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Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

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Re: Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

#91

Post by Mountain_Skies »

Syzygies wrote: post #36

One can't have an informed opinion on this without witnessing how grading a college exam takes place, first hand. Grading a stack of blue books is a "just kill me now" brutal experience. A majority of cognitive effort is just finding the page for the next problem to grade, with finding the answer another delay; any programming language with this kind of access latency would stay a "one bus" language. So of course pro…

One of my history professors would watch horror movies while grading history essay exams. Have to give him some credit for not taking the easy way out with scantron multiple choice test, requiring long form essays to demonstrate understanding of not just historical events but also their impact.

Re: Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

#92

Post by smelendez »

armchairhacker wrote: post #52
Syzygies wrote: post #36

One can't have an informed opinion on this without witnessing how grading a college exam takes place, first hand. Grading a stack of blue books is a "just kill me now" brutal experience. A majority of cognitive effort is just finding the page for the next problem to grade, with finding the answer another delay; any programming language with this kind of access latency would stay a "one bus" language. So of course pro…

It doesn’t have to be a book, it can be a cheap laptop without internet.

Probably someone will build and sell a dirt cheap laptop with nothing on it except a basic word processor for this purpose.

It’s still a hard problem though. If the students have the laptops outside of the testing site, they can load cheating materials on them, or use them to smuggle questions and answers out if the test is used in multiple class sections. You realistically will not lock down a laptop students can take home sufficiently that some people won’t tamper with it.

Otherwise you have to have enough laptops to get each student a wiped and working machine for every test, even with lots of tests going on. And students need to be able to plug them in unless the batteries are rigorously tested and charged, but not every classroom has enough outlets. And you need to shuttle the laptops around campus.

Then you need a way to get the student work off the laptops. You probably want the student to bring the laptop up when done and plug in a USB printer. Anything else, like removable media, and you have to worry about data loss or corruption, including deliberate manipulation by students not doing well on the exam, and students claiming what got graded wasn’t what they meant to hand in. And you still have to worry about students finding a way to deliberately brick their laptops and the inevitable paper jams and other hardware failures, especially an issue when students need to leave on time to get to another class.

So you need systems that are cheap but reliable, tamper-resistant but easy to diagnose and maintain, robust against accidental data loss but easy to reliably erase, able to export data and install security updates without letting students surreptitiously input data, and heavily locked down while easy to use for students with a wide variety of backgrounds, training, and physical abilities.

Re: Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

#93

Post by umbra07 »

xphos wrote: post #63
siliconc0w wrote: post #62

The other side is with AI tutoring, you don't even really need exams. You have a constant real time map of where the student is strong and where they're weak.

But like you don't have that because AI will lie to you but kindly. People who are learning don't have the tools to point out those types of mistakes yet either so they will learn things the wrong way. Not to say teachers dont teach the wrong thing most of math is learning the wrong way only to later distill the right lesson but I think the automation of it is much worse

You can literally just system-prompt-fix that kind of problem though.

Re: Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

#94

Post by Mountain_Skies »

lispisok wrote: post #80
CompoundEyes wrote: post #34

There are schemes happening in interviews too. I've been doing many technical interviews for a senior role with off shore candidates lately. They come to me after passing a challenging online test that has controls to check for browser focus lost, opening new tabs etc. I think it may require a camera to be on too. Even with that more than half of the candidates can't code. Our interview usually starts with them breat…

Have you considered using onshore candidates instead?

Management would prefer that cheap labor burn the company to the ground than pay a fair wage. It's something more perverse than simply saving money.

Re: Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

#95

Post by calmbonsai »

I'm all for written exams, but not on the traditional physical Blue-Books. Just allow students to use traditional paper and then staple the exam to their answers as they're turning it in.

On the few occasions (3) I took one, I ended up "punching through" the paper every single time. I tend to write with high pressure and the paper quality is atrocious. Twice, the tares were so bad the book was partially de-bound.

On both occasions, when presented with a "torn/destroyed book" I had to show the proctor the "issues" and then, very carefully, hand-copy over everything into a new book in their presence--absolute PITA.

Re: Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

#96

Post by teeray »

armchairhacker wrote: post #52
Syzygies wrote: post #36

One can't have an informed opinion on this without witnessing how grading a college exam takes place, first hand. Grading a stack of blue books is a "just kill me now" brutal experience. A majority of cognitive effort is just finding the page for the next problem to grade, with finding the answer another delay; any programming language with this kind of access latency would stay a "one bus" language. So of course pro…

It doesn’t have to be a book, it can be a cheap laptop without internet.

The idea is the same: society needs AI-free enclaves to measure aptitude. How those are realized can vary, of course.

Re: Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

#97

Post by toast0 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #35
noosphr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Can’t use AI on a date, or at a dinner party, or during a board meeting. I get the same "you won't always have a calculator with you" vibes from 90s teachers chiding you to show your work when I hear people say stuff like this.

You say that like those teachers were incorrect. They were correct, and still are correct. You don't always have a computer to hand, and you do in fact need to be able to do basic math.

It's pretty rare that I don't have quick access to a calculator. Which really reduces the basic math I need to do in my head.

It's more likely I will not have paper and writing implements than not having a calculator.

Besides, most people have room for fast arithmetic or integrals; fast arithmetic would be more useful, but I'm not putting the time in to get it back.

Re: Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

#98

Post by bradleyjg »

djoldman wrote: post #89

It's hard to have any substantial sympathy for the troubles of teaching private US college and university students. Given the absolutely wild increases in tuition, administrations should have massive resources to bring to bear to solving this and other problems. The reasons they don't feel more like excuses than legitimate explanations.

These institutions are not about teaching students. That’s a fundraising exercise for their actual purpose. And even the actual purpose is under heavy stress from cancerous administrative growth.

Re: Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

#99

Post by secabeen »

djoldman wrote: post #89

It's hard to have any substantial sympathy for the troubles of teaching private US college and university students. Given the absolutely wild increases in tuition, administrations should have massive resources to bring to bear to solving this and other problems. The reasons they don't feel more like excuses than legitimate explanations.

The wild increases in tuition are for the nameplate price, not the actual price paid by median students net of grants. See pg. 12 here:

https://research.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/Trends-College-P...

Published tuition has gone up, but grant aid has matched it, making the net cost at 4-year public institutions to be flat, or even down slightly over the 10 year period. The same applies at private 4-year institutions, large increase in nameplate price, matched by large increase in grant aid, actual net tuition flat.

Expenditure data also show that they are not spending significantly more. See the chart at the end of this page, which gives expenditures in real, per-student dollars. They are up, a little less than 20% over 10 years, but half of that is increases in hospital costs of their associated health care systems, which have nothing to do with tuition. The rest is a mix of various activities of universities, much of which are not tuition-funded.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_334.10.a...

Re: Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

#100

Post by acbart »

djoldman wrote: post #89

It's hard to have any substantial sympathy for the troubles of teaching private US college and university students. Given the absolutely wild increases in tuition, administrations should have massive resources to bring to bear to solving this and other problems. The reasons they don't feel more like excuses than legitimate explanations.

No no, that money goes to the administration. They are not involved in the teaching. That is left to the faculty, who are paid inverse to the amount of teaching they handle. Teaching is an afterthought at universities, the primary activities instead are research, building football stadiums, and paying for the revolving door of administrators.
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