Exams

[lukey]

I'm sitting my last exam of the semester in a couple of hours, but recently, I can't help but think everything about exams is just - crap.

I haven't really revised for this one, because there's no incentive to. I physically have to pass it, and the actual grade has no impact past my own pride. I'm pretty sure I can wing at least the lowest pass, and so that's what I'll be doing. What I find so disheartening though is that while this exam is worth 60% and can potentially be passed with no effort whatsoever other than physically enduring the two hours itself, I've had lots of lovely bits of coursework across the year which have taken several whole working days to complete each, sometimes with delightfully dazed all-nighters just to get them in, and to some sort of standard, and then they're worth 8% each.

My housemates are both doing more traditionally academic courses, and it's not even like we can really justify them there either. Uni, if anything, has drilled in the idea that independent thought is deeply discouraged, unless you can provide a reference to back it up. These exams, which are nothing more than glorified memory tests, then expect someone to regurgitate an answer to an unseen essay question. Most simply go in knowing what stock answer they're going to write, and look for a contrived way to relate it to whatever question best fits. So after months and years of being told best practices for referencing and writing, that's all just thrown out for the sake of the exam. These skills of spontaneously vomiting up an essay on cue without any cited research are not ones that are going to be used in real life, so why are they given such disproportionate weight in assessment?

People often say it's because coursework could be plagiarised/assisted. To me it seems if everyone has so little faith in the merit of coursework, why do we even have it at all?
My Computing exams are always a little bit bizarre. My course is less Computer Science, more 'Applied' Computing - that is, more emphasis on usability, accessibility, design etc. than scary things like - eek - maths. So we have these jarring mixes of pissy questions about how to make x scenario more usable for y disability, followed by demands to write fragments of code on cue, and for some reason I struggle greatly to write code on paper. No idea why. It seems like a deeply wrong meeting of subject and medium.

While I understand there's a need to demonstrate a grasp of the concepts, I can't help but feel that, at least in my case, the coursework would be a better demonstration of that. Rambling about the wonders of polymorphism for several pages just seems wrong against a concise bit of code which actually shows concepts working in a - 'APPLIED' - context.

It might be absurd and extreme to suggest that exams are just a universally wrong form of assessment, but certainly their disproportionate weighting against the work I actually feel I've actually put a worthy amount of effort into is very depressing.

Apologies for that moan. It's not so much exam stress as exam apathy that brought me here

[Mr Q]

My housemates are both doing more traditionally academic courses, and it's not even like we can really justify them there either. Uni, if anything, has drilled in the idea that independent thought is deeply discouraged, unless you can provide a reference to back it up. These exams, which are nothing more than glorified memory tests, then expect someone to regurgitate an answer to an unseen essay question. Most simply go in knowing what stock answer they're going to write, and look for a contrived way to relate it to whatever question best fits. So after months and years of being told best practices for referencing and writing, that's all just thrown out for the sake of the exam. These skills of spontaneously vomiting up an essay on cue without any cited research are not ones that are going to be used in real life, so why are they given such disproportionate weight in assessment?

Can I say this: As someone who has now had the displeasure of marking exams, I can tell you that is completely the wrong approach to take. Students who go in with the single objective of writing out their stock answers irrespective of what the questions actually ask generally won't do particularly well (or at least they shouldn't). I would have students just writing out an answer to a completely different question, and even if what they were writing was correct, I inevitably had to fail them because they completely disregarded what they'd been asked to write on.

The real reason that exams are weighted as heavily as they are is so that the assessors can have some degree of confidence that what the student is writing is actually their own work. You would be surprised at the amount of plagiarism that goes on in essays and assignments. As a student, I would never have dreamt of doing it. But I have come to realise that a great many students happily cut and paste from references without attribution, and probably won't get picked up on it - few lecturers and tutors actively check for that sort of thing. Now, of course, you could conceivably memorise a text and do the same in an exam - but I would have thought the chances of that happening were reasonably slim. After all, if you had that capacity to memorise stuff on that scale, then surely you might be inclined to direct your brain's efforts towards actually understanding the material at some point!

