[lukeschlather]

The problem is tests/quizzes and especially standardized ones. They have never been good teaching tools, and teachers have been railroaded into using them because they provide a blunt way to measure outcomes at a population level. But real teaching is 1:1 and teachers have a lot of power, it's just stuff that doesn't scale and you can't mandate organizationally. But this has mostly always been the case. Trying to measure student performance with a student who is more interested in gaming the process than learning is a fools' errand.

[nradov]

Tests/quizzes are good teaching tools. Students learn more effectively when they are frequently tested on the material.

https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/optimal-protocols-for-st...

[macrocosmos]

Students do better on tests the more they’re tested. How was the effectiveness of learning measured?

I’m not doubting your claim but I don’t have time to listen to that podcast and I’m interested in what was said since you did.

[dns_snek]

> Tests/quizzes are good teaching tools.

I skimmed the linked material and that's not my conclusion. Practice tests are better teaching tools than just memorizing the material and then taking a real test, but on an absolute scale, I'm convinced that they're pretty terrible for most types of material.

Throughout my education I've come across countless people who could memorize the material and recite it with relative ease but they didn't have any intuitive understanding so they couldn't use that "knowledge" to solve real problems. Much like ChatGPT itself.

Equating good memorization and recall performance with good education and knowledge seems like a form of cargo culting to me, it's missing the essence of what makes knowledge powerful in the first place.

[foxglacier]

What kind of school did you go to where you needed to memorize things? That's not how schools usually are these days. Tests don't test memorization, they ask you to solve problems.

[nxobject]

Reading the abstracts and introduction of the linked articles: the testing literature focuses on recall performance, no? It's only part of the picture of "learning'. Of course, any good educator will interleave quizzes with integrative projects, chances to review past work, etc.

[Yoric]

That is true, but the problem shows up even with open-ended tests. In my country, we generally don't use tests/quizzes, and nevertheless, every year, many students attempt to cheat – and some of them undoubtedly get away with it.

Regardless, I agree, attempting to assess the progress of a cheater is a fool's errand.