Exam Credit for Knowing What You Do Not Know
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Exam Credit for Knowing What You Do Not Know
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Re: Exam Credit for Knowing What You Do Not Know
#2I was a Computer Science student and teaching assistant at the University of Toronto for a number of years (about a decade ago), and the 20% rule was in full effect: "On a test, if you write 'I don't know', you get 20% of the marks for that question"
As a student, this challenged you to know and understand what you know, and what you don't, and promoted the idea that knowing what you don't know is, in itself, valuable.
As a teaching assistant marking tests, this virtually eliminated long, tedious, often vacuous answers where the student was clearly throwing darts and hoping for a mark or two.
Re: Exam Credit for Knowing What You Do Not Know
#3I was a Computer Science student and teaching assistant at the University of Toronto for a number of years (about a decade ago), and the 20% rule was in full effect: "On a test, if you write 'I don't know', you get 20% of the marks for that question" As a student, this challenged you to know and understand what you know, and what you don't, and promoted the idea that knowing what you don't know is, in itself, valuabl…
Re: Exam Credit for Knowing What You Do Not Know
#4> One problem in teaching economics--the course is on the application of economics to law, for law students--is that it is possible to think you understand something when you don't, when you are substituting some vague things you think you know already for much more precise and quite different things you are supposed to learn.
Isn't this generally the problem with economics writ large? It's possible to think you understand something when you don't, when you are substituting some vague math you can do / can measure for the more detailed and difficult (and possibly intractable) phenomenology that is reality?
Re: Exam Credit for Knowing What You Do Not Know
#5Note that for multiple choice exams you can go further and have people assign a probability distribution over the answers, rather than just picking an answer. Then you can use a proper scoring rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoring_rule#Proper_scoring_ru...
Re: Exam Credit for Knowing What You Do Not Know
#6In an economics class on Games and Strategies, the professor gave us a choice for one question: you can accept an 80% score for this question, or you can go to the front of the room and pick up the prompt.
Once you have decided to do so you will get whatever score you deserve — there's no turning back and declining to answer the question after seeing it.
I believe we were given the topic of the question in the instructions. IIRC, the class split about 50/50.
Re: Exam Credit for Knowing What You Do Not Know
#7I was a Computer Science student and teaching assistant at the University of Toronto for a number of years (about a decade ago), and the 20% rule was in full effect: "On a test, if you write 'I don't know', you get 20% of the marks for that question" As a student, this challenged you to know and understand what you know, and what you don't, and promoted the idea that knowing what you don't know is, in itself, valuabl…
I recall there was another professor at UofT during my time there that used a scheme of "Everyone starts with 30% on each question, every relevant and correct statement you write earns you marks, every irrelevant or incorrect statement loses you marks."
Re: Exam Credit for Knowing What You Do Not Know
#8When I was studying for the LSAT, I found it very helpful to mark a confidence indicator of 1-4 on every answer. Then, when I went back and graded my answers, I could see if I was missing questions that I knew I wasn't sure of, or if I was overconfident/sloppy on questions that I thought I knew. Not quite the same concept, but in the same vein of "know thyself".
Re: Exam Credit for Knowing What You Do Not Know
#9This is a great idea! I think there should definitely be more emphasis placed on knowing what you don't know in a good education system. Even something like knowing what areas of study exist can be quite valuable.
I had a friend acting as a research assistant to a biology masters student who was tasked with removing duplicates from an Excel file. The masters student said it would take about four hours because that's how long it usually took her to do it. My friend made a simple script in about an hour that then did the work in effectively no time. I am by no means a proponent of the "everyone should learn to code" movement but I think there could have been a lot of time saved here if the biologist just new the shallowest fact that computers are good for doing tedious things.
Obviously specialization is still very important but I feel introducing more shallow learning could really make a difference in both communication and innovation.
If you like this general topic Terence Tao has an interesting piece in a similar vein on assigning partial credit for true-false questions [1] that was posted on HN a while back [2].
[1] https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2016/06/01/how-to-assign-part...
Re: Exam Credit for Knowing What You Do Not Know
#10I'm upvoting all the comments people didn't make.