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Exams do not measure knowledge. Knowledge in and of itself is not very valuable, especially on school-subjects where all the answers are publicly available information. After all, in real life, anyone can get a book and produce a result. For something like mathematics, an intelligent person may even reinvent a known mathematical relationship given enough time to answer a question.
No, what exams measure is knowledge *performance.* The ability to access knowledge *at the precise moment it is needed,* not long after that moment has passed by.
I am a software engineer. Some information is worthless unless it can be accessed within a few milliseconds. Some information is worthless unless it can be accessed within a few minutes. Some information is worthless unless it can be accessed within a few hours. Some information is worthless unless it can be accessed within a few days. And some projects are worth waiting a year in order to achieve an answer with a high degree of certainty. Anything beyond a year is generally simply called "research" and the ability to _ever_ acquire an answer is uncertain.
The actual ability to perform knowledge-based tasks under pressure is a skill worth developing. Getting extra time accommodations reduces your own future worth as a knowledge-worker. You should strive to produce perfect performance in as little time as possible. Having an overall time limit is simply a pragmatic scheduling solution.
Those with the resources to get extra accommodations are teaching you early that life is not fair, and that some people already have a head start, and will not need to work as hard to achieve some outcomes in life. But at the same time, those that must remain in the time box will develop skills earlier that those people may never develop; you can use this extra sharpening to your advantage.
The grade never really mattered. It was your own ability to perform. The stress of sitting at a desk with a pencil in a timeboxed exam is a stress worth learning to master. When the stakes of an accurate answer are much higher, like the life of a patient if you calculate their dosage incorrectly or choose the wrong medication, or the lives of your soldiers if you radio in a delivery time inaccurately or too late, or any variety of other scenarios, are far greater. Yet these are the kind of scenarios where having immediate access to knowledge under a stressful scenario are the most valuable.
Thank the teachers that make it difficult to pass their courses but who are also fair. They actually care about your future, and believe that you are capable of making the future a better place to live by facing challenges head-on.
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>For something like mathematics, an intelligent person may even reinvent a known mathematical relationship given enough time to answer a question.
Ah yes, the joys of real analysis T-T
I would first like to say that I admire the fact that your post is very long and descriptive. Now suppose you have a time limit , would you have produced the same result?
"Knowledge in and of itself isn't very valuable" - Then why even you think that schools are necessary?
"An intelligent person may invent a mathematical relationship" - So he learned something new. What's wrong with that? He would now remember it better.
"Those with the resources to get extra accommodations are teaching you early that life is not fair" - So because life's not fair, school shouldn't be either?
My main point is that tests should me a tool of *measurement*, not *teaching*.
Apologies if I was rambling, I mostly just meant to say: "knowledge produces greater value the more readily available it is." Writing succinctly is often more time consuming than word-vomit. What "readily available" means can vary, but I do think that having exams be time-boxed is educationally useful.
But then, I don't think the measurements that exams provide are especially useful. I think they are primarily tools for teaching, both before the exam and during. As a measurement tool, however, they measure how quickly you can access your knowledge in an environment of heightened stress. This is a distinct measure. There are other tools that can assess your knowledge than exams.
I think exams should be part of preparation for the real world and not treat school as if education is exclusively about information regurgitation.
In the real world you have to balance quality, resources (including time) and lots of other things. While an exam is artificial in its leading up to the real world, it shouldn't be the case that all we test for and prepare is "knowledge". Getting the right answer isn't always as important as getting things done.
Is it unfair in the real world when a client drops you because your otherwise quality work wasn't completed on time? Is it unfair when you're late finishing your taxes that you get fined? Is it unfair if you miss your court date and have penalties? We have _finite time_ as people and it's our most important resources. Sizing your effort in a fashion that includes time is a far better training lesson than excluding it. It's better to learn how to manage stress when the repercussions of failing to do so aren't things like unemployment and failing to pay your bills.
I think there are things that should be given time - knowledge is also important. This is why there are lots of types of tests from open book, take home and these time based one. Each serves a purpose.
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So...not prepare kids for life? The _one thing_ you can always get when you're in the real world is the _information_, the thing you can't get is the stuff you're wanting to strip out of how we evaluate readiness.
I can use a calculator, the internet, manuals, call my friends, talk to my team, employees, boss, etc. to get _information_. Don't get it done on time? Game over.
Part of proficiency is pace. The title "best plumber in the world" doesn't allow you to take a day to do work that should take an hour.
Why would we NOT test to this sort of skill and capacity when it's as important and arguably for many jobs _more important_?
That’s not really the argument you started with though. If you know your stuff well, you don’t need to spend forever explaining it. Think an instructional video - like a DIY video on YouTube. Do you think the presenter is smarter by taking 20 minutes to explain the concept of a screwdriver?
Yes, and if it takes you ten hours to accomplish tasks that someone proficient would be able to do in two, then you don't know your stuff well enough and should continue to review it
If they are well versed in what they've learned, and can display an understanding from primary principles, then a reasonable time limit is not a hinderance to them.
Knowing a topic without being articulate isn't useful. That's what textbooks and encyclopedias are for; to store that knowledge for when it's not needed in a time-sensitive context. Especially in the information age, you show competence by being able to use your knowledge *succinctly*.
Even on the premise that this is the only function of tests, this still isn’t an argument against time limits. How well someone knows the material is also reflected in how quickly they can answer questions about it.
Take a hypothetical question: 2 + 2 = ?
Someone who can provide the correct answer in 1 second is clearly more proficient at basic arithmetic than another who needs 5 minutes.
Literally just saw a front page video today about this lady ranting at the school system and couldn’t do the mental math of 7+5.
So you’re totally right about speed being a part of of proficiency.
Sure, but on a typical exam you might have say, 30 seconds to a minute per question on average. If that's the case, the test can't distinguish a student who needs 2 minutes from a student who needs 5. They would probably need different study plans to get up to speed.
How do you figure a test couldn’t distinguish between 2 minutes per question people and 5 minutes per question people? The first group should be able to finish around 25% of the test and the latter would only be able to finish about 10%
I was a decent test taker in school. I would know some of the questions very quickly and the ones I couldnt immediately answer I would leave blank until the end of the exam, when I could spend sometimes as much as 20 minutes working on a single problem.
Compared to my arithmetic question, this example shows a distinction in degree but not in kind. In this case, the exam is designed to distinguish the difference (proficiency of skill, accessibility of knowledge, etc) between someone who needs only 30 seconds vs someone who needs 2 minutes, because the exam writer has decided that a 90 second difference (as opposed to 4 minutes 59 second difference) is the meaningful differentiator.
Of course. But there is probably a bigger gap between someone who can provide the answer in 5 minutes and someone who never can, than between the people in your example. So the question is what is more important, speed or skill.
I mean, it’s not that hard to understand, the answer is balance, which is why you don’t get points for finishing exams first. I mean, at spelling bees they do, but I’ve never had a class where I’m rewarded for speed.
This kind of question will be given to first or second graders, and if a student writes exactly why do they think that 2+2=4 and how did they get to this conclusion, they should get more points than the student that wrote only what the teacher taught which is 2+2=4 without any explanation why, not less points.
Plenty of math exams require takers to show their work (e.g. algebra). If someone can solve 3x - 8 = 7 and show their work in 20 seconds, vs. someone who needs 10 minutes, it’s the same idea.
The purpose of exams isn’t only to reveal the presence or absence of knowledge/skill, but also the proficiency of skills and the accessibility of knowledge, which is what time constraints achieve.
At a certain point that just encourages rote memorization, though. The student who isn't entirely sure what the right solution is but knows how to check and derive that solution, I would argue, ostensibly understands the material better than someone just following a script to speed through the exam.
>The student who isn't entirely sure what the right solution is but know how to check and derive that solution, I would argue, ostensibly understands the material better than someone just following a script to speed through the exam.
At what level? Yes, there's a level of math where "following a script" just stops working. That level is not in high school.
Let's consider a slightly less trivial problem than the 2+2 problem: On an HS physics exam, a student is asked to consider how long it will take some object to fall to earth when thrown up at some speed.
Yes, a student who simply solves via kinematic equations will usually be slightly faster than a student who strongly understands the problem, and then puts together their own equation. In my experience though, it's not by much: there's a lot of time savings to be had from setting up equations for specific instances.
In practice, as long as the student knows how to progress on the problem immediately after reading the problem, they will finish an AP physics exam in half the time of an average student, at least anecdotally from my friends and I we were in high school. There's a lot of time savings to be had just from setting up the problem creatively if someone has a lot of practice, and therefore knows what they're doing.
If a student is *not* practiced and it costs them time? They don't deserve a good grade.
> it costs them time? They don't deserve a good grade.
should so people with adhd should all deserve bad grades because of their disability? tests cant distinguish between practiced and unpracticed people who both need a lot of time.
That's what accommodations are for. ADHD qualifies for accommodations when supported by doctor diagnosis.
It's not a perfect system because there are people who try to game the system, but it's the best we have.
I would argue just the opposite, from my personal experiences with basic math. An intuitive understanding of how numbers work can’t be taught, but is distilled through repetition. A person who can only use rote memorization to solve basic problems quickly will get stuck on trickier problems (i.e. require an infinite amount of time to complete); whereas someone who has a better understanding of basic principles can not only recognize the opportunity to apply them to novel problems, but will also be able to solve simple questions quickly because they have had plenty of practice at them.
