I still cannot "remember" how to perform a discrete-wavelet-transform from memory (my honor's thesis) but i found myself digging into it a couple of months ago (just fiddling on pet projects). An hour on googling got me on the track. Point is there is so much even those with advanced degrees have to know and having to retain it all in memory all the time is both infeasible and wasteful. Yet expecting kids/young adults to do this is truly hypocritical and disingenuous.
2. Master’s degree courses follow all kinds of schemas for examination. From oral exams, to in person no extra material allowed, to open book, and take home. Being on both sides (taking the exams and creating them) I can say that it really doesn’t matter if you allow people to take the exam home and collaborate among each other. These types of exams are designed to really test a deep understanding and ability of the material. There have been exam questions where an entire class of >20 students are not able to solve it. People that are really good are able to have a shot at it and maybe make some progress, and that differentiates the good from the exceptional.
3. Nowadays undergraduate degrees are a commodity so it feels they need to make sure only the good students get one. But in the end it doesn’t really matter, since most employers (exceptions of course) will want to see how much value the candidate add, which does not correlate with having a degree or good grades
Of course you can, making up results is a time-honored tradition!
It does take a certain amount of skill to do it believably, though.... ;-)
At graduate level, there is too much stuff. You know the outline, you know where to find stuff. But you don't need to know everything exactly. If you forgot one passage from a definition, that should not cause a failure. Because in 'real Mathematics' you get to look at references.
A nice trick for open book is to make it time-infeasible to just look up everything. But allow students access to the materials incase they have a brainfart.
Which is a load of dingos kidneys.
Gate keeping.
All the good doctors I've ever been to have a wall of reference material and use it, even if only to show the patient, but it's there and accessible.
And besides, it's not like practising medical doctors don't make heaps of mistakes.
The number one cause of complications in a medical setting is medical intervention, so it could be argued doctors should be using more reference material and not relying on their over worked brains.
I lived with a orthopedic surgeon doing a specialization in pediatric orthopedia.
He was very very very good based on my understanding of the places he had worked, the offers he had to undertake his specialization, the change in operation waiting times and his model of how he worked within the hospital, and that immediately after returning to his home country he was head of the newly created orthopedic pediatrics ward.
His description of how he would approach a surgery was straight-forward:
- he would review the surgical referral, his notes from his patient intake
- he would review appropriate notes and documentation from the hospital on the allowed surgeries allowed, including reference texts on that particular surgery
- he would create a full plan for entering, performing, and exiting the operation
- (surgery)
- he would review the plan, add notes on how it actually went
So it's not like he woke up, walked into a surgical room, and ad-libbed it.
As an anecdote, he said he liked B-students for his surgical teams because they had to work hard to get there.
I also was good friends with a very nerdy emergency room doctor. He offered the anecdote that he was "called out" for using Google. His justification was that "once you throw in the appropriate medical terms, all you're getting is the latest research on treatments--and I was attempting to offer the best and latest in proven care". He also made the several changes to the shifts at the ER, including using time-sheet and patient data to show that patient outcomes suffered during longer doctor shift rotations. His anecdote on his schooling; "I was a bad student, and I'm a poor doctor, but my job is to get you stable until we can intervene properly". He funded a startup and wrote (in Java) a medical EMR system.
We need more doctors, if that means changing the culture within the profession so they're more inclined to use those reference material that would be good thing.
Overall I think an oral exam run by a skilled examiner is the best of all worlds, but it isn't practical for a section of 500 undergraduate students. It's quite doable for a seminar or manageable up to say 10-15 students, becomes difficult after that.
In some European universities, the outcome is such a foregone conclusion that the candidate's family is laying out the buffet, peeling the cling film off the plates, and unboxing the champagne bottles as the "defense" begins.
In the UK however, I've never seen this. It's generally a small room with candidate, an internal examiner, an external examiner from another university who is an expert in the field, and a convenor to record the minutes of the examination. The outcome is by far from a foregone conclusion.
A good student who is an expert in their field, is well-read and up to date on their work and the surrounding literature will perform well and have little to fear. Someone who hasn't written their own thesis, or didn't really have an understanding of the area, and thus isn't really an expert, will have a very unpleasant time, and will likely be failed, or be sent away with major corrections to be completed to the satisfaction of the examiners, possibly including a full oral re-examination.
America is leaking again.
Ok, from a terminology point of view that's fair - it isn't the same everywhere by any means.
However, most if not all of the graduate programs I know if internationally have something roughly equivalent, whether they are comps or prelims or qualifying or whatever.
The basic idea is that a department (and university, generally) has an interest in maintaining the quality of their programs, and one way to do that is to make sure that your students never leave with glaring holes in their background. The best way to do this is some sort of comprehensive evaluation, and the time to do it is at or near the beginning of a program - otherwise there is no time to address deficiencies.
The common factor among all UK PhDs I know of is that there is a rigorous viva at the end, where the outcome for the sudent is not a foregone conclusion. Despite the shorter overall duration of the PhD (~3 to 4 years typically), the oral examination can (rightly) cover material far beyond the scope of your thesis - if you are an expert in your field, you will be able to have a knowledgeable and informed discussion as a peer with your external examiner, who will be a recognised expert in the field. I'm definitely a big believer in the importance of being able to have a well-informed discussion around the area of your work, and actually found the whole viva process very enjoyable and cordial - a nice chat about the wider field, my and the examiners' own previous work, some debate of the merits of different approaches, and then onto a run-through of the thesis, chapter-by-chapter, skipping any pages where there were no points for discussion or contention.
Unlike European vivas though, there's no family or friends, no champagne corks being popped mid-defense, and no foregone conclusion of the outcome. I've been at European vivas with the family of the candidate preparing the celebratory buffet at the back of the auditorium while the questioning continues!
While the UK model is probably preferable in a lot of ways, this sounds much more enjoyable :)
At least that's the theory - I don't know if in practice it holds up; most of the grad students and later I knew from that system came from oxbridge which has a number of quirks.
My experience of it was that if you are genuinely knowledgeable and approaching being an expert in your field, it is an enjoyable experience, and just like having a (longer than usual, but not uncomfortably long) conversation with someone about a topic that you both share a deep interest in. There is nothing to worry about, as you can have a nice discussion about an interesting topic, and share interesting ideas etc.
I'm not sure if it's a lower bar for grad as such - I think it's got fewer "formal" requirements, and far more informal requirements. The most common way to "fail" is to simply not submit the thesis.
My impression was that someone failing their viva was seen as a serious failure on the part of their supervisor, who should not have let them submit without being more prepared.
That matches my limited experience with UK, although I've seen north american ones without a foregone conclusion - seems really dependent on institution.
> The most common way to "fail" is to simply not submit the thesis.
I think that's true everywhere, lot's of people just don't complete. I've heard somewhere that the "ABD" (all but dissertation) rate in US is nearly 50% at 10 years, if you go across all disciplines.
The two are pretty much equivalent, but with different names.
Open book is also fine in this case because without a base of memorized understanding an open book isn't that helpful anyway.
For advanced degrees, though, I'm not so sure. I expect someone which a masters or Ph.D. to actually be an expert in the subject matter, not just someone who is really good at figuring out how to solve problems. A big part of that is being able to internalize the information so well they you in effect become a resource that could be used by an undergraduate student. This internalization goes beyond rote memorization, but memorization is a big part of it too.
Just a disclaimer, though - I do not have an advanced degree, so maybe I expect too much from those who do? A big reason why I have no interest in pursuing one is that many people with a masters degree I find have little expertise to show for it, they could have just as easily learned the same information by self-study or being fortunate enough to find interesting work. (the hiring landscape is a separate topic)