In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Alan McLean <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Herman Rubin wrote:
>> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, >> Thom Baguley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >Glen wrote: >> >> As a student I *always* preferred closed book exams. If I know the >> >> material I don't need the book, and if I don't know the material, >> >> the book isn't going to help in the exam enough anyway. For open >> >Yes. Also, closed book exams tend to be easier because the range of >> >questions is more restricted. I have found them a way to avoid >> >students spending most of their time memorizing near-useless material. >The main reason why closed book exams tend to be easier for students is >that they actually realise they have to do some work in preparation! >> On the contrary, closed book exams emphasize memorizing >> near-useless material. >This describes a BAD closed book exam. It also describes a bad open book >exam. The only difference between a good closed book exam and a good open book exam is that the largely unimportant memorized material would be of even less importance. > A good one-hour exam would have >> three, or at most four, multi-part PROBLEMS. >> A good exam would be one which someone who has merely >> memorized the book would fail, and one who understands >> the concepts but has forgotten all the formulas would >> do extremely well on. >Since to understand the concepts almost always means understanding (and >hence knowing) the formulas, I would interpret someone who has >'forgotten all the formulas' as understanding the concepts only in the >most superficial manner, and so should do badly! This is completely wrong. How important is it to know the variance of the hypergeometric distribution? It is important to know the basic concepts, so one can derive the mean and variance. BTW, the usual "definition" of expectation should NEVER be used as such, as it obscures everything. One can compute the mean and variance of the binomial, hypergeometric, and negative binomial distributions from the concepts and the important fundamental PROPERTIES of expectation quite easily, and the rest should be looked up. In most books, these properties are not given, or given by fiat. The student should know what conditional probability means, but there is never any reason to memorize Bayes' Theorem as it is usually stated. >Overall, the evaluation of students is driven mostly by budget, >(lecturers') time, lecturers' interest, the number of students, politics >- the best one can do is to assess students as honestly as possible >within the range allowed by these factors! Those who want students to understand the material, not just regurgitate and carry out routine procedures, will not accept the need for garbage. In practice, a student will not have to calculate sample means, etc., under the conditions of a closed book exam, so why should we care? Teaching things like this makes it harder for them to be able to understand later. >My eight cents' worth. >Alan -- This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University. Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558 ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list and remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES are available at http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ =================================================================
