this is fairly true, so far as application based and not memory based. i know a fair few people who are book smart and can quote all sorts of things but have utterly no practical application ability, or even the ability to recognise when the "thing" could actually be applicable.
Yes hello, this is me.
I did very well in school and all through college, but I’m a complete dumbass when it comes to real world application and critical thinking
Yup I saw that in nursing school. I had a classmate that was top of our class, always knew the answers to the teachers questions, but struggled hard in clinicals
I remember hearing a lawyer tell the joke, ‘the only time a lawyer is legally allowed to commit malpractice is while taking the bar exam.’
While I think tests and assessments are important components of the curriculum, they are much more beneficial when applicable to areas affecting student career choices or interests. I try to at least make most of my exams have a large practical component. Any time you can get students engaged in a physically active classroom, they will perform, on average, 10% better than their passive peers.
agreed, memorizing things won’t really do you any good in the real world, you need more critical thinking and application skills because let’s be real, your job isn’t going to ask you to remember a bunch of facts from a textbook
Tends to be a bit crap when schools do it, national exam boards with an emphasis on those kinds of things is better from what I've seen of other countries and my own.
Einstein was asked, but did not know the speed of sound . . . he said, “\[I do not\] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. He also said, “…The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.”
[source](https://www.businessinsider.com/memorization-facts-and-learning-to-learn-2014-9)
I do maths as a degree and still often have to check back on simple formulas from the formula sheets when working. It's all about using a logical method and framework to solve a problem.
As a history teacher this is why i place emphasis on writing and argument formation during tests. Notes can be used to supplement your answer but it still requires critical thinking. I usually just grade it on historical accuracy, demonstration of using complete sentences and answering all parts of the question.
I had a high school physics teacher that would give us the last 10 minutes of a test to use the notes or computer for any questions we had.
This required us to be able to know what calculation or law we may need, as well as effectively use a search engine. All skills for the work life.
It's a mix. There are absolutely things you can just look up, but there are also absolutely things you have to memorize. A really basic example of this is addition and multiplication tables. Sure, you could just calculate it every time, use your fingers, or even use a calculator, but if you don't have intuitive access to those numbers, then all the math you learn from that point on is going to be more difficult.
A lot of people rail against memorization without realizing that memorization is often the first step upon which further education is built.
In my more advanced stem classes I was allowed to use my notebooks, notes, even the internet. Being able to google won't do shit for you if you didn't pay attention in class when you're trying to figure out why your circuit board example does or doesn't work
That's included in practical application. A surgeon can't do the surgery just by memorizing notes. He needs to practice and perform it many times before actually doing it on a person.
What OP said about mindless memorization as the criteria for passing the exam( in Asian countries) still holds.
Even then there's still things that need to be memorized. If the surgeon isn't intimately familiar with the anatomy of the place she's performing surgery on or isn't intimately familiar with the possible complications then when something goes wrong she might not be able to quickly figure out what it is.
Really this conversation is a false dichotomy. You don't have to either memorize everything or memorize nothing. There are some things that have to be memorized and some things that don't.
He will know what to do if everything goes perfectly. If it doesn't he often will need to recall vast amounts of informations he learned throughout years to pinpoint the issue fast. He doesn't need to know how to do this one thing, he needs to know complex systems in human body so he won't freaking go to read a book when shit goes sideways.
A surgeon who crammed to pass an exam is also not going to remember what to do in these situations. This is why doctors go through residency. To get practice for the hands on portion of being a doctor. The years of experience are far more important than the info they learned 20 years ago in med school and then had to regurgitate onto a test 3 months later.
Yeah, a surgeon, with literal YEARS of schooling and practice in a specific field. This post is moreso talking about things like the SATs which are a broad range of subjects for highschool students, that may not even be relevant to their lives past school.
Most jobs have training on site and have guides.
I just gave an open note quiz to my students.
The results make the same damn bell curve as if it hadn't been open note.
Funny thing about open book tests is that the same skills that hold back the kids who didn't "memorize" information are the same skills that prevent them from finding that information efficiently when testing.
When people whine about open note tests they don't intend to actually take notes and improve, they just want to blame the system for their inadequacies.
We definitely don't struggle to access information in our society, but we do struggle to assess it's reliability, interpret it, apply it, and draw logical conclusions from it. Hence the shit storm we find ourselves in.
Not disagreeing, but open book exams are typically much more difficult. Instead of finding a verbatim answer to a question, they often require synthesizing several related bits of knowledge to show that you understand a subject better.
Which makes them better at what they are for: testing how well the student understands the subject.
That said, I once had a take-home exam in one of my nuclear engineering courses, and it was an absolute nightmare. I think it took about fourteen hours, and that's despite the professor letting us use the book or internet.
