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> 90% of the grade in my undergraduate course comes from in-person exams Tangent:
I've never thought exams should be anything but in-person, but I've also never thought they should be so heavily weighted towards like one or two lucky days, not that that's necessarily what you're suggesting. I recall failing my data structures and algos mid-term that largely consisted of writing syntactically correct java by hand mostly because exams don't really provoke a sense of panic in me, the 3 hours in the evening that the course was didn't turn out to be prime productivity time, so I just kind of got bored and zoned out since I knew it just didn't really matter outside the scope of grades. I think I ended up with a C or something after getting a second shot at the final. I'd later learn I have ADHD, but there were numerous courses where my profs told me they were straight up disappointed I failed so hard, since I evidently stood out as the most engaged in the classroom, handling the course material and assignments just fine, and being a revisitor to the classroom after being a paid developer for years, then in my late twenties. I have no idea how Doctors that clearly have a similar type of attention do it through med school, maybe it's just sufficiently more difficult, enough to stay engaged. There's nothing I can do to provoke a sufficient stress response in an exam environment, and I've basically let it be a thing of the past that comes down to a dice roll whether it's engaging enough, or I get a good sleep the night before, or any number of other uncontrollable variables work out in my favor. Ironically, a persuasive essay in a history class turned out to be perfect. In some sense it does scare me a bit, this prospect of more heavily weighted analog exams, but I don't really see much of a way around it, as long as we continue accepting that the concept of grades and academic performance is a sufficient measure of something worth measuring, rather than the somewhat arbitrary filtering mechanism it became. If my career in software fails, I might have to re-enter into a system that's even more stacked against me than it was, unless it's a hands-on trade presumably. |
Yeah. I took some of those classes (they were more common back then) and didn't feel they were a great measure of how much I knew. I give four exams. The students will have seen related questions on the homework and in the lecture prior to taking the exams. Anyone that's been actually learning the material will find the exams easy and those that use AI, get the answers from someone else, or whatever method to get the homework points, will be lost on the exam. At least that's my goal. Teaching is definitely an imperfect art.