[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.