Re:I asked my students to turn in their cell phones and writ...
by klodolph on Friday December 27, 2019 @12:57PM
(#21892904)
> Also learning to remember to complete a closed book exam is not a useful skill anymore.
The exam is going to cover some well-tread parts of whatever subject you are studying. For most reasonable exam questions, especially at undergraduate level, you can find some answer online without having to do the reasoning yourself as long as you understand the terms. However, I would like to see undergraduates prepared to answer questions which are more obscure or unusual, and being able to reason through these questions with your knowledge of the field is a critical skill to make this possible.
Additionally, you should be spending some of your time memorizing things. This is just necessary to have some kind of fluent conversation with other people studying the same subject.
My personal preference for most subjects is a combination of open-book and closed-book. It’s hard to design the closed-book portion so that it doesn’t come down to a memorization game. The solution I usually prefer is to create a larger test, and allow students to a subset of the test to answer, but this creates a larger burden on the graders and the instructor creating the curriculum.
The exam is going to cover some well-tread parts of whatever subject you are studying. For most reasonable exam questions, especially at undergraduate level, you can find some answer online without having to do the reasoning yourself as long as you understand the terms. However, I would like to see undergraduates prepared to answer questions which are more obscure or unusual, and being able to reason through these questions with your knowledge of the field is a critical skill to make this possible.
Additionally, you should be spending some of your time memorizing things. This is just necessary to have some kind of fluent conversation with other people studying the same subject.
My personal preference for most subjects is a combination of open-book and closed-book. It’s hard to design the closed-book portion so that it doesn’t come down to a memorization game. The solution I usually prefer is to create a larger test, and allow students to a subset of the test to answer, but this creates a larger burden on the graders and the instructor creating the curriculum.