Today was the last class of the semester. The Administration has scheduled the exams where I have to be present all at the same hour distributed in 12 classrooms. The exams are open, that is, the students can bring and consult books, notes, pocket calculators, etc. In that format, cheating is almost unnecessary and impossible. The pic does not illustrate Fluid Mechanics (we have no girls with fat legs. We have no girls.). Yet, as Alex Tabarrok wrote in his blog:
I sometimes find evidence of cheating on exams but I rarely take action, I don’t have to. Almost invariably the cheaters get abysmally low grades even without penalty. Some people I know get annoyed when students without evident handicap ask for and receive special treatment such as extra time on exams. I comply without rancor as the extra time never seems to help. Over the years I have had a number of students ask for incompletes. None have ever become completes.I call this the law of below averages.
Today was the last class of the semester. The Administration has scheduled the exams where I have to be present all at the same hour distributed in 12 classrooms. The exams are open, that is, the students can bring and consult books, notes, pocket calculators, etc. In that format, cheating is almost unnecessary and impossible. The pic does not illustrate Fluid Mechanics (we have no girls with fat legs. We have no girls.). Yet, as Alex Tabarrok wrote in his blog:
10 comments:
The same is true for homework plagiarism. They always copy crap.
I love extended time. Extended time is parnossa for my family. In the US, when you receive extended time on the college admissions test , there used to be an asterisk on the score indicating this. Then someone with no arms, who had received extended time, sued the College Board for "discrimination". Now when you receive extended time, there is no way for the colleges to know. Therefore there is a whole industry of obtaining extended time for the "learning disabled". My wife (a psychologist) specializes in this field. Rich parents angling for an advantage spend thousand of $ on an "evaluation" in order to qualify for extended time. For some reason, every child that she tests turns out to be disabled and in need of more time - disability is an epidemic. Like Indian ancestry, it is everywhere. This puts bread on my table. May it continue forever.
I agree that it adds no real advantage - your first answer is usually correct. I left my multiple choice bar examination (which I passed) maybe 1/2 hour early - I answered all the questions, rechecked my answers and then left. If I had changed any answers it would have probably been for the worse.
K
I paid 2000 sheqels for a psychologist to get that evaluation for my Daughter Number One. She made very long a serious tests, prepared graphs and summaries and delivered an impressive report. I started to read it in her office and seemed all absurd. How is that you say that she does not remember what she learns? Everybody learns with repetition, Even a dog remembers. And so. BTW the report is secret information and nobody gets access to it, thanks God. The girl finished second degree and wants to start PhD. She has excellent memory.
$500 - that's cheap. In the US you could not get such a fancy report for $500.
I make fun of the "learning disability" racket but in fact it is real, though it was unrecognized in the past and like gout, is a disease of the rich. Of course such children can learn, but my wife likens it to a road on a highway system that is blocked. This does not mean that you cannot reach your destination, but you must take an alternative path, a detour around the obstacle. Some children have problems with oral comprehension - they learn visually, so you leach them visually. For others it is the opposite - you get them books on tape. And so on.
K
K
That is exactly what the psychologist said. She has to learn to find ways to learn. Apparently she did, because she is working in the investment department of a large insurance company.
" agree that it adds no real advantage - your first answer is usually correct. I left my multiple choice bar examination (which I passed) maybe 1/2 hour early - I answered all the questions, rechecked my answers and then left. If I had changed any answers it would have probably been for the worse."
:)
I wasn't so smart.
Finished the entrance exam subjects for faculty in something like 1 h out of 3 - before I had some participations at national olympics on the same field.
But instead of walking out started a recheck and found hmmm errors. Exactly what mother explicitly told mo not to do.
Ans started to correct but then discovered I was just stating to be influenced by emotions and hmmm had to write the fracking paper which I corrected once again.
But hmmmm the page structure wasn't thje same now.
Back then at written entrance exams leaving strange empty spaces might be considered an attempt to fix the exam as by leaving signs.
It could mean instant elimination of that paper.
So I sweated a lot and managed to write it again so it matched the other sheets.
Fortunately I had enough time to do all this and just run out after finishing, still half an hour to the end.
Managed to get 9.95 out of 10, but the hardest note I ever got.
You were much smarter K.
"The exams are open, that is, the students can bring and consult books, notes, pocket calculators, etc. In that format, cheating is almost unnecessary and impossible."
Had teachers practicing this also. If you know the subject it might be of modest help. For people who have problems with stress management. For me it was nice as an insurance policy, it gaved me great confidence. I was always learning in the latest moment possible so the danger of forgetting some formulas was always present. And deducing them was time consuming and then you had a problem because it didn't live enough time for the rest of the work. And also made you concentrate on different issue then what were the main ones.
Usually not a problem, but during an exam I had problems switching from one to another.
