Comment by leafboi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leafboi | Hacker News Reader

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The university I went to offered open book/note exams for almost all courses. It literally didn't even matter how much you memorized... open book tests didn't make anything easier. you need to understand or fail.

I'm not into showing off ranking or pedigree but I do genuinely believe that the higher the pedigree your school the more likely the exams will be harder and require total understanding and even creativity over rote memorization.

The reason is because memorization is trivial. Students able to get into any top school will likely all easily achieve full score on an ordinary tests. The professors at top schools need to make these tests brutally hard in order to produce a bell curve.

I literally had one new professor at my school actually give a mid term that was what would ordinarily be called fair in any other school or college... but the entire class ended up getting nearly full score.

He realized his mistake and the final was way, way harder.

Rote memorization tests are the easiest to make and grade, both in terms of simple instructor effort as well as in terms of fairness and lack of ambiguity.

In Asia it is common for schools to solely grade base on multiple choice exams which promote cramming and memorization. But in the US I would be shocked if a program that only operated that way was accredited. I would argue students who simply memorize things are trying to hack their way to an unearned grade. The goal of higher education is supposed to be to reach higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy, beyond the rote stuff done in primary and secondary school.

> Students able to get into any top school will likely all easily achieve full score on an ordinary tests. The professors at top schools need to make these tests brutally hard in order to produce a bell curve.

This is no longer how “high pedigree” schools function in the US. There is too much blowback from helicopter parents and the kids who haven’t ever had to deal with critical feedback before.

Lookup “grade inflation” if you want to be horrified by the quality decline of “pedigree education”.

You got a good point. My school is listed as a school that has grade inflation but anecdotally I feel my engineering department was pretty brutal. Average GPA was below 3 when I was there.

It could be my personal situation was not representative of the norm.

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