On 20050721T213458-0500, Peter Samuelson wrote: > People keep complaining about the Essay Test from Hell, but I guess I > still don't quite see the problem. Who is it that doesn't like it? Is > it AMs that feel it's too much work on top of their other duties to get > to know an applicant's skill level? Is it the competent applicants who > feel it's beneath them? Or is it incompetent applicants who feel > intimidated by all the hard concepts to look up? The Essay Test from Hell is exactly like a traditional unviersity exam, at least as they are performed around here: 1) it's a lot of work, 2) it is stressful for the student, 3) it seems to measure really well what the student/nm has learnt and 4) it actually does not measure anything of the sort. What people learn from traditional exams is not the subject matter but how to pass traditional exams. (Most people do also learn the subject matter, but that's mostly in spite of, not because of, the tests - they realize that they will need to know the stuff after the test, as well.) My day job is half teaching, and that responsibility also carries the need to prepare exams for my students and to grade them. While I am not in any sense a formally qualified teacher (if you must ask, do it privately), I have done some reading on didactics, and especially university-level exam theory and practice. All my sources agree that the traditional exam is a very bad method of conducting exams. The best method is to give the student a real task that they should perform (eg. programming students should be made to create a program that solves a real problem for a real user), and grading should be based on observing both the process and the end result (and the user's satisfaction!); when that is impractical, the students should be given tasks that simulate real tasks (like programming a solution to a realistic but still invented problem). Only when that is also infeasible, should questioning be used, and it should be realized that it is a poor substitute for the better methods. -- Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho, Debian developer http://kaijanaho.info/antti-juhani/blog/en/debian
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature