Transcript
A bluesky post by hyperspace, @thehyyyype.bsky.social, saying "Cheating on an exam by memorizing everything the professor taught in advance so I can easily answer all the questions. The post was made on January 24th, 2025 at 9:31 PM.
A bluesky post by hyperspace, @thehyyyype.bsky.social, saying "Cheating on an exam by memorizing everything the professor taught in advance so I can easily answer all the questions. The post was made on January 24th, 2025 at 9:31 PM.
In middle school and high school I specifically remember being told the standardized math and science tests would have problems like we’d never seen before, but if you knew the concepts well, you could answer them.
This was not popular for a lot of people :/
Isn’t that how exams are always supposed to be done?
1/3 is testing knowledge alone, 1/3 is testing your ability to apply this knowledge to problems and 1/3 is testing your ability to transfer your knowledge to new contexts.
Example for maths:
Knowledge: Provide the formula to solve any quadratic equation.
Apply knowledge: Solve this quadratic equation: […]
Transfer knowledge: [Some long text problem requiring you to translate it into mathematical terms and then solve it]
I guess “how exams are supposed to be done” is a pedagogy question, or “what is the best way to teach?” As I understand it, pedagogy might be more popularly known in Europe and more top-down and behind the scenes in USA.
I don’t know about the current state of pedagogy, but it makes sense to me that you’d want to test something like these categories.
I’ve had plenty of tests though where the type of problems on the exam were the same type we practiced, for the whole test.
From your last example, if you’ve already practiced many examples of [some long text problem] in a common format, it might not be a new context to you.
The middle school/high school tests I was talking about had entirely different kinds of problems we had never seen before, but where if you knew the concepts well, you could make the connection to how to solve them.