Timeline for Pedagogical reasons for time-limited exams
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
16 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Feb 23, 2020 at 2:04 | comment | added | vonbrand | @Suresh, most education should prepare/evaluate for later "real world performance". And very rarely isn't time an issue in the "real world". And also very rarely required to solve every problem without considering external sources (from the textbook through standard reference texts up to latest research reports). | |
| Sep 16, 2014 at 13:40 | comment | added | reirab | @bone, Yeah, that does happen sometimes, but that's bad management. It's specifically one of the reasons that I look for employers where the management are actually engineers, not some guy with just an MBA trying to manage an engineering department. | |
| Sep 16, 2014 at 4:43 | comment | added | bone | @reirab, you are probably right, although in software development, the standard practice seems to be that the project manager comes and says: "This just came in, customer want this and that feature. Please do it for tomorrow, no testing we release directly to the customer. If you are a good programmer, then you'll do it right and ther's no need to test right?" And so you have a limited time to think the best way to do what they are asking. I could be a little biased btw. | |
| Sep 15, 2014 at 14:16 | comment | added | reirab | As an engineer, I would rather disagree with this answer. I would much rather hire an engineer who takes somewhat longer to think his designs through and then verify that they're correct than one that just tries to whip something out quickly. Sure, time to finish is not unlimited, but I've never encountered a real-world scenario that even remotely resembled a time-limited exam in my engineering career. Exams that are designed to put 'time pressure' on students are testing a skill that is irrelevant in most fields rather than actually determining whether students understand the material. | |
| Sep 15, 2014 at 14:12 | comment | added | reirab | "The teacher can't just say, so this is the project for this semester, handle it in whenever you can." Umm... Isn't that basically the idea of a term paper or term project? I'd say those are pretty standard, at least judging from both my graduate and undergraduate experiences. | |
| Apr 16, 2014 at 1:17 | comment | added | bone | Wait, no one is questioning a 1-week takehome exam, but we go back to the same: You have only one week , a limited amount of time. The teacher can't just say, so this is the project for this semester, handle it in whenever you can. | |
| Apr 15, 2014 at 22:07 | comment | added | Suresh | Btw, let's be clear that "unlimited time" is a strawman. We're really talking about a 1hr exam vs (say) a 1-week takehome. | |
| Apr 15, 2014 at 20:35 | comment | added | badroit | The discussion reminds me of a documentary I saw about Andrew Wiles where he worked in secret for seven years to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. That got me thinking about what I would work on if given seven years no-questions-asked ... it might even be something useful, who knows. @Suresh, yep, my comment was intended only as a counterpoint. But besides proving Fermat's Last Theorem and the likes, I do struggle to think of work scenarios that are free from short-scale time constraints. | |
| Apr 15, 2014 at 19:58 | comment | added | Aksakal almost surely binary | @Suresh, the purpose of undergraduate education is not the same as basic education (k-12 in US). It is not simply to help students to learn the material but also to prepare them for future jobs. If you are studying computer science, then you are going to be a programmer. This job requires certain level of performance. You can't spend unlimited time on any given assignment at work. | |
| Apr 15, 2014 at 19:42 | comment | added | Suresh | @badroit indeed :). But at the risk of taking your comment seriously, the purpose of teaching is to help students learn material. "recreating real-life scenarios" is a side issue. So the arguments are not symmetric: it's perfectly fine to have unlimited-time exams IF that creates a better learning experience, but justifying a time-limited exam in terms of "real-world" scenarios is what requires justification. | |
| Apr 15, 2014 at 18:22 | comment | added | badroit | @Suresh, I'd be interested in hearing of actual work scenarios where unlimited-time exam conditions are replicated. I think I might like to apply! | |
| Apr 15, 2014 at 17:10 | comment | added | Suresh | I'd be interested in hearing of actual work scenarios where the exam conditions are replicated. | |
| Apr 15, 2014 at 17:01 | review | First posts | |||
| Apr 15, 2014 at 18:22 | |||||
| Apr 15, 2014 at 16:50 | comment | added | bone | Of course is not going to be the best one possible, but the student should try to to the best they can with the limited time that they have. | |
| Apr 15, 2014 at 16:46 | comment | added | Suresh | I don't see why. I've heard this rationale, but it never made sense to me. If you're being asked to produce an answer in one hour, then no one is simultaneously expecting that answer to be the best one possible. | |
| Apr 15, 2014 at 16:45 | history | answered | bone | CC BY-SA 3.0 |