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From: laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton)
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: Re: Grades, Assignments
Message-ID: <1615@utcsstat.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 7-Jan-84 07:37:55 EST
Article-I.D.: utcsstat.1615
Posted: Sat Jan  7 07:37:55 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 7-Jan-84 08:23:39 EST
References: <3059@utcsrgv.UUCP>
Organization: U. of Toronto, Canada
Lines: 28

I just went to a course where I discovered something new in grading. They
are going to give us 5 questions every week, and a lot of stuff to read.
We get to discuss the stuff in class. The kicker is that the exam is
going to be comprised of certain of these questions, changed slightly
to get around the university regulation that you cannot give students
questions that they have seen before on an exam.

I wonder -- why have this regulation? if the purpose of the exercise
is to learn something, then tell us what it is that we are supposed
to learn and give us an opportunity to do so. Telling us *exactly*
what it is that we are supposed to know strikes me as perfectly
reasonable. It sure beats "Guess what the professor, who sounds
entirely different from the TAs who do the discussing, mean when they
use these words", a game which I have had to play on several exams.
if you guess worng, you do badly, even if you know the material.
Screaming that the question was ambiguous is not really guaranteed to
help if you petition your mark -- what do you do if they think that
you should understand how to unravel ambiguities?

Unravelling ambiguities is not really taught at university, unless
you go looking for a course to do this. In person, if I start to
answer a question that I have misinterpreted, the otehr party can
say "wait, I didn't mean THAT, what I meant was..." and then you
can present the argument on the right topic. Somehow, exams
don't allow for that.

Laura Creighton
utzoo!utcsstat!laura