The Long Road

08/06/2004 Archived Entry: "Finals"

Had a strange exam experience on Wednesday. Weeks before the end of class we were given a list of 18 questions and told that the exam would be made up of 10 of those questions. Of course, I spent like 3 days answering all the questions as best as I could but somehow kept feeling that the exam would have some kind of surprise to it. Surprisingly, the exam had no surprises; it was very straightforward - ten questions from the set we were given, just as she said.

Not that I'm complaning, but doing it this way made the exam much too easy. And too easy to prepare for. There was no struggle during the exam at all, just straight up regurgitation. There were even some questions that I didn't remember exactly how to do but did remember the answer I got and was able to work my way backwards. And then there were those questions where I bothered only to memorize the steps to the solution without understading the underlying concepts.

Talking to one of the TAs, he said that the prof was just trying out an "experiment". I think the better way to do this, as some of my old profs/teachers have done, is to tell the students what KIND of questions will be asked or to give a very representative version of the exam to practice with. This way ensures at least some kind of applied knowledge can be tested and is better than the standard "study everything" approach which is usually too much material to be tested on anyways. I'm all for "focused studying", learning (and understanding) only the important concepts and procedures that the prof wants you to know. It's unreasonable to expect that a student will know everything that was taught over the course of 4 months, this just causes overload and information just gets purged as it gets written onto the exam paper anyways. It's as if what you studied was some weight your consciousness had to hold onto and is relieved to let it go when you know you don't need it anymore (in the imediate future, at least).

Break

Exam period always feels like a sequence of Sundays. I'm always dreading the upcoming "Monday" and keep thinking I should get some work done but never get to it. I've also noticed that the night before an exam, I'm often of the mentality that I probably know enough material but it would be very nice to have an extra day to reinforce all this knowledge so that it's a bit less fleeting. Of course, I've usually wasted a day or so not studying by this point.

Replies: 2 comments

open book exams are the way to go ... i think they're the best way to test your application of the material you have learned, as long as the exam itself is written properly

Posted by melpie @ 08/06/2004 09:51 AM EST

I took the same exam, and here's what I think in response.
http://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~ww2chen/index.php?num=35

Posted by Will @ 08/06/2004 03:44 PM EST