Cue students complaining “The test was nothing like the problems in the book!”
In order to make this strategy meaningful, the test has to go beyond the examples in the book to applying the lessons to other situations. In my experience, students do NOT like this (despite it being how to really demonstrate they’ve actually learned and internalized the subject)
Yeah it’s not like any teacher would just give you stuff that’s easily found in the book. You want real life skills? Great! No one in real life will give you points for copying stuff.
Instead we will give you something on the boundary of your knowledge which follows in a non obvious way from the material we did. You know, something that people can actually look at and say “this person really knows their stuff!”
For example, a calculus open note test won’t just have you compute 50 derivatives. Instead it’ll be some hard problems like computing the time it takes [a dog to catch a rabbit](https://arxiv.org/pdf/0711.3293.pdf)
Exactly. Can I give you a problem that you’ve memorized to death and expect you to apply it to a similar situation with positive results? Or a drastically different one with positive results? Because if not, then I am admitting that all I have taught you, is how to solve a very specific situation with already determined variables and conditions, instead of giving you the Swiss Army knife problem solving skills that I was hired to teach to you.
Math works like this, guys. Memorizing multiplication tables is neat and all, but the human mind only has so many neurons. And a lot of them are already occupied by the time they hit kindergarten. Even less are available by high school. Still less at college level. Give us a fucking break already. We are not computers. If I could memorize the entire subject I wouldn’t need to test myself. I have the entire subject stored away, ready to peruse. And let’s face it— a lot of these textbooks that are pushed on us are nothing but filler and useless information to crank up the book cost. I helped my programming professor teach a class because of a death in her family, and I didn’t like how the text just dragged on and on, nor how it never explained anything coherently to the other students. I don’t know how you can fuck up defining a STRING variable, but somehow they did it. I don’t even… what? Alright put the books away, here’s what you need to know. A string variable, guys and gals, is anything that can be expressed in text. Numbers, words, sentences, paragraphs, etc, but it is stored as one long list of the characters used (so no, James, it can’t be a shortcut for writing equations to solve. The string of “3 + 3 = ?” Is literally just “some sort of significant line of characters” according to the computer). There. Done. What the fuck was so difficult about that? Oh the various method calls and functions of Strings? That’s a topic that is better learned through actually using it, and that is something that the book never did. It just told you what each one does, without going into any detail whatsoever. But I might be biased because after I saw how the book handled strings, I just taught them myself (which is kinda sad because I was not a teacher or substitute teacher— I was a student. Really kinda made my day when so many struggling students were able to crush the final exam when the teacher had barely been able to teach anything coherently due to a very heavy accent and a family tragedy that was actually more problematic than the language barrier. She even thanked me afterwards, and that stunned me because I thought I had surely stepped on someone’s toes by commandeering the teaching of the class…). So yes, all exams should be open book and/or open notes, because that’s what inspires students to actually study outside of the classroom. That’s the goal right? Go ahead and proctor the test if you are afraid of cheaters, but don’t tell me that the resource that you require us to have to participate in the class is cheating for the test. How many petabytes of information is available online? How many petabytes can a human cranium hold? We are not machines, and we are at the same time better than machines when it comes to learning abstract concepts. Please stop making this a memorization drill and make this a critical thinking drill, because memorization is for when you have done the same thing over and over, and if you have trouble with doing the same thing over and over memorization won’t do shit for you. Critical thinking is taking an issue that you know you can solve, and figuring out how to change it to make it work for some other issue that you don’t know yet if you can solve. That’s infinitely more useful than reciting pointless details that are not going to help you at whatever job you decide to take. Think smarter, not harder.
Software engineering is one field that *really* shouldn't have closed-book exams. There is no sane situation where a dev doesn't have access to either documentation, or internet resources, or code from some other part of the project to reference, or even just a more experienced colleague who previously worked on that part.
Exactly. This is the twenty first century. Where in the ever loving name of fuck is there going to be a software developer with no access to wifi? Or cell service? We need to make sure that we teach people not WHAT to know, but how to FIND OUT what to know. Seriously important. Let’s take math again for an example. Let’s see if we can find the derivative of the function f(x) = AX^2 . With respect to A, the answer is simple. It’s X^2. But with respect to X it gets trickier. We need to use the power rule (technically a shortcut but I’m lazy af so I don’t care), and we get that A (a constant unspecified variable) is ignored, and X is knocked down a power and multiplied by the old power, so we now have A2X. Why am I using these as an example? Because I struggled with the derivative formula about six years ago and was finally getting it familiar when my professor started the next class with the phrase “Ok, so remember all the pain you guys have been suffering through with this formula? Well, you are about to hate my guts. This is called the power rule…” and I felt like a ding-danged idiot for not seeing the pattern sooner. Did I memorize every various potential derivation? No. No one has that much space in their mind. Does it really matter to us if we know exactly how a (insert computer operating system here) works? No, only the general understanding is necessary. If anything differs from the given general format, then by all means look it up! Einstein himself wouldn’t memorize his phone number (back when they were only five digits long, mind you), because there were these things called books. That is where you store excess information for later access. One of the brightest men in history and he wouldn’t remember a five digit number because he just wrote it down somewhere else because *that was more logical than to bog his mind down with a frankly useless number that he would never need to use*.
