I think that many people understand testing (in college) as a set of facts and processes to be mastered as opposed to an opportunity to create, analyze, and advance knowledge. As a professor, I am very frustrated by the limited view of understanding, disciplinarity, and knowledge-creation, but it is pervasive.
When my kid was in elementary school, she took standardized achievement tests that were ranked from 1-4. Many parents were thrilled their kid got a 4 or, in the case of weaker students, a 3. One day I realized no one had considered what a 5 looked like. Now there is nothing wrong with evaluating kids from 1-4 if your purpose is to assess schools and figure out who needs help, but if your goal is to evaluate creativity, brilliance, and insight, then you need a test that has space for 5, 6, and 7. That is what college testing does.
I think there’s a better time to “create and advance knowledge” than on an exam. Courses themselves aren’t really meant to advance knowledge, but to pass it on.
If you want to separate the 4’s from the 5’s, 6’s, and 7’s, I suggest you actually define what a 5, 6, or 7 actually looks like. Making a normal distribution curve and just saying that X% is a 7 when it could be true that 100% or 0% of them are actually 7’s? That’s just lazy teaching.
Exams can be creative. Only public schools waste people’s time with boring, regurgitation tests. Certainly university courses are suppose to advance knowledge. In addition to teaching the basics, they teach students how to create and advance knowledge. In our rapidly changing technological world, professionals need to understand innovation and problem solving.
I suspect many parents are thrilled that universities are fostering "undergraduate research.’
No one said that there should be “regurgitation tests” - synthesis and application should really be the focus - but you don’t create and advance knowledge as a novice who barely understands the basics (all undergrads are just novices). Making a test “interesting” shouldn’t even be a criteria- most people aren’t in the mood for a professor’s idea of fun and games on a very strict timed deadline. That isn’t how research progress is made either.
UG research is a better way to teach those skills, though it probably won’t involve novel discoveries (the best UG research generally produces new solutions to well understood problems, not novel theories) and there are most certainly other ways to gain that knowledge.
I agree with @mamalion - good students and their parents are thrilled with more creativity and advancing knowledge in courses and on exams. A problem on a homework, or a test, should be something that grabs your attention preferably for weeks afterward to think about. (Or should I say, the best students are the people who do that kind of thinking.)
Make me #3. I Am also a huge Bloom’s taxonomy fan. Education focusing on the lowest 3 tiers does students a disservice. The goal of education should be having student function in the upper three built on mastery of the lower 3.
@Neodymium, actually there sometimes is. We have teachers who will allow students who got a C to earn extra credit. The students who studied and got B’s are not allowed the same chance to raise their grades. College grading practices pale in comparison to the unfair and arbitrary high school standards.
I teach introductory physics - Newtonian mechanics - which has been well understood for, like 300 years. I find it unlikely that my students are going to create anything new here in their freshman intro course. I’m happy if they can do the basic stuffs.
Some students like to sit and think about a certain problem for weeks or months, both the very smart and the not so smart who are still eager learners. Others understand that time is scarce while you are a student and simply don’t have time to dedicate weeks to small “research” problems when they already stretched to the limit by their class load.
“Novice” is certainly not how most Profs would have described many HS classmates or students like them across the nation.
Especially considering some of them started undergrad even at the HYPSMC tier taking advanced undergrad or even graduate level courses in STEM and non-STEM subjects.
Quite a few were already taking advanced undergrad/graduate STEM courses at nearby 4 year colleges while still in HS because they’ve exhausted all our public magnet HS’s advanced math offerings which meant they were also well-beyond the most advanced STEM courses offered by our local community colleges.
“Novice” meaning that they are not at the edge of knowledge within their field or even specific subfield. That pretty much describes all undergraduates, even the extremely high-achieving ones. Not by necessity but practically it is almost always the case.
True—and no one assessment is going to get at the value of both of those approaches…
…which is why there are relatively few college classes that limit themselves to a single type of assessment.
I’ve been lurking on this thread through its entire existence, and the number of people who seem to be implicitly assuming that exams are all there is kind of surprises me.
To take one introductory class I’m teaching right now (taking a break from grading an exam with a very low average to post this, in fact), yes, there are exams, but there are also extended analyses of datasets, a research paper with its accompanying scaffolding assignments, a class participation metric, and a handful of other scattered small pieces. This is because I want to find out whether students can apply the knowledge they (are supposed to) acquire from the class in multiple ways.
But one of them is whether they can do so under a bit of pressure—and timed exams are fabulous for that.
Of course, the frontiers of knowledge keep moving. In the 17th century CE, calculus and physics mechanics were at the frontier of knowledge; now they are commonly taught to college frosh and advanced high school students.
Update: the teacher actually got on Blackboard yesterday and posted all the scores. I am at a 77% in the class overall. I’m actually fairly happy with that - at least I’m passing. And I’m well above the averages in each area for the most part (homework, the test, quizzes.)