The US is fucking cooked
I can’t help but think this is a phenomenon unique to the US where education has been completely devalued. If the only point of education is to fulfill a requirement to make more money then it makes sense to shortcut as much as possible.
The solution is of course no computer
The education system has always been stupid and it’s about time it stopped with it’s Victorian era, one size fits all, “the student is needs to be whipped into shape” style teaching.
You do not know your students commitments outside of study. You probably also do not know how best they themselves learn. They have the right to have their time respected as much as anyone else, and they aren’t even getting paid for their time and effort
Strict deadlines are stupid. In the real world, illness happens, tragedy happens, bad traffic happens, etc and deadlines aren’t always going to be met. Closed book tests are also stupid. In the real world there is hardly ever going to be a time you cannot consult your notes.
Also, because we stand on the shoulders of giants and forever expand the scope of human knowledge, teachers are finding that they have too much content to teach and not enough time to teach it (also lack of education funding and pressure to get students into the workforce as soon as possible doesn’t help). As a consequence, students are bombarded with an avalanche of content in a short time, more content than is physically possible for a human brain to retain in such a short time. Therefore, students trying to work smarter rather than harder isn’t just understandable, but is increasingly becoming mandatory.
Do I think AI is a good substitute for a real education? Hell no. But I do think it’s use among students is the natural result of a broken education system rather than “them lazy students can’t think for themselves.”
Also I hope this rant doesn’t make it sound like I’m blaming teachers, they’re doing the best with what the system demands of them. I’m talking more about the whole damn structure of the education system. It fucks over teachers as much as it does students.
What alternatives are there in the context of math tests when it comes to testing a student’s knowledge of a topic that isn’t just an algorithm of solving a particular type of problem?
There is more to math than just acting like a human calculator. We already got pocket calculators. You can create word problems or case studies in math where the student has to figure out what algorithm to apply, why, and how. Or even a combination of algorithms, plus their limitations and modifications.
I know. I literally am a mathematician by education. I made a couple of math-related posts on Hexbear last year. That’s why I excluded relevant tests in my question.
Okay, but I did exclude this sort of test in my question.
What I am much more curious about is students proving that they understand things like what Taylor series is (including its significance and relation to polynomials), or basic theorems about planes in the context of linear algebra. How does one test that students do understand that without limiting their access to notes and textbooks?
I don’t believe that closed book tests should literally never be used.
I just believe that for a lot of things, the typical test provides very limited or low quality information on the abilities of the student.
In the case of the Taylor expansion, you can test if the student has correctly memorised the formula and can plug and chug, which is what a lot of my closed book tests were like. But these tests were easy because all I had to do was memorise a few basic formulas. The home assignments and labs tested my full skills much more.
You can also ask a student to actually explain the motivation for it, as well as its significance. My university exams were all in the form of explaining a few assigned topics to a teacher after being given some time to prepare notes and remember things, without access to prior notes and textbooks. Being able to use notes without restrictions would trivialise that.
Rote memorisation would not work in the case of the exams that I took.