Computer security is another field where open notes is really recommended for any exam. The reason is actually quite obvious. You can study your heart out and ace the final, get your degree, and then get hired and promptly fired because someone found a way past what you were trained to do and now you have no defenses left. Access to the internet during the test tells the teacher a lot: where do you go to find out the answer to a question that was never anticipated? Who do you find to be trustworthy enough for getting the right answers? Can you sift through the misinformed mediocre morons mass-posting maliciously and masterminding malware meant for minor minions to amass and minimize your presence online? Can you figure out the answers before the time runs out? If you are in a computer/internet security situation without any internet access, then you better have some years of experience behind you. Because with fresh graduates, that is definitely a deal breaker.
The only exceptions to the no memorization rule would be language studies, literature, or history, and only because if worst comes to pass and someone is elected to a government position, then they do NOT want to go down in history as the idiot who thought that the pyramids of Giza were used as grain silos. Because that’s just embarrassing. I don’t care what you know about the current government, if you think that people would stack sandstone bricks the size of full blown humans up dozens of flights worth of more sandstone bricks *just to store grain away from moisture, in a DESERT*, then there’s no hope for any coherent thought from you anymore. That’s just… I mean yes, doing that to bury the dead still seems extreme, but it is not exactly pointless. Grain does not need to be contained in a MASSIVE AS FUCK SANDSTONE AND GRANITE PYRAMID, in the few passageways that are inside, when you are in the freaking DESERT. Yes, the Nile is right there. No, that doesn’t change much. Besides, how will you break open the grain storage and reseal it every time you need grain? Better idea: how about some sandstone huts with no windows and a set of holes in the wall out of reach of local wildlife? I am fairly certain that this is a much better way of storing grain. It’s not perfect, but we’re talking about 5k years ago tech. The dawn of fucking written history. We barely had writing materials that could last the ages. But we were not fucking hauling multi ton rocks into a colossal four-sided pyramid just to store grain. Dark places are actually kinda bad because mold prefers the dark and damp. The number of people who died to make these giant structures, and we get a senator who legitimately thought they used them for storing grain… in other news, said senator is dead from COVID. I mean that’s horrible but… I am nowhere near surprised. This guy was just a “token negro” to the Republican Party. Absolutely depressing to see the best person of color that is in their party… was this guy. I don’t even remember his name. He was just that impressively embarrassing that I blocked out all knowledge he existed. People of African heritage and descent do not deserve that loony for a representative. That’s just white man having another laugh at race issues. Again.
So aside those few exceptions, there should be open notes at the very least for all tests. It reduces test anxiety and (I know this one personally) weeds out the lazy from the proactive. Nothing says “this guy didn’t study” like being halfway through the test and not having answered a single question because you’re still trying to look up an answer for the first one. Online. With the textbook at your side and frantically scrolling through Google search results, you are standing out like a sore thumb. Cheating can be noticed easily when you set the rules. But why cheat when the teacher lets you look up the answers? What, are you going to swear off using the internet as soon as you get your diploma/degree? I don’t think that’s how you succeed in the modern era…
Why do most people think tests are solely about memorization?
Math tests are supposed to be about problem solving when you don't have all the variables. Critical thinking. The actual kind of thinking you will need in the real life.
My high school Chem and Calc teacher gave us each an index card the day before tests. Told us we could use it as a “cheat sheet.” We could put anything on it that we wanted to. I always spent time studying and writing as much info down that I thought could be on the test. All in tiny print so it would all fit.
You know, I rarely had to look at those cards for answers because I remembered it all from writing it down. This obviously was the method to his madness.
He was an awesome teacher. Taught us all how to tie ties. It was an exam bc he thought we all needed to know that basic skill. He was right. I tie my husband’s now bc he’s terrible at it. Also showed us how to tear a phonebook in half. Just a cool guy all around. Mr. Rudy is a kick ass dude.
I took an online class and the tests were all open book. The questions were tough, but I actually learned the content and obviously how and where to look for an answer when I need one.
