Tests should promote learning

Tests here are hard. Open book tests here are harder. They make you falsely complacent and then have a way of turning out more complex questions than an ordinary test. Right?

Well, I just took an open book test this week. It was probably the easiest test I ever took in my career at Tech. It had only 25 multiple-choice questions that tested simple, core concepts.

The test was easy, and, for the first time, I came out smiling from an exam hall. Best of all, I remembered the material days after the test and actually understood the logic behind it.

So do easier testing strategies actually make you learn and retain more information?

All I remember from classes with hard, grueling tests, even an hour after I've taken them, are the marathon cram sessions involved in studying and my enormous caffeine intake for each one of them.

Thanks to the wonderful concept of relative curving I have gotten "A's" in some of those classes. But I don't feel I have come away with anything substantial.

I did great, but years from now, will I remember the technical intricacies of the Bernoulli-Laplace chain ,or will I remember that the test average in that class was consistently a 45 out of 100?

Getting an "A" in a class does not guarantee that you will remember all the material when you discover you need it.

A brilliant Physics senior recently discovered that after all these years of straight "As" in advanced classes involving complex mathematical equations, she was unable to conjure up a simple solution to an even simpler math problem.

The issue, she told me, was that while essential techniques for solving problems from those classes evaded her, she could not forget, in painstaking, excruciating detail, the number of hours she spent not sleeping, every day, in an attempt to master the extraneous descriptions of first and second order differential equations.

While quantitative testing strategies like multiple-choice exam questions are an easy way to rate students' ability and work, what about other factors like testing methodology and information retention?

Shouldn't there be a qualitative approach to our education too?

Why make tests so hard in the first place? Studies show that there is a higher probability of remembering general principles than details and highly specific facts. So why not test just the core concepts that professors want us to come away with?

"The purpose of education is to change the thoughts, feelings and actions of students," said Benjamin Bloom, a famous educational theorist of the past century. Bloom also believed that education should not solely focus on utilitarian, lower levels of training such as transfer of facts and information recall, but rather on core principles and big picture concepts.

I believe in order for that to happen, we need more practical and valid testing strategies in our courses that have student understanding and long-term learning as their ultimate goal.

Open book tests and focusing on the main principles of the material, would achieve this goal by reducing student stress of having to learn dry facts and figures and shift the focus towards having the student actually understand the concepts being presented.

Difficult concepts, ideas and theories that need a longer time to digest can be presented to students through homework assignments, projects and papers.

This would make learning more achievable and also encourage information retention through actual application of concepts.

Papers would be good for liberal arts courses and projects fit well with practical engineering classes.

This does not mean that openbook tests, projects and papers should be the only evaluation strategies in courses.

Maybe we can mix and match to find a balance between traditional timed tests and newer, more inviting alternatives.

In the long run, I would like to see more testing styles where the emphasis is not on cramming the material and being able to regurgitate it in an hour long torture session, but rather on understanding the material and retaining the information long after we have our diplomas framed in our office.

Then, we might actually remember something we learnt.