On 11/11/2011 10:47 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
On 11/11/2011 4:37 AM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
In my school experience (both high school and college), the students who
were well versed in and heavily focused on rote regurgitation were
consistently the ones with the best grades, and the ones who where
therefore
considered to be "smart" even though they couldn't have reasoned to save
their lives. That *needs* to change.
That was true of my high school, but not my college (Caltech). At
Caltech, rote memorization would get you precisely nowhere. Exams were
(by institute policy) open book and open note. This did have the
interesting effect of forcing the profs to come up with exams that could
not be completed by rote.
I came to attend Caltech mostly by accident, and it was a most fortunate
accident. The attitude and culture of Caltech suited my personality
almost perfectly.
(For another example, professors were not allowed to take attendance at
lectures, not allowed to make attendance part of the grade, not allowed
to proctor exams (100% honor system), etc. I loved being treated like an
adult for the first time.)
One might ask, isn't it easy to cheat under such a system? Yes, it is.
But such a system had an unexpected effect. The students did not regard
themselves as the adversaries of the professors. The students liked the
honor system so much that if someone did cheat, they'd get ostracized.
Ostracism is a powerful and very effective means of getting conformance.
Almost nobody cheated (to my knowledge).
The/a solution to the cheating problem at anything but the last set of
classes is to make the next set of classes *painful* to take if you
don't know the materiel from the prerequisite. The point of the class
after all is to teach you the materiel (whatever that amounts to) and if
you've got the materiel how you got there is irrelevant. That all
depends however on a carefully tuned definition of "got the materiel".