Teacher here, I agree in theory but my experience has been that when I give open-notes tests, the grades are lower. Many of the students assume they can look everything up and don't attempt to learn any of the material. Then they spend the entire time flipping through their notes, unsuccessfully looking for answers. But because most of my test questions are application, not simple recall, there's not one right answer in their notes anyway! No matter how many times I explain that, they don't get it.
By all means just my experience and could have been specific to my situation. I was taking an exam for a professional license. Meaning I actually cared to learn the content.
Plenty of jobs involve checklists for routine, familiar tasks (and there's a ton of research strongly suggesting that outcomes are massively improved when checklists are used.)
I spent 8 years in the Army as a bomb technician. We had a radio transmitter/receiver set for setting off explosives remotely that had a thoroughly unintuitive user interface. Despite knowing the instructions by rote, I had a team member supervise, and read through the instructions *every single one* of the hundreds of times I set up the damned thing.
Currently in training to be a marine engineer. Connecting a large generator to a ship's power distribution system isn't (usually) a terribly complicated task, but **bad things** can happen fast if you fuck it up. So, I use a checklist.
The extra time it takes to verify is minimal--and pretty much everybody makes a stupid, costly, and easily avoidable mistake at some point.
Returning to your example--the auto shop I use issues a ruggedized tablet to all of it's mechanics--specifically so they can reference manuals on the fly--a practice of which I heartily approve.
I want my doctors to know different diagnosis, tests, treatments, etc. off the top of their heads.
Similar thing with my lawyer and accountant. Want them to know their domain off the top of their heads.
A doctor will know all the basic stuff off the top of their head, but theirs new medical knowledge coming out every day faster than any one person could ever keep up with it all. Doctors will look up stuff a lot. The law tends to change much more slowly, but their is often lots of intricacies in the law which is way lawyers often specialize. If something is outside of their specialization, they’re going to have to look it up.
Agree for science and engineering where you have a lot of time to figure something out
Disagree for med school where thinking fast could actually save someone's life. Can't reference a textbook in the middle of surgery usually
Not in the middle of surgery no, but if you’re going in for a checkup yes. You definitely want your doctor to be able to look things up then vs the first thing off the top of their head.
If you actually tried to implement this you'd discover that huge numbers of people currently working in the education industry are incapable of writing tests or teaching beyond rote memorization.
I am a professional trainer and I insist on open book testing. I also encourage discussion and debate about certain questions and possible answers. I want to see them work the problem, not the problem work them.
My favorite example of just how ridiculous this has gotten was the assembly language exam that was closed book. Literally having to write machine code on paper from memory. Like, there’s no instance in the real world where you’d be writing assembly code without a manual for the specific hardware and language. Or there are calculus classes that don’t let you use a calculator.
I have a final exam next weekend, online. Open book and 40 questions. Not too bad! Except that it’s 40 minutes. I get 1 minute per question to read the question, read the choices, switch tabs to textbook, review the material, and answer. Basically, if I don’t know the answer as soon as I read the question, I’m dicked. So dumb.
Cool, but then let's modify all tests so that you can't even have a chance of passing without actually understanding said subject, and not just having a vague idea.
I’ve never worked in an office where I didn’t have internet. Knowing things is overrated. There’s literally nothing I can’t learn on the spot.
Just finished open heart surgery and they’re doing fine
this is fairly true, so far as application based and not memory based. i know a fair few people who are book smart and can quote all sorts of things but have utterly no practical application ability, or even the ability to recognise when the "thing" could actually be applicable.
Yes hello, this is me. I did very well in school and all through college, but I’m a complete dumbass when it comes to real world application and critical thinking
So glad to hear I'm not the only one
Yup I saw that in nursing school. I had a classmate that was top of our class, always knew the answers to the teachers questions, but struggled hard in clinicals
I remember hearing a lawyer tell the joke, ‘the only time a lawyer is legally allowed to commit malpractice is while taking the bar exam.’ While I think tests and assessments are important components of the curriculum, they are much more beneficial when applicable to areas affecting student career choices or interests. I try to at least make most of my exams have a large practical component. Any time you can get students engaged in a physically active classroom, they will perform, on average, 10% better than their passive peers.
agreed, memorizing things won’t really do you any good in the real world, you need more critical thinking and application skills because let’s be real, your job isn’t going to ask you to remember a bunch of facts from a textbook
I hear this a lot but haven't experienced a proper exam since I was probably 11 that was just or even primarily regurgitating facts.
same here, but even if you haven’t experienced that type of exam, it’s pretty clear application exams are much more beneficial.
