[skate22]

> "In a CS exam, you either know the answer or you do not."

This is simply not true. Consider an algorithm proof, with enough time you might be able to derive a proof that you should have known cold.

The real world does have deadlines & performance matters, and the women who spent the time studying should get the better grade

[eeeuo]

You believe that a student that derives a proof from scratch is less knowledgeable than a student that rote memorizes it out of a textbook?

My argument comes from the perspective of the real world. It is, in effect, the same type of argument that drives the "interview questions on a whiteboard" discussion -- which qualities are actually important in an employee? As someone involved with hiring for a company that consistently produces high quality, critical code used in important systems, my experience is that "working under pressure" is pretty far down the list of important qualities.

[skate22]

Grades are relative though.

I'm not saying the person that came to the proof with 30 mins extra is not smart, but they were not able to meet the same expectation as the other students.

If everyone gets a 50, the grades will scale, and your final grade will depend on how you performed compared to the rest

I've brute forced a few proofs, and if i had done so in overtime, i would 100% stand by my viewpoint that i deserve less points than the student next to me who met the expectation.

In an interview it's different too, because you have not been preparing for a clearly defined expectation for 3 months.

Now on the other hand, if you were to argue for completely untimed exams, i can get behind that. I really enjoyed some of my take home CS finals, and it really let me perfect my solution to the best of my ability.

It really depends on what expectation is set (imo)

[TheCoelacanth]

What does it matter if students meet the expectation that is set if the expectation has no bearing on anything useful? Surely the university's goal should be to produce capable graduates, not to simply have a contest of who is better at taking pointless exams. If they want to adjust the expectations set for students to put less emphasis on rapid recitation of rote memorization, that is a good thing.

[skate22]

So first: most jobs require you to do a lot of stuff that you may not agree with or feel is useful. I don't want to work with the person who is going to only do what they want when they want. At the end of the day the work needs to get done.

Secondly: any school that has GPA is essentially holding a contest. Many job postings consider GPA and may use it as a tiebreaker between 2 canidates from school X. It's not a perfect metric by any means, but it is relevant in the world today for new hires.

Work in the real world is largely the ability to deliver on expectations.

[TheCoelacanth]

Okay, but why that particular set of hoops to jump through rather than some other set of hoops to jump through? Why should the university have to stick with one set of hoops to jump through just because it's the one they happened to pick decades ago?

[katzgrau]

+1

In college, I did well on math exams precisely because I had a strong understanding of what I was doing. I did not mechanically follow a recipe for a solution like some other students did.

The result was that I usually took the entire exam period (right up to the last minute) to finish, but I usually had a perfect score or close to it. I outperformed high scorers who had completed the exam 30 mins before me by almost 10 points.

The only exam that got the best of me was the first linear algebra exam, which was a lot of mechanical matrix multiplying. I only completed 3/4 questions before the time was up.

[lucideer]

> with enough time you might be able to derive a proof that you should have known cold.

Maybe it's just me, but I would wager that a student that can derive a proof is more likely to understand that proof than one who writes it from rote.

[skate22]

Perhaps that person does have better problem skills, but who knows if someone also derived it faster within the time frame

Perhaps that person also makes a habit of not preparing & just winging it (Which is fine until it's not)

[lucideer]

Both are possible, but the former in particular is highly unlikely (and as I said, "I'd wager", so we're talking probabilities here)

[skate22]

The reality is that you should be learning how to prove, not memorizing proofs.

The student who was most prepared would be able to derive proofs (by the process that was taught, like knowing to apply a theorom, or being comforatable with induction, etc) in a timely manner.

The exam is there to see how well you grasp the material taught, not how good at winging it you are (which is a very useful skill of course, but not the one being tested)

[xaedes]

I had an CS exam where I was familiar with all the topics asked and knew all the answers and even how to apply them, well despite some quirks surely ;P

But some questions in the exam required us to apply some algorithms by hand. I knew how they worked and I could also do them by hand. Did it on whiteboard with toy problems while studying for it. But what I didn't really expected was how fast the time run with manual execution on paper.. Even for modest data sizes.

I thought that the algos really could be improved to be much faster by hand, refactor to optimize for different operation costs when doing by hand given the available tools in the exam, reducing operation costs by speeding up hotspot manual steps by training right into muscle memory and better memory alignment on paper for faster data lookups in the first place.

I probably could have finished that exam in time, but with a baaad score. So I just quit and gave them a blank paper with my name to try again next time.

I knew what the real problem was: time, and I had a plan how to prepare for it. It worked =)

[dvlsg]

An exam where you can hand in a blank paper to try again later and not just get a 0 seems like it would be uncommon. I certainly never had that experience.

[Scarblac]

Well, you'd get a 0, but then you can try again (in my experience in the Netherlands).

What's the alternative, be forced to drop out of university once you fail an exam?

[dvlsg]

Interesting. My experience was in the US, and I would have kept that 0 unless my professor was feeling _very_ generous. I don't think it would be completely unheard of to have a professor with a policy like you described, but I never ran into it.

We wouldn't have been forced to drop out (at least not due to that exam in isolation), but the 0 would have been considered as part of our final grade for the course.

[Scarblac]

My experience is that the exam is at the end of the course, so the 0 would be your grade for the course. And you can't finish your degree without passing grades on every course in the degree, so if there were no second chances then that would mean the end of your study.

At my university the year was divided into three trimesters with exam periods at the end, and a fourth exam period at the end of summer holiday. Each exam period would have the exams of all the courses of the previous trimester and also exams of courses of the trimester before for people who still needed to pass that course. If you fail the exam twice, you have to try again when the exam is given again next year (or try to argue with the prof to get special arrangements, say if it's the only one you still need for your degree).