Post by Tony CooperOn Mon, 24 Jun 2024 17:10:43 +0200, Bertel Lund Hansen
Post by Bertel Lund HansenIn Denmark (year 1964+) we had oral and written exams in grade 9
and all following years. Danish and math had both.
Physics/chemistry was only oral at the final exam, but we had
written ones along the way. Other subjects had only oral exams.
Wow! Something I don't remember even hearing of!
I can't figure out what I missed because I can't figure what the
tests would be like. Covering details of sections of lesson plans?
Covering the BIG ideas? How long did it take to give an oral final
exam in chemistry or physics?
Our tests, all written, included problems with computations, and a
lot of multiple choice -- sometimes, "Pick the right answer for the
computations." Fill in the blank or short sentences as answers.
Several sentences for 'essay' answers -- Where I previously thought
that American classes missed out was that I wrote VERY few essays of
a page or more; I read about British schools where long essays were
frequent, in several courses, and wished I had had more of that.
In my case it was written exams almost all the way down. I can remember
just two exceptions.
In final year high school French, where the public exams were state-wide
(i.e. not administered by the school, except to the extent that the
school supplied the rooms and most of the inviligators), I had one oral
exam where I had to prove that I could actually speak French, and where
I had to recite a couple of memorised poems. (I suspect that the poetry
was at least partly to check on my pronunciation.) Even then, that was
only part of the assessment. There was still a written exam.
In my final undergraduate year, we had 12 hours/week of lab work, which
was unsupervised and only weakly structured. In a "machines" lab, the
instruction sheet might say "Synchronise this three-phase machine to the
grid, and then find out what you can about the relationship between
torque, speed, field current, and any other relevant variables". In an
"electronics" lab, it might be "design, build, and test an amplifier to
the following specifications". After three years of tightly scripted
labs, we finally had to show our initiative.
Grading such work could have been a heavy load on staff time, so the
staff had introduced a system of oral exams. Every Wednesday (IIRC)
morning, we had to turn up to a reporting session. The people who had to
report were selected by ballot, and there was about one chance in three
that we would be chosen. (If not, we were free to leave.) If chosen, we
had a detailed interview with a staff member, where we had to produce
our notes: observations, calculations, conclusions, etc. No formal
written report, but we were grilled in detail over what we had done and
our depth of understanding.
I don't think I ever did a multiple choice exam, but I did once set one.
I taught a postgraduate subject at UC Berkeley where the rule was that I
had to return the final student grades within (something like) 24 hours
of the final exam. The only way to do that was to set a paper that was
easy to mark, which meant it had a lot of multiple choice questions. I
felt bad about that -- it was a relaxation of my standards -- but not
too bad. Postgraduate students are, on the whole, better motivated than
undergraduates, and will learn even if you don't threaten them with a
tough exam.
Since those days multiple choice has become a lot more common, for two
reasons. The obvious one is that they can be graded quickly. The second
reason is less obvious, but is more important. Both at secondary and
tertiary level, there is a lot of political pressure to make subjects
easier to pass. At secondary level, this usually means higher average
marks. (In the NSW system, a final agreement mark of 50/100 means what
10/100 used to mean, and university admissions staff have to worry about
the difference between 99.5 and 99.6.) At university level, the pressure
is about "productivity": the universities have to become more productive
by giving degrees to the students who used to fail first year.
--
Peter Moylan ***@pmoylan.org http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW