Re: FINAL EXAMS

["John S. Denker" <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

At 01:23 PM 11/2/01 -0500, David Abineri wrote:
> High school teachers, how about posting your first semester final exam
> to the list after you administer it so that we all have a slightly
> better idea as to what expectations we all have for our students.

Wow, what a cool idea.  At the college level it is fairly common to post
past exams on the web, but a quick look (using altavista) didn't turn up
much at the high-school level.

Just think about the implications:

 1) There would be a pool of questions that teachers could draw from when
making next year's tests.  This is a huge win, because creating good
questions from scratch is hard work.

 2) The pool could contain not just the questions, but commentary, such as
   -- what percentage of the students got it right
   -- how well did score on this question correlate with score overall
   -- what were the most-common mistakes
   -- et cetera.

If just 10% of the teachers on this list participated, and contributed just
a few high-quality questions, there would be hundreds of questions in the
pool.  Keep up the pace for a few years and there would be thousands.

Note that if teachers draw from a small pool of questions, the system is
vulnerable to cramming (by students who focus on the specific questions,
not on the concepts), but if teachers draw from a large pool, it becomes
easier to learn the concepts than to cram all the questions, so the
vulnerability goes away.

There is one slight fairness issue:  Since _some_ students will have access
to the pool of questions, in the interest of fairness one should make sure
that _all_ students can get access.

> Are we able to do this on the list?

a) Just posting them to the list would be a fine way to start.  This
implicitly makes stuff available on the web (via the phys-l archives) but
this is not 100% wonderful because the major search engines can't see into
the archives.

b) After some modest number of questions have been contributed, it would
make sense for somebody to collect them onto a web site.  Skilled editing
would greatly increase the value of the collection.