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Re: Assessment; evaluation of GRE scores



A useful and productive exam preparation in any circumstance is practice
with *similar* questions to those given on an exam.

I hope that this is what Jim Peters is admiring.
I am shocked that a college professor would bridle at such preparation.
A too narrow focus on the regulations, perhaps?

In contrast, the FAA tests to which John Denker alludes are
given with selections from the *same* thousand questions, over and over
for periods of years.

Accordingly, civilian pilots who want to take the Commercial or
the Instrument with the best possible results spend a few hundred for
a three day cram class at nationally advertised aviation schools.

There is nothing underhand about this: every one of the one thousand
questions is discussed, and compared with the official answer.
It is usual for Commercial applicants to make 90%+ on this test.
Certainly I made the high nineties on the Commercial ground.
When the questions change, the schools make haste to find the
'officially approved' answers.

To avoid the embarrassment of too many test takers making nearly 100%
(one imagines) the FAA seems to choose the edge of the envelope for
its questions - so you read the kind of question to which a naive or
unprepared test taker would probably make a wrong choice.

The FAA is not alone in this: I have the honor for example to hold the
FCC general commercial radio license with radar endorsement, so anytime an
ocean liner needs radar service in the Altus area, I am prepared -
I actually did this to support a simulator technician who wanted
to obtain this license as an entree into a commercial airline simulator
operation, for which the General Radio is a prerequisite, for some reason.

For this one, sample tests are available on the web, so that one can get
high grades by modest sweat equity at home, in several weeks study, perhaps
with a text too.

Then there is the charter yacht captain test - essentially no experience in
the role is required.

But I digress....

Brian




At 17:46 8/25/01 -0400, Jim Peters wrote:
I must praise what John Denker wrote below.

/snip/
This also seems unfair to physics teachers who spend years teaching their
students how to think and the general subject of physics, only to have their
students outclassed by students who are given test questions to "learn".

There is one problem on gravity that I saw on the GRE test but no where else
in many years of teaching. Should I teach my students this problem and
others like it because of the high probability of them seeing these problems
on the GRE or should I teach them general principles and how to think?
/snip/
Thus it seems that if physics teachers obtain test materials from previous
test takers and distributed them, the students who have them will do much
better on the GRE physics test. If you do not do this and others do, then
your students will do worse. If you use GRE scores for assessment, you will
rate poorer than you deserve. Is there something we can do about this
situation?

Jim Peters
Hillsdale College


From: John S. Denker [mailto:jsd@MONMOUTH.COM]
Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2001 12:32 PM

/snip/
It is bizarre that Michael Edmiston and his students can't benefit from
looking at past exams. In contrast, according to the URL cited above
... in most Chinese physics departments there are books ... about
an 80-85% chance of having all the questions on the next exam to
be given.

It seems foolish of the ETS to set "rules" that can't be uniformly
enforced, especially when this gives such a huge advantage to the
rule-breakers.

This is particularly foolish on a test where there is tremendous time
pressure (1.8 minutes per question). Memorizing the answers to a modest
subset of the questions can greatly increase the time for thinking about
the remaining ones.

Note that it doesn't have to be this way. For example, the tests designed
by the Federal Aviation Administration are largely immune from this
particular problem, because
a) they prepare a huge number of questions, typically about 1000, of
which only 50 or 100 are selected to appear on any given test, and
b) they publish all the questions.

As Mr. Spock would say, this is crude but effective. It eliminates one
entire category of rule-breaking. Anybody who wants to memorize the
answers to all 1000 questions is free to do so.

As a corollary, this takes the previously-underground practice of "teaching
to the test" and moves it above ground.
/snip/
brian whatcott <inet@intellisys.net> Altus OK
Eureka!