Maybe: but that's unobservable. All exams have time limits of some kind. If they did not, the procrastinators would NEVER get theirs finished. Even given take-home exams and a matter of weeks to do them, most papers are in fact turned in (in my experience) practically AT the deadline. Hard to see support for the idea that the distribution of time taken to complete an assignment (whether an exam or otherwise) is "artificially produced". Seems to me to be the nature of the beast: quite naturally produced.
On Sat, 7 Jun 2003, Dennis Roberts wrote: > of course, this is sort of artificially produced since there is a > time limit ... if the exam were not timed ... while it might still > have some - skew to it ... it would not be what we typically see in > that the mass wait till close to the time is up ... > > but, since students are so conditioned to be thinking of an exam as > being some fixed time limit ... the more natural time that examinees > "would" spend if not time constrained ... might be rather hard to > find in the short run in response to Stan Brown's reaction to Thom Baguley's example: > > >Time elapsed before leaving exam hall. (Left skewed with a slight > > >blip close to zero and a peak at the end IMO). > > > >I love this example: it will relate directly to a phenomenon every > >student is familiar with. ... My O matches yours on this. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Donald F. Burrill [EMAIL PROTECTED] 56 Sebbins Pond Drive, Bedford, NH 03110 (603) 626-0816 . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