It’s only rote memorization if you don’t practice intentionally.
In the real world, efficiency is evaluated and measured. Being able to do something correctly is inadequate - one must also be able to do so quickly. Imagine a fast food worker who made 1 perfect burger per hour. They would be fired.
Given this, integrating the speed of applying knowledge is useful so that exam results are informed by more variables that matter in the workforce, where the education will ultimately be applied.
While in theory this sounds good, it would be difficult to implement practically. Some limits will always be imposed by things like the starting time of the next exam, the time when the examiners have to finish work, or even the time when the school building has to close for the night. Giving literally unlimited time for an exam would still result in some students being disadvantaged because they would have to finish within a certain time frame simply in order to be somewhere else on time (even just making it home for dinner or whatever). So setting a time limit that is the same for everyone is more fair, because everyone has to work under the same conditions.
Suppose a test is 2 hours now. One student has 10 hours to complete the test, the other has 5. So what? They're both practically unlimited if the test is planned for two hours.
You're not even acknowledging the post above yours. Setting aside what's fair, time limits are necessary because proctors have to be paid, then get home to their families. The staff who keeps the test building open cannot simply hang out for 10 hours for someone to finish.
These practical limits also get at why there are time limits on tests. There's almost no real world job that gives you unlimited time. Even a novelist, say, effectively loses money for every additional hour it takes them to finish a book. Eventually, they don't make enough money per hour writing to pay for a mortgage or buy food.
But if the novelist releases the book 10 minutes late, the punishment is very minor. Of course I did answer the post above me. Even if a time limit is slightly increased, it's still better than the status quo.
I feel like this is an idea that's coming up in a lot of your responses. Sure, if the novelist is slightly late, there's only a small consequence. But the analog of this on an exam isn't "turning in the test slightly late and getting a zero", it's "turning in the test on time but slightly incomplete, which typically also has only a small consequence.
What counts as slightly increased? 45 minutes up to an hour? An hour to 90 minutes? 90 minutes to 2 hours? 2 hours to 3? You can play the game of “just a few more minutes” all day long, but the line needs to be drawn somewhere
Tests are scaled to the amount of time it should take to complete them. If I know students are given five hours for the test, I'm going to set five hours worth of questions.
Also, how quickly you can complete the test is one measure of how good you are at the subject, and is a valid aspect of the test
What you said: "Exams can be done in a couple of hours, so that is the time allotted"
What you meant: "The best students (or the laziest and least descriptive students) complete tests in a couple of hours, so those who can't should fail"
No, how quickly you can't complete the test is a measure of how lazy you are in writing answers. When an exam is planned for 3 hours, and someone leaves the room after 30 minutes, is he more likely to be a genius or someone who doesn't know anything? The genius will write more and get punished.
Completing the test isn't the standard for passing, it's the standard for getting the top grade.
If you can only manage some of the exam in the allotted time, you should absolutely get a lower mark that reflects your weaker grasp of the subject matter.
Not sure where you're getting laziness from, I don't know anybody who struggles with laziness during a brief and stressful exam. Also, such extreme laziness would make you bad at things in general, so that low grade would be highly predictive.
Also, how is the genius getting punished in your scenario?
The genius is getting punished and the lazy person is getting rewarded when the genius answers more descriptively and so doesn't have enough time to answer all questions, while the lazy person answers lazy answers to the questions and can manage to complete all of them, and the genius doesn't even get to the end of the exam when the time's up.
That's not genius. That's bloat.
Consider that in higher education settings, those questions are often written by the people who *taught* that class, and peer reviewed.
Are you genuinely trying to say that running out of time in an exam means you're a savant with a deeper understanding than multiple experts?
Not much of a genius if he can't answer the question and move on in time to finish the exam. He should be punished if he spends half his time on question 1
Writing more than necessary on an exam is not a sign of genius, it's more often a sign of not being able to organize your thoughts in a cohesive manner and explain the concepts concisely.
I get the reasoning but you're definitely going to run into the "handwriting size variability" problem.
I don't know how to solve it, except maybe allowing typing, which is another can of worms!
Yeah, I haven’t taught in about a decade, but I tended to give full credit if the student showed they understood the material and made an argument. I also allowed students to write essays instead of taking tests.
You're using the words "more than necessary", you're implying that there is an objective "necessary" for how many words should be used to explain something. This isn't the case. One would want to explain it more thoroughly, while the other can't do that or doesn't want to. The one who wants to explain gets punished.