But otherwise it's of no use from what I saw.
Interesting psychological effects though.
"I comply without rancor as the extra time never seems to help. Over the years I have had a number of students ask for incompletes. None have ever become completes."
Observed the same. Always.
Only exception was once at a mathematics exam.
(A colleague who was always in high school close to international olympics, always very very close to qualify. And that with drinking, girlfriends, etc.
Way way above my level, from a different film. Great and fast carrier in IT after faculty etc etc.)
So this guy thought that he was a sort of Perelman. And tried to solve a problem, also tolpology if I remember correctly through some different methods, didn't understand anyway what he did. And he took extra time. Everyone surprised of course. And he wrote a lot of pages.
Anyway it proved he was wrong, he wasn't Perelman, teachers were sort of ashamed after some debates, didn't know what to do, and he got 5 out of 10 points.
Re took the exam - needed approval, got it easily of course and got 10. In probably less then an hour.
:)))
Keep in mind bar exam was pass/fail. The passing score was something like 70% correct (they need to set the bar to the bar very low or they would end up excluding too many blacks, leading to political controversy, law suits, etc. - as it is, over 1/2 of blacks who enter law school never pass the bar - white pass rate is around 85% ). So I was not worried - I have always been a very calm test taker - just as J mentions regarding swimming, panic is your biggest enemy.
Usually I can guess the answers on a multiple choice exam by process of elimination (or at least narrow it down to a couple) even if I don't know the material.
Of course, there are some tests that require more perfection. In my daughter's class at MIT, the median SAT math score is 780/800 . 1 wrong answer out of 54 gets you a 780 and 2 wrong is a 760... something like that. My daughter had 1 wrong (a stupid mistake, well within her knowledge if she had been thinking clearly), which, I tease her, makes her only an "average" MIT student. I don't know how those Asian kids (mostly) maintain their focus to get 800s. Like my daughter, I can't imagine maintaining enough focus not to slip up accidentally on even 1 question. The questions are not that hard (calculus is not tested on the basic SAT) but usually somewhere along the line you make some stupid error. Not that it make any difference - they are looking for lots of other attributes and don't really care if you have a somewhat lower score as long as you have those other factors ( minority, athlete, female in the case of MIT, etc.) On the other hand, they delight in turning away scholarly Chinese boys w. 800s. They spit them out all day. Pthhoey.
K
In my daughter's class at MIT, the median SAT math score is 780/800 . 1 wrong answer out of 54 gets you a 780 and 2 wrong is a 760... something like that.
Now I get it. It was something similar in my example. Our last entrance score was 9.6 out of 10.
So you\re a little bit worried. And hmmm you can panic easily. Somehow I managed to do this at the math test, and I needed probably half the time. But I squezed it in a third and then started to look for errors and then panicked.
Now it amuses me. Each time I was convinced I was so very smart I got a lesson of humility.
Anyway I managed to sweat 980/1000 at that test.
And after Hmmm I wasn\t so arrogant anymore. So at physics test took the time moved slowly etc and managed 995/1000.
But I didn\t dare to even think about any check up.
Interesting to think about STEM in US universities - you mentioned it. Practical results in real world are so very low that it is a very interesting case study.
Why this lack of results takes place is a fascinating subject.
PS. About the main subject. J is absolutely right I think. More time is of no use in general. The allocated time is enough if you don't panic.
And except entrance tests you got no reason to panic.
Why this lack of results takes place is a fascinating subject.
I can thing of a few reasons. On one end , things are going to hell as a result of changing racial / IQ composition and political correctness. At the very top, things are more competitive than ever, driven largely by an Asian vanguard that other groups struggle to keep up with. As I mentioned before, in the STEM competitions where my daughter has succeeded, the winners roster looks like an Asian festival (esp. in relation to the # of Asians in the general US population). (The WASPs used to kvetch about the Jews this way). This goes along with Murray's thesis that there are increasingly "two Americas" that are isolated from each other. One America, the one you find at top universities, etc. is Asian and Jewish (at Harvard these 2 groups account for 40% of the enrollment vs. 6% of the general population) with some residual WASPs and a handful of blacks and hispanics thrown in to make the catalog photos look good and they get a top notch education -maybe the best in the world. Most of the non-Asian minorities gravitate to the "Studies" (Black studies, hispanic studies, etc.) departments because they can't keep up with the fierce competition in the hard sciences. The other is Hispanic and Black and poor white and they are half educated to a barely above 3rd world standard. WHen you blend the 2 worlds you get the US standing 25th or something in world rankings but this disguises the polarization - one US is 1st and the other is 50th.
I haven't seen the race figures by major at MIT (I suspect they guard them fiercely) but for gender, while they try to balance the class at almost 50/50, there is a vast gender gap in majors that ranges from 70/30 to 30/70. I suspect the same is true by race.
K
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