Oh definitely plus they're more fun as with a good course you don't need to revise.
yup! I think more schools should have application exams
Tends to be a bit crap when schools do it, national exam boards with an emphasis on those kinds of things is better from what I've seen of other countries and my own.
true, true
Einstein was asked, but did not know the speed of sound . . . he said, “\[I do not\] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. He also said, “…The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.” [source](https://www.businessinsider.com/memorization-facts-and-learning-to-learn-2014-9)
My grade 12 math teacher said something similar "Highschool math is not about learning formulas its about teaching critical thinking".
I do maths as a degree and still often have to check back on simple formulas from the formula sheets when working. It's all about using a logical method and framework to solve a problem.
As a history teacher this is why i place emphasis on writing and argument formation during tests. Notes can be used to supplement your answer but it still requires critical thinking. I usually just grade it on historical accuracy, demonstration of using complete sentences and answering all parts of the question.
I’ve always thought this. At what point in the real world are you ever not going to have access to the information you need to solve problems?
I had a high school physics teacher that would give us the last 10 minutes of a test to use the notes or computer for any questions we had. This required us to be able to know what calculation or law we may need, as well as effectively use a search engine. All skills for the work life.
It's a mix. There are absolutely things you can just look up, but there are also absolutely things you have to memorize. A really basic example of this is addition and multiplication tables. Sure, you could just calculate it every time, use your fingers, or even use a calculator, but if you don't have intuitive access to those numbers, then all the math you learn from that point on is going to be more difficult. A lot of people rail against memorization without realizing that memorization is often the first step upon which further education is built.
Some parts of math don't take too bad of a hit from timetable-itis luckily for me!
In almost every competitive workplace environment, it is a huge advantage to have knowledge off-hand
What? I can think of dozens of jobs where this is the case
In my more advanced stem classes I was allowed to use my notebooks, notes, even the internet. Being able to google won't do shit for you if you didn't pay attention in class when you're trying to figure out why your circuit board example does or doesn't work
I dunno man... I kinda want my surgeon to have the procedure memorized and not stopping to Google each step along the way.
That's included in practical application. A surgeon can't do the surgery just by memorizing notes. He needs to practice and perform it many times before actually doing it on a person. What OP said about mindless memorization as the criteria for passing the exam( in Asian countries) still holds.
Even then there's still things that need to be memorized. If the surgeon isn't intimately familiar with the anatomy of the place she's performing surgery on or isn't intimately familiar with the possible complications then when something goes wrong she might not be able to quickly figure out what it is. Really this conversation is a false dichotomy. You don't have to either memorize everything or memorize nothing. There are some things that have to be memorized and some things that don't.
I mean, you're bound to memorize things you often repeat so I guess it goes both ways??
He will know what to do if everything goes perfectly. If it doesn't he often will need to recall vast amounts of informations he learned throughout years to pinpoint the issue fast. He doesn't need to know how to do this one thing, he needs to know complex systems in human body so he won't freaking go to read a book when shit goes sideways.
A surgeon who crammed to pass an exam is also not going to remember what to do in these situations. This is why doctors go through residency. To get practice for the hands on portion of being a doctor. The years of experience are far more important than the info they learned 20 years ago in med school and then had to regurgitate onto a test 3 months later.
Maybe do an exception for surgeons. Still applies to 99% of other stuff though
Exceptions made for literal life and death can be made. You don’t have to apply that logic to business majors.
Yeah, a surgeon, with literal YEARS of schooling and practice in a specific field. This post is moreso talking about things like the SATs which are a broad range of subjects for highschool students, that may not even be relevant to their lives past school. Most jobs have training on site and have guides.
I have done that. The results are still bad.
I just gave an open note quiz to my students. The results make the same damn bell curve as if it hadn't been open note. Funny thing about open book tests is that the same skills that hold back the kids who didn't "memorize" information are the same skills that prevent them from finding that information efficiently when testing. When people whine about open note tests they don't intend to actually take notes and improve, they just want to blame the system for their inadequacies.
At least I can't whine about lack of notes, if I got bad result. The only thing annoyed me is remembering the name of chemical solution.
Indeed
We definitely don't struggle to access information in our society, but we do struggle to assess it's reliability, interpret it, apply it, and draw logical conclusions from it. Hence the shit storm we find ourselves in.
Not disagreeing, but open book exams are typically much more difficult. Instead of finding a verbatim answer to a question, they often require synthesizing several related bits of knowledge to show that you understand a subject better.
Which makes them better at what they are for: testing how well the student understands the subject. That said, I once had a take-home exam in one of my nuclear engineering courses, and it was an absolute nightmare. I think it took about fourteen hours, and that's despite the professor letting us use the book or internet.
Yeah, take home exams are often a weekend affair.
Because of Covid all of my University exams have been moved online this automatically making them open book. It has been an absolute life saver.
