Re: Would like to find study group for computer science comprehensive exams.

In article <ffj3sn$2gjq$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Patricia Shanahan <pats@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Why not write questions that require the student to demonstrate
understanding, and let us use whatever resources we want?

For a lot of courses, it's unfortunately fairly difficult to create problems
that "test understanding" that are still solvable by the average student in
a couple of hours. Say you're a professor and you come up with a few good
problems like that for your exam. The next year, your students will bring
answers to those questions with them to the exam, having inherited them from
the students who took the class with you last time. Copying the answers
doesn't test understanding, but how do you block that?

In general, though, I agree with you that for graduate courses, closed-book
exams seem wrong-headed. The courses I took for my Ph.D. in math did not
have closed-book exams (well, one course did, but only one).

By the way, one could argue that even an open-book exam doesn't really test
understanding, because a couple of hours isn't enough to test understanding,
whether the exam is closed-book or open-book. Indeed, most of my advanced
math classes were evaluated based either on one-week take-home exams, or on
problem sets. However, if cheating is a problem, then these methods won't
work.
--
Tim Chow tchow-at-alum-dot-mit-dot-edu
The range of our projectiles---even ... the artillery---however great, will
never exceed four of those miles of which as many thousand separate us from
the center of the earth. ---Galileo, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
.

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