On 23/08/2013 7:44 PM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>
> (Not that I expect my opinion to influence anything...)

No chance. There is too much money involved.

-- 
Regards
     Stephen

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On 23/08/2013 10:28 PM, Warp wrote:
> One thing about exams that I have noticed is that the exact same difficult
> exam becomes much easier, even trivial, after several years of experience.
>

[snip]

>
> Of course there's the other side of the coin, though: There were many
> exams that I passed, and which I would nowadays flunk completely, because
> they have simply not been part of my life in any way, and therefore I have
> got no experience.
>

When you get older, you will know what you just said is true and why.

-- 
Regards
     Stephen

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Le 23/08/2013 20:44, Orchid Win7 v1 nous fit lire :
>>> The problem with distributing grades along a bell curve, like that, is
>>> that in years where the class is full of genies, someone who has an
>>> otherwise good grasp of the theory ends up with a C, and years when the
>>> class is full of morons, you give an A to someone who doesn't merit one.
>>

If you want to really be able to compare grade along years, the only
sure way would be to have all the classes (even 10 years after diploma)
to take (or retake) the same test. Due to the burden, you could end up
with a test every 5 years instead of one each season.
But it would provides accurate comparable values.
Let's have a national evaluation week !


> I still believe that a qualification - ANY qualification - should have a
> fixed set of requirements, and anybody who meets those gets the
> qualifications, regardless of what anybody else did in the same year.

That would works only for "Hard-sciences".
Litteracy, Poetry, Philosophy, artistic performance, and plenty of other
evaluations would still be subject to the appreciation of the evaluating
jury.

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>> I still believe that a qualification - ANY qualification - should have a
>> fixed set of requirements, and anybody who meets those gets the
>> qualifications, regardless of what anybody else did in the same year.
>
> That would works only for "Hard-sciences".
> Litteracy, Poetry, Philosophy, artistic performance, and plenty of other
> evaluations would still be subject to the appreciation of the evaluating
> jury.

LOL "Litteracy". Irony, much? ;-)

I still think it's dubious that one should be able to get a 
_qualification_ in something which is highly subjective. I mean, sure, 
*everything* has some level of subjectiveness in it. But having a 
qualification in "being able to draw really pretty pictures" is far too 
vague; beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Qualifications need to be 
based on something more objective. (And, indeed, art degrees are usually 
based mostly on technical skill rather than artistic merit.)

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> This makes me think: Why does this have to be so? Why couldn't we make
> students achieve that level of knowledge and experience so that they
> will trivially pass those exams with 100% score (for the simple reason
> that they outright *know* the answers by heart due to experience and
> practice)?

I'm going to say "because many students don't CARE about the subject 
they're learning, they just want good grades". Notice I said "many", not 
"all". But I know A LOT of people on my degree course appeared to 
absolutely HATE computing. (So why are you on a computing course? Oh, 
right - because you think there's going to be money in it...)

At school it's even worse; you get TOLD what you have to study, and 
there's no choice in the matter.

> Of course there's the other side of the coin, though: There were many
> exams that I passed, and which I would nowadays flunk completely, because
> they have simply not been part of my life in any way, and therefore I have
> got no experience.

My mum thought it would be great fun to make me answer some website's 
mock GCSE questions.

I'm not entirely sure how I got 6/7 for the History one, given that I 
know nothing about history. Then again, it's multiple-choice, so you 
have a 25% chance of getting each one right. Basically when it asks what 
measure was proposed in such-and-such a year, just think which ones 
sound too progressive.

For Maths I only got 6/7. This is due to me not knowing the cosine of 

excuse me, one quarter of root-5 minus 1. Obviously...)

I scored poorly on my recent LPIC exam due to a number of factors. One 
of them was the number of IPv6 questions. (Does anybody on Earth 
actually *use* IPv6 yet?) Also partly due to several questions about 
topics which are NOT IN THE BOOK! >_< So, totally worth buying the book 
then. :-P

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> The 700k population of students perhaps doesn't fluctuate much, but the
> difficulty of the questions surely does. But how to control for that?

Isn't that a perfect reason to have a fixed % of people getting each grade?

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On Tue, 27 Aug 2013 10:03:26 +0100, scott wrote:

>> The 700k population of students perhaps doesn't fluctuate much, but the
>> difficulty of the questions surely does. But how to control for that?
> 
> Isn't that a perfect reason to have a fixed % of people getting each
> grade?

Depends on whether you need an absolute measurement of skill/knowledge or 
a relative measurement.

Jim

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>>> The 700k population of students perhaps doesn't fluctuate much, but the
>>> difficulty of the questions surely does. But how to control for that?
>>
>> Isn't that a perfect reason to have a fixed % of people getting each
>> grade?
>
> Depends on whether you need an absolute measurement of skill/knowledge or
> a relative measurement.

If the distribution in skill/knowledge of the students is fluctuating 
less than the difficulty of the questions, it will give you a more 
accurate absolute measure (if the alternative is to give everyone grades 
based on the number of questions they get right).

Given there are only a handful of questions in an exam, and hundreds of 
thousands of students taking them (and hundreds of thousands of 
teachers), I'd say it's way more likely the distribution of question 
difficulty varies from year to year than that of the students' skill.

Anyway I'd suggest that the main use of school exam grades is to secure 
a place at a college or university, so a relative measure is probably 
all that's needed.

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On Wed, 28 Aug 2013 08:31:49 +0100, scott wrote:

>>>> The 700k population of students perhaps doesn't fluctuate much, but
>>>> the difficulty of the questions surely does. But how to control for
>>>> that?
>>>
>>> Isn't that a perfect reason to have a fixed % of people getting each
>>> grade?
>>
>> Depends on whether you need an absolute measurement of skill/knowledge
>> or a relative measurement.
> 
> If the distribution in skill/knowledge of the students is fluctuating
> less than the difficulty of the questions, it will give you a more
> accurate absolute measure (if the alternative is to give everyone grades
> based on the number of questions they get right).
> 
> Given there are only a handful of questions in an exam, and hundreds of
> thousands of students taking them (and hundreds of thousands of
> teachers), I'd say it's way more likely the distribution of question
> difficulty varies from year to year than that of the students' skill.
> 
> Anyway I'd suggest that the main use of school exam grades is to secure
> a place at a college or university, so a relative measure is probably
> all that's needed.

Well, maybe.  If you buy into the idea that pre-uni instruction degrading 
isn't a problem.  An absolute measure can be used to uphold an absolute 
measure, and if the pre-uni schools aren't meeting it, then they need to 
up their game, rather than the universities lowering their standards.

Jim

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>> Anyway I'd suggest that the main use of school exam grades is to secure
>> a place at a college or university, so a relative measure is probably
>> all that's needed.
>
> Well, maybe.  If you buy into the idea that pre-uni instruction degrading
> isn't a problem.  An absolute measure can be used to uphold an absolute
> measure, and if the pre-uni schools aren't meeting it, then they need to
> up their game, rather than the universities lowering their standards.

Just by the nature of setting questions I think the standard over a 
longer period (eg 10 years) would be easier to keep consistent. So you 
could still look at the absolute scores averaged over the long term to 
analyse the performance. Giving students relative scores will avoid them 
being penalised by the year-to-year variations in the difficulty of the 
questions.

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