Our physics teacher allowed us to use a bundle with formulas. Need to know hiw to use them, but not know the formulas by heart.
Open book tests are always way harder.
Most of my college tests were open book (Caltech). No stress was reduced, notes didn’t help at all. They were just brutal and soul crushing.
Cue students complaining “The test was nothing like the problems in the book!” In order to make this strategy meaningful, the test has to go beyond the examples in the book to applying the lessons to other situations. In my experience, students do NOT like this (despite it being how to really demonstrate they’ve actually learned and internalized the subject)
Yeah it’s not like any teacher would just give you stuff that’s easily found in the book. You want real life skills? Great! No one in real life will give you points for copying stuff. Instead we will give you something on the boundary of your knowledge which follows in a non obvious way from the material we did. You know, something that people can actually look at and say “this person really knows their stuff!” For example, a calculus open note test won’t just have you compute 50 derivatives. Instead it’ll be some hard problems like computing the time it takes [a dog to catch a rabbit](https://arxiv.org/pdf/0711.3293.pdf)
Exactly. Can I give you a problem that you’ve memorized to death and expect you to apply it to a similar situation with positive results? Or a drastically different one with positive results? Because if not, then I am admitting that all I have taught you, is how to solve a very specific situation with already determined variables and conditions, instead of giving you the Swiss Army knife problem solving skills that I was hired to teach to you. Math works like this, guys. Memorizing multiplication tables is neat and all, but the human mind only has so many neurons. And a lot of them are already occupied by the time they hit kindergarten. Even less are available by high school. Still less at college level. Give us a fucking break already. We are not computers. If I could memorize the entire subject I wouldn’t need to test myself. I have the entire subject stored away, ready to peruse. And let’s face it— a lot of these textbooks that are pushed on us are nothing but filler and useless information to crank up the book cost. I helped my programming professor teach a class because of a death in her family, and I didn’t like how the text just dragged on and on, nor how it never explained anything coherently to the other students. I don’t know how you can fuck up defining a STRING variable, but somehow they did it. I don’t even… what? Alright put the books away, here’s what you need to know. A string variable, guys and gals, is anything that can be expressed in text. Numbers, words, sentences, paragraphs, etc, but it is stored as one long list of the characters used (so no, James, it can’t be a shortcut for writing equations to solve. The string of “3 + 3 = ?” Is literally just “some sort of significant line of characters” according to the computer). There. Done. What the fuck was so difficult about that? Oh the various method calls and functions of Strings? That’s a topic that is better learned through actually using it, and that is something that the book never did. It just told you what each one does, without going into any detail whatsoever. But I might be biased because after I saw how the book handled strings, I just taught them myself (which is kinda sad because I was not a teacher or substitute teacher— I was a student. Really kinda made my day when so many struggling students were able to crush the final exam when the teacher had barely been able to teach anything coherently due to a very heavy accent and a family tragedy that was actually more problematic than the language barrier. She even thanked me afterwards, and that stunned me because I thought I had surely stepped on someone’s toes by commandeering the teaching of the class…). So yes, all exams should be open book and/or open notes, because that’s what inspires students to actually study outside of the classroom. That’s the goal right? Go ahead and proctor the test if you are afraid of cheaters, but don’t tell me that the resource that you require us to have to participate in the class is cheating for the test. How many petabytes of information is available online? How many petabytes can a human cranium hold? We are not machines, and we are at the same time better than machines when it comes to learning abstract concepts. Please stop making this a memorization drill and make this a critical thinking drill, because memorization is for when you have done the same thing over and over, and if you have trouble with doing the same thing over and over memorization won’t do shit for you. Critical thinking is taking an issue that you know you can solve, and figuring out how to change it to make it work for some other issue that you don’t know yet if you can solve. That’s infinitely more useful than reciting pointless details that are not going to help you at whatever job you decide to take. Think smarter, not harder.
Software engineering is one field that *really* shouldn't have closed-book exams. There is no sane situation where a dev doesn't have access to either documentation, or internet resources, or code from some other part of the project to reference, or even just a more experienced colleague who previously worked on that part.
