I suspect that the students who do brilliantly under exam conditions would do even more brilliantly and the students who genuinely would have done OK but for those conditions would do OK - but that the main effect would be a big sorting-out at what’s now the 2.i level. In other words, we’d lower the 2.i hump and bulk up the left and right tails. (Was that what we wanted to do? I forget.)

This is solvable too, you combine the effectively unlimited exam time with a complete open book policy. No discussions is all you really need to insist on. Then you ask fundamental questions they haven’t seen before, all of which are answerable if only you understand the course material well.

The down side is it’s a real pain to mark, and will risk leaving you terribly depressed about your abilities, and theirs. It’s a bit like oral exams that way, but perhaps more practical for a large class.

I guess, but even in mid-hourlong-exam I let students go use the restroom.

I do remember having a logic professor who prohibited me from leaving the examination hall to use the restroom. I finished the test ignoring the intermittent bouts of rather acute abdominal pain, and hard-mindedly wrote a whole additional paragraph, apparently encoded in what I guess was not-quite-satisfactory predicate logic notation, which asserted that anyone who would humiliate themselves by resorting to bathroom liaisons in order to discover answers for a test as blastedly undemanding as this one ought to be completely beneath the notice of as distinguished a gentleman as he.

I probably still have the blue book marked 96/100 around somewhere—had points taken off for errors in that extra paragraph. But yes, not letting exam-takers use the restroom is a horrible horrible policy, unless the university where you teach is kind enough to provide students with longer than a ten-minute break between exams that occur at opposite ends of campus. :P

Oral exams would certainly have been good fun though

Oral exams are, for better or worse, an excellent means for very quickly finding out just how comprehensively befuddled one’s ‘C’ students really are. (And this gets back around, obliquely, to the general topic of the thread: what does a letter grade or a ranking like 2.1 mean, what does it communicate, and is it reasonable to call today’s grades “inflated”?)

I like that idea – it’s true that the task of connecting idea A with ethical question B and body of research C doesn’t go that well with what we think of as Exam Conditions. It’s not so much the coffee as the concomitant toilet break that I worry about: our in-bred* dislike of being watched while peeing would create a substantial opportunity for what we pedagogues refer to as “cheating”.

Learnt? Culturally specific? Universal?*

**OK, wrong thread.

But I tend to think that there’s a holistic element – in philosophy anyway – which means you’re not really ready to be examined in anything until you’ve finished the course (though if I’m honest there’s also an element of exhausting the appeal of cut-price sybariticism before coming round to the idea of doing some focussed study.)

‘cross-cutting’ essay questions, i.e. required them to think on their feet and write an essay’s worth of connected prose Isn’t that kind of supposed to be the idea? Oral exams would certainly have been good fun though, in a world in which suitably qualified examiners were sufficiently plentiful.

This sounds far less fun than oral examinations. It could be quite fun for students, and I imagine more useful for assessment purposes, if the university let you book an exam room for all Saturday and you let students bring a bag lunch and coffee and take a few hours to complete the essays, so they can afford to cross-cut at a ponderous pace.

“Mastermind”-type questions, as I explained it to a student the other day. It’s generally considered unsporting to set an entire exam in this format – students like to have an essay question so they can trot out the essay they’ve prepared get to grips with the subject in depth. In one module last year we set ‘cross-cutting’ essay questions, i.e. required them to think on their feet and write an essay’s worth of connected prose. We got complaints. (We also got some pretty good exam scripts.)

No. It’s a very good way of asking a number of different kinds of question about the content of a course and getting answers. Set coursework, and you usually end up with one or two extended essays. Students quickly realise that to amximise their marks in the extended essay, they need to concentrate in depth on their essay topic. An exam is a very handy (and comparatively cheap) way of setting some questions that test knowledge of the course as a whole alongside others that go into depth. I don’t think, by the way, that humanities degrees should only be assessed through exams like mine was.

Open papers are a very good way to combine the standards of coursework and the flexibility of an exam, but they only really work for residential study where you can assume that every student is equally able to shuck off all their other responsibilities for up to 12 / 24 / 48 / 72 hours.

Whatever way you chose to assess you’re left with a reflection of different abilities and levels of engagement.

As for slipping standards, I have a hunch that it is getting increasingly difficult to fail a course. In some institutions I’m familiar with they go to extraordinary lengths to keep ‘bums on seats’. This means there are lots of thirds and 2.2s that probably should have failed. This pushed satisfactory/average students into the 2.1s, to distinguish them from the strugglers; while a 1st is still a 1st, except the distance between 1st class work and truly mediocre has narrowed.

As I say, just a hunch… It wouldn’t take much to convince me that standards are slipping and we’re all off to Hell in handcart.

In humanities subjects, at least, the only meaningful rationale for closed examination is to prevent cheating; and if stopping the students cheating were to be the determining rationale for assessment policy, then we’d be acknowledging that it isn’t really education any more, it’s just a knock-down fight for the piece of paper with the highest number on it…

And lack of student… affinity. General analytical skill. Comfort tackling new things. These are important and rare characteristics, increasingly rare as greater portions of the population

Bloix has got me thinking about why so many of these folks, who quite possibly don’t find any enjoyment in their studies, go to college. I’ve long held this idea that any human being who wishes to take an interesting or potentially useful course at a college should have the opportunity to do so. Grading systems (as well as tuition, class meeting hours, and geographic distribution of public universities) should be set up to facilitate this: relevant to this thread, a student should be able to treat a grade as a meaningful communication from the assessor about her/his understanding as reflected in her/his work.

Take a 2 hour exam, and set it as a coursework and suddenly you find grades improve dramatically. Is that due to better teaching methods?

But… but… rephrase this. Take some coursework, and assign it instead as an hour exam. The grades will fall dramatically. Is that due to worse teaching methods?

What’s so hard about a 2 hour exam?

• No opportunity to consult resources.

• No time to think.

If there was a way to accomplish the former without the latter, I’d be all for it. Student wants to take an extra hour to finish their exam? Why not? Gives me a chance to see what they can do with a fairly peaceful head: I’m interested in what they understand, not how well they destress in real time.

Granted, there are limits to what it’s possible to do: you just can’t get an exam room for 4 hours. But it always saddens me to give an exam and see students just rushing, just rushing not thinking not processing just go go go, for the last 20 minutes of an hour exam. I see them fail to do things I know they can do, since I’ve seen them do the same tasks in class fluently. I see them hit mental blocks there’s no justifiable reason for me to want them to hit.

Neither I nor they get anything out of the responses which are written in this state of mind. So I completely agree with D² on this one.

I know this sounds like conservative bollocks, always claiming that things were better in the past, but it isn’t. I certainly do not think that students are lazier, more stupid or anything like that. But I’ve taught at enough Math departments and have seen syllabi reduced in response to lack of student knowledge. Scaling is a big thing where I am – essentially, the university decides how many of each grade classification there are. And simply, as a professional, you think you have a good feel for standards (this can be misleading, however).

I don’t think it is entirely negative, because I think it largely results because of increased student numbers, which is most definitely a good thing. But just because there are some tired old arguments from boring conservatives saying that standards are falling, doesn’t mean its not true.

isn’t this just the exams vs coursework debate though? or am I wrong in assuming that this is pretty much settled as a matter of educational philosophy?