Whew

[trinityvixen]

Survived the test. We'll see how I did come next week. I'm not sure. Once again, I find myself going, "I think I knew everything, but I could see where I might have missed a point or two on not getting wording exactly right." Last time, that led to me doing well but still missing a shit-ton of easy points that I shouldn't have. Also, I think the curve will be higher on this one because it wasn't as out-and-out tricky as the last test. We'll see.

A mini-rant, if I may? Why the hell do teachers give take-home exams? This professor is a really nice guy and all, but I kind of want to throttle him when I have to do an additional half-hour (at least) of work on a take-home exam because his stated excuse is that he has more to test us on but doesn't want us to rush and write novels in the exam space. That reason is bullshit. If you can't write a test that can be reasonably answered in the space of time allotted, that's your problem, not mine.

I guess I don't understand the point of closed-book take-homes either. I don't cheat. I've already done it, and packed it away, not to look at it again until I hand it in. I didn't even touch the computer when I got in until it was done and put away. But I don't have the faith in humanity that some honor code means everybody behaves that way. Pssh.

Comments

[six-demon-bag.livejournal.com]

Congrats on surviving the test!

Nice guy or not, your professor's methods sound... questionable. Yeah, that's a nice way of putting it. And a take-home test on which students aren't supposed to "cheat" and use their books or whatever? That's just retarded. I consider myself an honerable guy, but, in that situation, I don't think I could resist the temptation and I wouldn't blame anyone but the professor for this. It's his own damned fault and that's what he gets.

Anyway.

Break's over and I gotta get back to work. Sorry for ranting on your LJ. : /

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

With the last exam, I looked something up after I had finished it. I turned out to be right, but I don't know what I might have done if I were wrong. It's hard to say.

But yeah, this points to poor time management skills on his part. Thanks for ranting with me!

[mithras03.livejournal.com]

I had a final exam like that in college - it was in class and take home, closed book. In-class exams were usually 3 hours so here's what he did. The first hour was a short answer current events "quiz" and the second 2 hours of the allotted time he expanded to 4 hours, and asked us to take the test with us and write answers to 2 out of 5 possible essay questions within that time (i.e. we couldn't take it home, and hand it in on another day - it was due that day at the end of the 4-hour period), and it had to be typed, and each answer had to be at least 7 pages long. Yeah...all my other exams were cake-walks after that :-P

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

It feels like a failure of the teacher to plan appropriately, you know? If the teacher wants essays during the year, he/she has every right to assign them. If s/he wants essays for the final, that's fine. But it's irresponsible of the teacher to assign such things at the end with no prep time. If you want to test how good the student's recall is, you have to do it in class. Otherwise, you can't control how long they spend pondering something (thus you're not testing their rapid recall) and you're not making sure they aren't using some guide to answer the question (thus not testing their recall at all).

The point of testing is to determine what a person has learned and retained from learning. Sequential testing shows how well they've maintained what they've learned, which is why most classes don't just have one test. The take-home doesn't really prove anything except how quickly some students can Wiki things.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

This has turned into "Ivy recalls her hardest tests," but whatevs.

In high school, European history had a notorious final exam. For that, you had to write an eight-page essay, with footnotes. You were given the questions in advance and given time to work on it. But you had to write that eight-page essay, with footnotes, by hand, with no notes, in a three-hour period.

Yeah.

This meant I (and all my classmates) wrote the essay, then practiced writing it out by hand again until we could do it from memory in the time allotted. My hand has never cramped so badly as it did during the week leading up to that.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

That, my friend, is totally bullshit. Congratulations on your crazy school and its lunatic teachers.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I think it's telling that this test was in European History, a class which was no longer core curriculum but had been previously. This type of testing is clearly a throwback to early twentieth-century classical schooling type of techniques. The teacher had been teaching it for forty years, always giving the same tests, and the fact that it was an elective meant he wasn't forced to change.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Ah, reminds me of the time that I took a pchem exam where you had to answer two out of three questions in the allotted time (all were proofs). Everyone in the class chose to answer the first question...in which he had switched a negative sign to a positive sign. It was unprovable.

As a consequence, everyone in the class spent most of their time trying to make this unsolvable thing solvable, then half-assed the next question. I realized what he'd done as I was walking to my next class and, as soon as I could, went to his office to point out his error. He looked at the test, went huh, you're right, and...that was it. Did I get credit for catching his error? No. Did he curve the test to compensate for the fact that all of us got stuck on this problem? No.

That was the only time I ever seriously considered just putting the test down and leaving because I could not do it.

[moonlightalice.livejournal.com]

I had a really good take-home exam once. It was three essay questions, and it was take-home so that we could a) use any or all of our books and b) not have to rush through the answers. I was up all friggin' night doing it, but I felt like it was both fair and a LEGITIMATE use of the take-home exam.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

To me, a take-home of that style is rather like an essay assignment. You're writing something that you cull from resources, not just testing your ability to recall shit. Functionally, it does not test your recall so well as your reasoning (and ability to read quickly, I suppose). That's all well and good, since you're not testing factual knowledge as much as reasoning. That's a fair use sort of thing. The ones with closed-book, want-to-see-what-you-recall sort of questions? Yeah, I call bullshit.

[saikogrrl.livejournal.com]

Closed book take home exam? That is pretty dumb. It's the same kind of deluded faith that led one of our undergrad professors to post all his lecture PowerPoint info online before each lecture. Guess how full his lectures were after that?

We had an open book in class test for editing, which was necesssary because in a real editing situation there would still be a time limit but of course you would need to consult dictionaries and style guides.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

This professor puts up PowerPoint slides, but you have to go to class to get half the information on the test because the slides are incomplete. He strikes the right balance there--give them enough to lighten the load of notetaking, but they still have to come to class to get the rest.

But the closed book thing--it's a last desperate gasp, you ask me. It's like assuming kids with laptops in class are taking notes (sitting behind them would dispel that illusion right quick).

Ahhh powerpoints

[negativeq.livejournal.com]

I make my slides available after the lesson. They receive versions with blank spaces. To be able to fill in the blanks, they have to show up to class and pay attention. Mwahahahaha. They receive handouts of the slides to write on. And most still know nothing. SO LAZY.

As for testing, I use my best students per section as litmus tests. If THEY all get a question wrong, most likely something is off with the question, I didn't teach it properly, or I may have taught it to one section and not the other. I adjust the scoring if needed. I try to be as fair as possible. Of course, there is no excuse for certain questions. If on a multiple choice with THREE choices, and you pick KIDNEY as a type of blood cell, you're not trying ...

Re: Ahhh powerpoints

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

The nice thing about powerpoint is that you can print out notes to take to class that have pictures, so you don't have to lug the textbook along with and yet can still have the illustration/diagram there to write on. But the note-taking should still prioritize class attendance.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I had a teacher who let students retake the midterm if they didn't like their grade, with the expectation that the same would be true of the final. He was then shocked that no one went to his lectures any more.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I think take homes exist so the teacher doesn't have to proctor them. Also, a closed-book take home is an invitation to cheat. I always feel more pressure doing one, because I assume that most of my classmates will cheat, at least a little, since it is truly a no consequences situation, and that therefore if I don't I will be lower on the curve than I would otherwise have been.