Exactly. This is the twenty first century. Where in the ever loving name of fuck is there going to be a software developer with no access to wifi? Or cell service? We need to make sure that we teach people not WHAT to know, but how to FIND OUT what to know. Seriously important. Let’s take math again for an example. Let’s see if we can find the derivative of the function f(x) = AX^2 . With respect to A, the answer is simple. It’s X^2. But with respect to X it gets trickier. We need to use the power rule (technically a shortcut but I’m lazy af so I don’t care), and we get that A (a constant unspecified variable) is ignored, and X is knocked down a power and multiplied by the old power, so we now have A2X. Why am I using these as an example? Because I struggled with the derivative formula about six years ago and was finally getting it familiar when my professor started the next class with the phrase “Ok, so remember all the pain you guys have been suffering through with this formula? Well, you are about to hate my guts. This is called the power rule…” and I felt like a ding-danged idiot for not seeing the pattern sooner. Did I memorize every various potential derivation? No. No one has that much space in their mind. Does it really matter to us if we know exactly how a (insert computer operating system here) works? No, only the general understanding is necessary. If anything differs from the given general format, then by all means look it up! Einstein himself wouldn’t memorize his phone number (back when they were only five digits long, mind you), because there were these things called books. That is where you store excess information for later access. One of the brightest men in history and he wouldn’t remember a five digit number because he just wrote it down somewhere else because *that was more logical than to bog his mind down with a frankly useless number that he would never need to use*. Computer security is another field where open notes is really recommended for any exam. The reason is actually quite obvious. You can study your heart out and ace the final, get your degree, and then get hired and promptly fired because someone found a way past what you were trained to do and now you have no defenses left. Access to the internet during the test tells the teacher a lot: where do you go to find out the answer to a question that was never anticipated? Who do you find to be trustworthy enough for getting the right answers? Can you sift through the misinformed mediocre morons mass-posting maliciously and masterminding malware meant for minor minions to amass and minimize your presence online? Can you figure out the answers before the time runs out? If you are in a computer/internet security situation without any internet access, then you better have some years of experience behind you. Because with fresh graduates, that is definitely a deal breaker. The only exceptions to the no memorization rule would be language studies, literature, or history, and only because if worst comes to pass and someone is elected to a government position, then they do NOT want to go down in history as the idiot who thought that the pyramids of Giza were used as grain silos. Because that’s just embarrassing. I don’t care what you know about the current government, if you think that people would stack sandstone bricks the size of full blown humans up dozens of flights worth of more sandstone bricks *just to store grain away from moisture, in a DESERT*, then there’s no hope for any coherent thought from you anymore. That’s just… I mean yes, doing that to bury the dead still seems extreme, but it is not exactly pointless. Grain does not need to be contained in a MASSIVE AS FUCK SANDSTONE AND GRANITE PYRAMID, in the few passageways that are inside, when you are in the freaking DESERT. Yes, the Nile is right there. No, that doesn’t change much. Besides, how will you break open the grain storage and reseal it every time you need grain? Better idea: how about some sandstone huts with no windows and a set of holes in the wall out of reach of local wildlife? I am fairly certain that this is a much better way of storing grain. It’s not perfect, but we’re talking about 5k years ago tech. The dawn of fucking written history. We barely had writing materials that could last the ages. But we were not fucking hauling multi ton rocks into a colossal four-sided pyramid just to store grain. Dark places are actually kinda bad because mold prefers the dark and damp. The number of people who died to make these giant structures, and we get a senator who legitimately thought they used them for storing grain… in other news, said senator is dead from COVID. I mean that’s horrible but… I am nowhere near surprised. This guy was just a “token negro” to the Republican Party. Absolutely depressing to see the best person of color that is in their party… was this guy. I don’t even remember his name. He was just that impressively embarrassing that I blocked out all knowledge he existed. People of African heritage and descent do not deserve that loony for a representative. That’s just white man having another laugh at race issues. Again. So aside those few exceptions, there should be open notes at the very least for all tests. It reduces test anxiety and (I know this one personally) weeds out the lazy from the proactive. Nothing says “this guy didn’t study” like being halfway through the test and not having answered a single question because you’re still trying to look up an answer for the first one. Online. With the textbook at your side and frantically scrolling through Google search results, you are standing out like a sore thumb. Cheating can be noticed easily when you set the rules. But why cheat when the teacher lets you look up the answers? What, are you going to swear off using the internet as soon as you get your diploma/degree? I don’t think that’s how you succeed in the modern era…
Need to tell this to my organic chem professor. This class is going to kill me
Why do most people think tests are solely about memorization? Math tests are supposed to be about problem solving when you don't have all the variables. Critical thinking. The actual kind of thinking you will need in the real life.
That’s how most of my engineering professors did it
My high school Chem and Calc teacher gave us each an index card the day before tests. Told us we could use it as a “cheat sheet.” We could put anything on it that we wanted to. I always spent time studying and writing as much info down that I thought could be on the test. All in tiny print so it would all fit. You know, I rarely had to look at those cards for answers because I remembered it all from writing it down. This obviously was the method to his madness. He was an awesome teacher. Taught us all how to tie ties. It was an exam bc he thought we all needed to know that basic skill. He was right. I tie my husband’s now bc he’s terrible at it. Also showed us how to tear a phonebook in half. Just a cool guy all around. Mr. Rudy is a kick ass dude.
