question does not test what a student "knows", but how well they can think. One can imagine questions that when asked in an exam, require imagination, synthesis and critical thinking, that if provided beforehand could just be memorized. That said, providing students with the questions of the same type/same topics beforehand obviously allows them to prepare better for the exam, and therefore better demonstrate the skills you would like of them. | |
| Aug 1, 2019 at 10:16 | comment | added | goblin GONE | You, sir, are a hero. | |
| Jul 30, 2019 at 23:47 | history | answered | paul garrett | CC BY-SA 4.0 |