In saying that, as online submissions of course assessments become more common, I believe essays and take home 'exams' certainly become more feasible, largely because they can be integrated with an automated plagiarism scan. And I would certainly prefer assessments which rely on independent research and analysis rather than having to write at a pokey little desk for two or three hours in silence.

[Mr Q]

Oh, and good luck.

[Sput]

My housemates are both doing more traditionally academic courses, and it's not even like we can really justify them there either. Uni, if anything, has drilled in the idea that independent thought is deeply discouraged, unless you can provide a reference to back it up.

I suspect you mean "traditionally academic" to be things like literature and I can't talk for that. As a sciencey type (that's the official term, I'll have you know) though I can't agree with that at all. Schools seem to deliver people to university with no critical analysis faculties whatsoever - I regularly teach first years that will estimate a lake in the peak district to have an area of 300,000 square kilometres and be happy that they've got an answer at all, let alone think about if it's a sensible one. You simply fall out of the running if you can't think for yourself in a science course. Yes, there are plenty of heavily mathematical stock proofs that you sometimes regurgitate in exams but that'll only get you your bottom 40%.

[lukey]

My housemates are both doing more traditionally academic courses, and it's not even like we can really justify them there either. Uni, if anything, has drilled in the idea that independent thought is deeply discouraged, unless you can provide a reference to back it up.

I suspect you mean "traditionally academic" to be things like literature and I can't talk for that. As a sciencey type (that's the official term, I'll have you know) though I can't agree with that at all. Schools seem to deliver people to university with no critical analysis faculties whatsoever - I regularly teach first years that will estimate a lake in the peak district to have an area of 300,000 square kilometres and be happy that they've got an answer at all, let alone think about if it's a sensible one. You simply fall out of the running if you can't think for yourself in a science course. Yes, there are plenty of heavily mathematical stock proofs that you sometimes regurgitate in exams but that'll only get you your bottom 40%.

I can't speak for sciencey types - my housemates do Psych and American Studies, and I've dabbled in History and Politics modules to make up credits, and I was a wee bit surprised at how discouraged critical analysis was (less so in history, because it has this whole 'doubt every interpretation, question everything' ethos).

To put what I meant in some context, when I was doing the likes of Modern Studies at school, I was encouraged to take a policy, or a source, or an ideology and when I was writing essays, because there was no burden of referencing, (I don't mean I don't believe in citing sources! - just that it wasn't factored into Higher courses...at all) I could just ramble on about my interpretation and opinion on something. Obviously at this stage this was all very low-level and more about the idea of analysing something than coming to any profound conclusions, but people's perception when they came to uni was that they could no longer come to any conclusions of their own - they just had to find someone else's opinion and reference it. I think there was a lot of frustration that 'we're not allowed to think', and essays just became a matter of who could find the most books to extract someone else's thoughts from.

Now, in a similar vein, in Computing courses there's literally understanding different common algorithms, data structures etc. and knowing how to use them, and then there's the whole problem solving aspect. I was shocked at just how lacking in problem solving/logical ability so many people on our course are. An example was, one assignment last year was coding a game of Othello/Reversi, and most people just COULDN'T think of any way to express the act of taking a turn as an algorithm. They could build all the bits of code that they had learned, but couldn't apply any independent thought to it. It's a skill which is considered a given, even though it's so deeply essential to having any success, and of course it's not 'taught' (although after realising how crap people were at this, they did introduce an 'Argumentation' module which involved people sitting in groups solving puzzles for hours on end).

[cdd]

Speaking for History, I'd say the approach one takes for each type of assessment is vastly different.

Coursework is highly comparative. Your job in a coursework essay is to come up with a disputed point in your subject, and analyse sources in the light of other sources. the term is 'critical analysis', and it's the skill to not take something in print as read. With that said there are a couple of points I should make. First, contrary to your claim I feel this makes plagiarism extremely difficult. Your job as a coursework writer is fundamentally diferent to that of a book author - as you say, the latter requires (generally) the inclusion of more original points, and also a greater emphasis on narrative and chronology. Copying entire passages from some book would really, really show. Secondly, I would agree uncited original thoughts are not really encouraged in coursework - but that doesn't exclude original thought, merely encourages a diffeent type of original thought. For example, finding two vastly opposing views and highlighting their commonalities to produce a 'new' view that hasn't been expressed before.

On the other hand, exams are just the place for your original thought. In exams, you have the perfect 'excuse' to cite nothing - of course, you can namedrop away, but there's no expectation to actually do direct quoting. This, in my opinion, is what causes this huge divide in exams - if you know a subject well, you'll find the exam effortless, natural and - almost - fun. You'll be relaxed and exploring the question from new and interesting perspectives - and that is likely to wake up the jaded examiner for whom this is the 150th paper they are marking. This is how students get 100% results in exams. On the other hand, if you only have a limited knowledge of the subject, you will be quite likely to produce an answer which is desperately clinging to some pre-thought out structure. While examiners have mark schems and rubrics, they are open to some degree of interpretation to allow for this divide.

I would say it is this unique capacity for you to express personal thought in exams - and thier ability to really separate good students from OK students to bad students - that makes them so worthwhile compared to coursework.

The case that you only need to get g.t. 60% is a problem with the way the course is set out, not the exams - and I agree that's wrong, wrong, wrong. So yes, good luck, but not really since it sounds like you're on a sort of low-effort-guaranteed-reward thing here.

[Pete]

I can't speak for sciencey types - my housemates do Psych and American Studies, and I've dabbled in History and Politics modules to make up credits, and I was a wee bit surprised at how discouraged critical analysis was (less so in history, because it has this whole 'doubt every interpretation, question everything' ethos).

....people's perception when they came to uni was that they could no longer come to any conclusions of their own - they just had to find someone else's opinion and reference it. I think there was a lot of frustration that 'we're not allowed to think', and essays just became a matter of who could find the most books to extract someone else's thoughts from.

nonsense. Have you never had John Regan? Who's entire course is based on presenting the Troubles as "the most recent british civil war" purely to force you to question authority? In addition, whilst in Politics we are encouraged to reference a lot if you just list a load of arguments from other sources you get a low "argument" mark. I did this in first and second year and only since I've started really forcing my own view in and using others to compliment and dismiss arguments have I got good marks.

Who did you get for politics anyhow? The only complete twat in the history dept is a woman who's name I shall MSN you as she completely demolished ideas other than her own with a "no that's wrong" but others do request you to voice opinions.

Having said that, American Studies, esp in the days it came under the English dept was poor (not sure how it is now its under History), and Psych is particularly bad if they have a high concentration of the man who has his face on his jumpers.

[lukey]

I did include a bit of reservation about throwing History in with the rest of it, because I do appreciate there was a big element of challening existing interpretations (with the Revolution stuff I've just put behind me, it was scary John Regan who was pushing that the most), but when it actually came to writing an essay, I still didn't feel like I had much choice other than to just take existing interpretations, explain them, cite them, compare them by citing them rather close to each other, and other than through some attempts to qualify points I was making with phrases like "Clearly this demonstrates...", I felt like I wouldn't be able to get away with any more overt analysis.

Maybe I was more concerned about this than I should've been, but it felt like especially with our module journals being soooo wishy-washy about just writing your feelings on the course, that basically consumed that module's quota of opinion-making.

The politics stuff I did last year, though, I still don't think gave me any opportunity to actually express an original (albeit not unique) thought. Even though a lot of the stuff about ideology seemed like the perfect chance to actually write something with a shred of opinion, I still ended up reducing things to vaguely critical description.