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

In article <471e1ac0$0$479$b45e6eb0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<tchow@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
somewhere around second year of university, assessment is mostly
pretty daft. We should just educate people, and let them find
their own level in employment [or life].
Can you cite any educational research to back up this conclusion?

Of course not. I'm an educator, not a meta-educator! Just
an opinion ....

Based on
anecdotal evidence, I find that a lot of people fall into the category of
will-work-hard-if-threatened-with-assessment-but-won't-otherwise.

Sure. But a university -- indeed any voluntary educational
establishment -- is not a slave camp. "Will-work-hard-if-threatened-
with-withdrawal-of-funds-but-won't-otherwise" seems to me just as
plausible, but puts the responsibility where it belongs instead of
with the hapless teacher trying, against the odds, to construct a
fair assessment.

This is
true both in school and in the workplace.

A handful of professions conduct "assessment" [in the sense
of formal testing, as opposed to a review of progress], but most of
us in the workplace are judged primarily by results. Any form of
review will suffice to concentrate the mind, esp if your job is on
the line.

It's nice to believe that
everyone falls into either the category of wonderfully-self-motivated or
the category of won't-be-productive-even-if-assessed, but that sounds to
me like an ideological statement rather than one backed by empirical
studies.

No doubt it would be, but I don't know anyone who believes
that. But if you're going to rely on assessments, then do you not
owe it to the students to ensure [how?] that the assessment is fair
and really measures something worth measuring? I'm sure there is a
correlation between success in exams [or in projects, or ...] and
"how good the student really is" [whatever that means], but I know
far too many people who are brilliant at exams but hopeless at
research, or vice versa, to take such assessments very seriously.
[Much the same applies to IQ tests, FWIW.]

--
Andy Walker, School of MathSci., Univ. of Nott'm, UK.
anw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
.

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