Comment by bArray
5 hours ago
> This approach still works, why do something else?
One issue is that the time provided to mark each piece of work continues to decrease. Sometimes you are only getting 15 minutes for 20 pages, and management believe that you can mark back-to-back from 9-5 with a half hour lunch. The only thing keeping people sane is the students that fail to submit, or submit something obviously sub-par. So where possible, even for designing exams, you try to limit text altogether. Multiple choice, drawing lines, a basic diagram, a calculation, etc.
Some students have terrible handwriting. I wouldn't be against the use of a dumb terminal in an exam room/hall. Maybe in the background it could be syncing the text and backing it up.
> Unless you're specifically testing a student's ability to Google, they don't need access to it.
I've been the person testing students, and I don't always remember everything. Sometimes it is good enough for the students to demonstrate that they understand the topic enough to know where to find the correct information based on a good intuition.
I want to echo this.
Your blue book is being graded by a stressed out and very underpaid grad student with many better things to do. They're looking for keywords to count up, that's it. The PI gave them the list of keywords, the rubric. Any flourishes, turns of phrase, novel takes, those don't matter to your grader at 11 pm after the 20th blue book that night.
Yeah sure, that's not your school, but that is the reality of ~50% of US undergrads.
Very effective multiple choice tests can be given, that require work to be done before selecting an answer, so it can be machine graded. Not ideal in every case but a very quality test can be made multiple choice for hard science subjects
True! Good point!
But again, the test creator matters a lot here too. To make such an exam is quite the labor. Especially as many/most PIs have other better things to do. Their incentives are grant money, then papers, then in a distant 3rd their grad students, and finally undergrad teaching.any departments are explicit on this. To spend the limited time on a good undergrad multiple choice exam is not in the PIs best interest.
Which is why, in this case of a good Scantron exam, they're likely to just farm it out to Claude. Cheap, easy, fast, good enough. A winner in all dimensions.
Also, as an aside to the above, an AI with OCR for your blue book would likely be the best realistic grader too. Needs less coffee after all
Pros and cons. Multiple choice can be frustrating for students because it's all or nothing. Spend 10 minutes+ on question, make a small calculation error and end up with a zero. It's not a great format for a lot of questions.
This is what my differential equations exams were like almost 20 years ago. Honestly, as a student I considered them brutal (10 questions, no partial credit available at all) even though I'd always been good at math. I scraped by but I think something like 30% of students had to retake the class.
Now that I haven't been a student in a long time and (maybe crucially?) that I am friends with professors and in a relationship with one, I get it. I don't think it would be appropriate for a higher level course, but for a weed-out class where there's one Prof and maybe 2 TAs for every 80-100 students it makes sense.
Scantron and a #2 pencil.
Stanford started doing 15 minute exams with ~12 questions to combat LLM use. OTOH I got a final project feedback from them that was clearly done by an LLM :shrug:
> Some students have terrible handwriting.
Then they should have points deducted for that. Effective communication of answers is part of any exam.