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I don’t completely disagree with this and I do appreciate the well thought out response. I should say that most of my recent relevant experience was as a grad student teaching assistant so I’m neither just somebody grouching that I didn’t like taking exams, nor somebody with deep experience setting the things up. Some respectful quibbles, then, since I gather you have more direct experience than me. > Proctored, in-person exams are the only reliable mechanism we have for ascertaining if a specific individual has mastered key fundamentals and can answer relevant questions about them in a relatively timely fashion. Everything else is details and thresholds - how fast do you need to be able to recall, how deep, what details are fundamental. I don’t think this is how people actually engage with exams. I had a lot of folks in office hours who treat the exam as the ceiling of their competence, rather than the floor, and do things like cram or try to figure out exactly what topics will be on the test to study just those. If the goal is to establish a 100% solid foundation for things you have to know to be a professional (which I think is a great goal), I prefer something like Mastery Learning to the conventional exam process. (Maybe we could call Mastery Learning conventional exams a different set of thresholds, unusual thresholds if we want to look at it that way). > From there, I think it's fine to hate poorly made exams, and it's a given that many folks making exams have no idea what they're doing (or don't have the resources to do it right). But the premise of an exam is not completely divorced from reality. I worked with some professors who I thought gave good exams, some who gave less good ones, so I don’t think the premise is completely divorced from reality. But it seems more like something the good instructors overcame, rather than a construct that is really helpful. |