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I must praise what John Denker wrote below.
This also seems unfair to physics teachers who spend years teaching their/snip/
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?
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
It is bizarre that Michael Edmiston and his students can't benefit from/snip/
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.