this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
915 points (98.2% liked)
Technology
59174 readers
3700 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Also actual mathematicians are pretty much universally capable of doing many calculations to reasonable precision in their head, because internalizing the relationships between numbers and various mathematical constructs is necessary to be able to reason about them and use them in more than trivial ways.
Tests for recall aren't because the specific piece of information is the point. They're because being able to retrieve the information is essential to integrate it into scenarios where you can utilize it, just like being able to do math without a calculator is needed to actually apply math in ways that aren't ~~proscribed~~ prescribed for you.
err... I'm finding it hard to understand the meaning of the sentence using the dictionary meaning of this word. Did you mean to use some other word?
I'd love to tell you how the hell I got there. My brain exploded I guess. I meant prescribed, in the sense that you're following the exact script someone laid out before you.
I had a physics class in college where we spent each section working through problems to demonstrate the concepts. You were allowed a page "cheat sheet" to use on the exams, and the exams were pretty much the same problems with the numbers changed. Lots of people got As in that class. Not many learned basic physics.
A lot of people don't get further than that in math, because they don't understand the basic building blocks. Plugging numbers into a formula isn't worthless, and a calculator helps that. But it doesn't help you once the problem changes a little instead of just the inputs.
That seems like the worst way of making an exam.
In case the cheat sheet were not there, it would at least be testing something (i.e. how many formulae you memorised), albeit useless.
When you let students have a cheat sheet, it is supposed to be obvious that this will be a HOTS (higher order thinking skills) test. Well, maybe for teachers lacking said HOTS, it was not obvious.
Yeah, I'm all for "you don't have to memorize every formula", but I would have just provided a generic formula sheet and made people at least get from there to the solutions, even if you did the same basic problems.
It's hard for me to objectively comment on the difficulty of the material because I'd already had most of the material in high school physics and it was pretty much just basic algebra to get from any of the formulas provided to the solution, but the people following the sheets took the full hour to do the exams that took me 5 minutes without the silly cheat sheet, because they didn't learn anything in the class.
(Edit: the wild part is that a sizable number of people in the class actually studied, like multiple hours, for that test with the exact same problems we had in class with numbers changed, while also bringing the cheat sheet where they had the full step by step solutions in for the test.)