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

[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.