In college, chemistry core lab had an eight hour take home exam. You would think this would be a practical, since it was core lab. You would be wrong. The exam had three questions, each something like "you are starting a business that detects and removes asbestos. What equipment do you need, what regulations must you follow, and what is the expense?" What the FUCK this had to do with ANYTHING we'd done in class I don't know. I aced it because I was the only one to think to go to the EPA website to check government regulations. The EPA also has recommendations on equipment and services to use. The exam was pretty much testing your googling skills and then your ability to cut and paste what you find. It was ludicrous. And why put an eight hour time limit on it? Either give it an hour or two hour time limit or give it no time limit at all. I tracked all the time I spent on it, but do you really think most of my classmates did? I don't.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I would say you're right, but so many teachers assign take-homes on top of the exam. It's only going to create more work for them in the long run. It is laziness in a way--they don't have to bother perfecting time-need on their exam (which, hey, is hard), but really it just makes more work in the end.

And I'm with you on the pressure, since I don't trust people so well and I'm terribly competitive when it comes to grades and totally assuming that unless one cheats, one is automatically at a disadvantage.

I'm loving your insane test history. That's pretty impressive, and you just keep coming up with new ones!

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Well, there's also the time my high school pre-calc teacher who was also a crew coach got conked in the head by the crew shell as they were carrying it into the water. It's the only time I've ever seen a knot on someone's head like in Looney Tunes. Needless to say he got a concussion, and in this state, which he described as feeling drunk, he decided to give a pop quiz. It was nuts. It had shit that we hadn't covered, that wasn't even in the book, and the questions had a billion parts. Like, "my dog Weener (can't remember his dog's name, but it was as stupid as this) is tied to a rope. My yard has a bush here, and a tree here, and another tree here, and a well here, and a fence here, and another bush here, and a poisonous bush here. How long can the rope be before Weener eats the poison berries?"

I've also had teachers who were such geniuses that they had no idea how long it would take an undergrad to do the test. Like, they'd run it by a colleague who'd finish it in a half an hour and figure giving us an hour was plenty of time... Yeah, no.

Oh! And there was the time I found out after a test that a grad student had given the answers to the test to the students who showed up at the weekly study session. I was pissed. I reported him to the teacher. His defense was that if I had wanted those answers, I could have come to the study session. He'd clearly done this out of pique that almost no one did. My defense was I HAD ANOTHER CLASS AT THAT TIME YOU JACKHOLE. Yeah. He got in trouble. Funny thing is, I got all the questions he'd given answers to right anyway, so it's not like it actually affected me. Clearly I'm that student.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Also, most of my science classes had either open book exams or exams where you could bring a cheat sheet. The exception was molecular biology. In both high school and college, the teachers seemed to know that the real test wasn't whether we could recall arbitrary formulas, but whether we could solve them. (In quantum mechanics, having an open book does not help at all.)

Great Teacher Q must comment

[negativeq.livejournal.com]

For the most part, take home exams are bullshit. You know everyone is going to wiki it, or perhaps get a sibling or friend to do it. I spend too much time checking essays and powerpoints for plagiarism. (The time has been shortened since I have the most common cheat sites memorized. Ah hah! Insta-zero!)

I despise open-book exams. Students these days are already overly coddled and infantilized. They are convinced they don't have to retain anything in their heads - they just look it up on their I-phones. To make a point, a few times I gave the kids open-book exams. I warned them, you do NOT want this. I am going to make these very nasty. And they did worse on the open-book than they every did on the closed-books.

Why is that? Because a worthwhile exam is going to be mostly application questions. The recall should be stuff that you SHOULD have in your head at that point in your life. You should be able to figure out the rest from reading the question and thinking about it. If you know jack, then the book and cheat sheet won't help you. You waste time flipping through pages trying to find something relevant. And then you copy nonsense from the book and I sit back and laugh at you.

I'm grading midterms! Can you tell?

Re: Great Teacher Q must comment

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I dunno about open-book tests. I haven't taken all that many. I've had tests where you could bring a note card with equations--it's not a bad thing to do when you're not in an out-and-out math class where the equations are the things to have recall on and apply. If you're talking about physics, or biochem, I don't have a problem with keeping the notes of the equation around, but testing closed-book on the reasoning behind the relationships in the equation is a must.

If it doesn't test your recall and your application skills, what's the point?