[Jach]

Is your goal to get students to understand, or get them to do the work-hours you want them to? If your course is one where a smart student could pass your exams without doing any of the assignments (or conversely an average student who might fail your exams but does well on assignments without cheating), why should you care if anyone does those assignments or even copies them? Just make assignments optional and the tests account for >90% of the grade, and use your cheating-detection skills at test-time where you can actually test understanding.

[alf]

The problem is that test taking is only minimally useful outside of school, and by choosing tests as the only measurement, you end up optimizing for the wrong skill. (I know because I was a pretty good test taker as a student, but the laziness and procrastination that it fosters is really starting to bite me in the ass right now) I think tests are useful because they're an easy metric, but if you're goal is to teach or learn a skill, tests are a really poor tool. As a thought experiment, if you wanted to teach yourself something what would you do? You probably wouldn't do it by giving yourself written tests.

[Jach]

If I wanted to teach myself something, I wouldn't be going to school for it. The whole purpose of grades, testing, and catching cheaters is so a school can determine if a certain person deserves some credentials they give them or not. Ideally we wouldn't need them, but you tell me a better way apart from projects (which have their own problems if they're in groups) to measure a student's proficiency in something while remembering they're taking 5 other classes at the same time with professors who may do the same thing.

I do agree with you on possible bite-backs to a highly test-oriented system, and poorly made tests are very easy to game. Lots of students coast through high school and then around their sophomore or junior year of college stuff starts getting hard and they don't know what to do and don't know how to study.

[DSpinellis]

I agree; tests can be too easily gamed. The assessment of courses I described in the blog was mainly based on the coursework. In the programming course a simple multiple-choice exam was used to weed-out students who might assign their coursework to somebody else. In the software engineering course, the "exam" consisted of the final presentation.

[equark]

Testing can actually have a direct effect on learning:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/science/21memory.html?_r=2...

[alf]

>A week later all four groups were given a short-answer test that assessed their ability to recall facts and draw logical conclusions based on the facts.

The problem with this study is they measure learning using test. Of course the groups that had taken tests while memorizing scored better, they got practice.

[Jach]

HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2125742