[lambdaphage]

My graduate advisor is Spanish, but is faculty at a university in the States. In his first year of teaching, he penalized for incorrect answers (as is apparently the Spanish custom). But his students threw fits during office hours, so he caved in the face of potentially terrible teaching evaluations.

After tenure, he said, things will be going right back to the way they were in the old country.

[rprospero]

I could see throwing a fit, too, depending on how the weighting is handled for partially incorrect answers. If the question is "What shape is the Earth?", if a student answers "A cube", I can see taking off points. However, if they answer "A sphere", do they also lose points? Do they lose just as many points as the person who said sphere or do they get partial credit for being closer to the correct answer of "oblate spheroid"

To put it differently, would I get a better score in OS design than Linus Torvalds? After all, he wrote an operating system that contains bugs, while I wrote no operating system as all.

[lambdaphage]

That's a general problem with the interpretation of test answers. What an appropriately penalized scoring scheme for a multiple choice tests does is set the expected value of guessing to zero, providing an unbiased estimator of performance for students who guess randomly.

[rprospero]

Ah. I didn't realize he was doing this on a multiple choice test. It makes complete sense in that context. The Spanish threw me - none of my language courses had multiple choice exams.

I've seen people try and take this scoring scheme out of the multiple choice arena and into a more general program. However, when the answer space is infinite, the expected value for guessing is already zero, so there really isn't any point, besides sadistically torturing students.

[lambdaphage]

Sorry, I should have clarified-- my boss is Spanish but works in computational biology, not Spanish lang/lit.

[eru]

In the real world "I don't know" has more utility than a wrong answer. So you can argue that education should follow that route, too.