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

[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.)