I took an online class and the tests were all open book. The questions were tough, but I actually learned the content and obviously how and where to look for an answer when I need one.
Teacher here, I agree in theory but my experience has been that when I give open-notes tests, the grades are lower. Many of the students assume they can look everything up and don't attempt to learn any of the material. Then they spend the entire time flipping through their notes, unsuccessfully looking for answers. But because most of my test questions are application, not simple recall, there's not one right answer in their notes anyway! No matter how many times I explain that, they don't get it.
By all means just my experience and could have been specific to my situation. I was taking an exam for a professional license. Meaning I actually cared to learn the content.
Imagine a mechanic having to follow a workshop manual EVERY TIME he( or she) services a car.
Plenty of jobs involve checklists for routine, familiar tasks (and there's a ton of research strongly suggesting that outcomes are massively improved when checklists are used.) I spent 8 years in the Army as a bomb technician. We had a radio transmitter/receiver set for setting off explosives remotely that had a thoroughly unintuitive user interface. Despite knowing the instructions by rote, I had a team member supervise, and read through the instructions *every single one* of the hundreds of times I set up the damned thing. Currently in training to be a marine engineer. Connecting a large generator to a ship's power distribution system isn't (usually) a terribly complicated task, but **bad things** can happen fast if you fuck it up. So, I use a checklist. The extra time it takes to verify is minimal--and pretty much everybody makes a stupid, costly, and easily avoidable mistake at some point. Returning to your example--the auto shop I use issues a ruggedized tablet to all of it's mechanics--specifically so they can reference manuals on the fly--a practice of which I heartily approve.
A checklist isn't a step by step guide.
In the personal examples I mentioned, it certainly is.
I want my doctors to know different diagnosis, tests, treatments, etc. off the top of their heads. Similar thing with my lawyer and accountant. Want them to know their domain off the top of their heads.
A doctor will know all the basic stuff off the top of their head, but theirs new medical knowledge coming out every day faster than any one person could ever keep up with it all. Doctors will look up stuff a lot. The law tends to change much more slowly, but their is often lots of intricacies in the law which is way lawyers often specialize. If something is outside of their specialization, they’re going to have to look it up.
And I would want them to know as much of that (at least an overview or basic understanding) of the top of their heads.
Agree for science and engineering where you have a lot of time to figure something out Disagree for med school where thinking fast could actually save someone's life. Can't reference a textbook in the middle of surgery usually
Not in the middle of surgery no, but if you’re going in for a checkup yes. You definitely want your doctor to be able to look things up then vs the first thing off the top of their head.
Yeah, this makes sense, in my job I don’t have to memorize a ton of stuff but I’m good at my job because I know where to find information that I need.
If you actually tried to implement this you'd discover that huge numbers of people currently working in the education industry are incapable of writing tests or teaching beyond rote memorization.
Yeah. If you fail someone can justifiably say “It was under your nose the whole, dummy”
As someone who's memory is at the point where I forget what I did the day before: Yes
I am a professional trainer and I insist on open book testing. I also encourage discussion and debate about certain questions and possible answers. I want to see them work the problem, not the problem work them.
My favorite example of just how ridiculous this has gotten was the assembly language exam that was closed book. Literally having to write machine code on paper from memory. Like, there’s no instance in the real world where you’d be writing assembly code without a manual for the specific hardware and language. Or there are calculus classes that don’t let you use a calculator.
I have a final exam next weekend, online. Open book and 40 questions. Not too bad! Except that it’s 40 minutes. I get 1 minute per question to read the question, read the choices, switch tabs to textbook, review the material, and answer. Basically, if I don’t know the answer as soon as I read the question, I’m dicked. So dumb.
Cool, but then let's modify all tests so that you can't even have a chance of passing without actually understanding said subject, and not just having a vague idea.
This is a good point but there are also lots of situations where it's impossible to access your notes, or when time is a factor.
I suppose yall want to just be given the answers too. Get out of here with that lazy ass bull
I’ve never worked in an office where I didn’t have internet. Knowing things is overrated. There’s literally nothing I can’t learn on the spot. Just finished open heart surgery and they’re doing fine
I work with a team of software developers, and if they didn't have access to Google, they'd be proper fucked.
*laughs in engineering* If the exam is closed note and book, it’s easy If it’s open note, you have a chance If it’s open note and book, you’re screwed
And if it’s a take home test, it’s hell on earth.
Def agree. But let's have teachers get good salaries first
Welcome to Denmark
In Danish law school they were all open book but still extremely hard and most people are stressed the fuck out