Off: Right To Decide et. al.

[Eric Siegerman]

On Thu, Nov 20, 2003 at 05:22:12PM -0000, CWarburton at OAG.COM wrote:
> A teacher friend of mine commented that his
> students were no longer interested in finding out how to derive a solution
> to a problem, they just wanted to "know what the answer was" for the
> purposes of the exam.  Bye-bye Socratic method!

When I was in school, an answer without a derivation would be
worth approximately 0 (except in highschool chemistry, where the
tests were all multiple-guess).  Has that changed too?

Chemistry finals, on the other hand, went the other way entirely.
They weren't multiple-guess -- but they were open-book.  The
questions were designed to test understanding, not simple
knowledge of facts. and so the teachers felt (and told us so
quite clearly) that having your textbook available to look facts
up in wouldn't help you much if you didn't understand the
material.  (I suppose they must also have felt that by making the
exams open-book, and thus freeing us from the need for rote
memorization, they were steering us toward using our study time
on the stuff that isn't so easily looked up in reference books.)

I have a lot of respect for that.  It much more closely models
real, working life.  I'm forever looking up facts (command
syntaxes, calling sequences, file formats, HTML tags, and on and
on); a lot of the skill is in knowing *where* to find them, and
knowing *which* facts you want in the first place.

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        erics at telepres.com
|  |  /
It must be said that they would have sounded better if the singer
wouldn't throw his fellow band members to the ground and toss the
drum kit around during songs.
        - Patrick Lenneau