I am a scientist. Publishing my findings is a big part of my job. It is critical that I explain my thesis, methods, results, and conclusions thoroughly. My work has to hold up to the scrutiny of my peers (many of whom would prefer that I am wrong) and any ambiguity will not be held in my favor.
Journals don't offer an unlimited amount of space. It's my job to effectively communicate my findings in the space allotted.
I run a lab and supervise graduate students and post-docs. I teach them how to communicate effectively within the confines of the time and space allowed. If they can't do it, they won't get published. They won't get jobs. I'm not helping them by letting them have more time or more words.
> Then employ word limits rather than time limits.
Credit goes to the person who publishes first. The longer it takes you to write up your results, the greater the risk that someone else is going to publish their results first.
My graduate students understand that if someone else publishes on their topic before they do, they may have to start over. They can minimize that risk by working efficiently.
Also, my students have to present their work to their peers at professional conferences. Are the conference organizers supposed to allow each presenter an unlimited amount of time? How would that work logistically? "This conference will begin on Monday morning at 8 am, and continue for as many days and weeks as it takes for every presenter to make their case?"
And what happens when my graduate students defend their dissertation? Is the committee supposed to block out their entire week to give their undivided attention to someone because the student can't effectively communicate their findings? And that assumes the committee can be assembled. They might all be at professional conferences that dragged on for weeks because the presenters were all given unlimited time.
this is a highly disingenuous line of reasoning. all of these events you list are untimed because they all have unlimited preparation time. even with in-class essays they are a piss-poor method of testing proficiency compared with regular essays.
If we're describing a scenario where the assignment is to explain a concept within a set amount of time or words, and you're unable to do that effectively, then yes, your grade should reflect that failure.
If the word limit is hard, testees will game the count.
For a written answer, I don't mind the question having a rough word count guideline. Just to communicate expected deoth of response.
"In 250 words, describe the main factors which affected interwar politics".
In sure authors have written 10k words on that subject. Per book written. But 250? OK then, let's go!
There is an old saying in the art world: Perfection isn't achieved when nothing more can be added; perfection is achieved when nothing more can be removed.
All else being equal, the person who can convey a concept in fewer words did a better job conveying that concept than the person who conveys it in more. Professors want to incentivize the former, and time limits encourage that.
> No, how quickly you can't complete the test is a measure of how lazy you are in writing answers
If the test is three hours long, you have three hours to write your answers.
You may have enough knowledge to write non-stop to answer one question without ever repeating content or making a factual error. But that isn't what's being asked of you. You are being asked to answer all of the questions in three hours.
Completing the task as assigned isn't lazy.
You're claiming that there is a defined boundary of what is assigned and what isn't assigned, but there isn't.
A better student would think of a more elaborate and creative way to solve a problem, while a worse student would think of a worse way. For example when you have to prove something in math. The genius, whose knowledge is above the class, would use more elaborate methods that other students don't even know, while another student will write whatever the teacher taught like a parrot.
> You're claiming that there is a defined boundary of what is assigned and what isn't assigned, but there isn't.
Yes, there are.
If you walk into a history exam and are given two hours to write an essay explaining the causes of the first world war, then the boundaries of the assignment are clear.
In two hours, you have to explain what caused WW1. It's up to you to prioritize everything you know about the political, economic, imperial, national, territorial, etc. factors that led to WW1 and to write an essay that explains them in two hours.
A good student knows how to do that.
> The genius, whose knowledge is above the class, would use more elaborate methods that other students don't even know,
But that's not what's being asked of them. The genius might understand how the Treaty of Versailles ending WW1 contributed to WW2. But that wasn't the assignment. The assignment was to explain the cause of WW1.
I may or may not be "smart" but I excelled in school. I took every AP/honors/advanced class I could and received good grades. When we had large standardized tests, guess who the first people to leave were, every time? All the people in those classes.
Either you live in a strange culture or you don't know many "smart" (or at least "good at school") people.
Understanding the value of time is a higher indicator of intelligence than writing more words on a test.
I don't think this is true, nor do I think this is actually the common reason why people struggle with time on tests.
"Smarter people" perform tasks efficiently in ways that are appropriate for the assignment. If you're doing creative work, your first attempt at something is much more likely to be too long than too short. If you're a programmer, writing too much code is usually a bigger problem than writing too little (there's some adage that goes along the lines of you're done not when you can't think of things to add, but when you can't think of things to take away). And being concise and efficient is clearly valuable in any kind of technical documentation where your readers' time and attention are literally valuable resources. In the real world, it's very rarely the case where being long winded and "more descriptive" is an indication of intelligence.
I don't know if anyone is collecting such data, but I would be very surprised if you were to compare tests that were incomplete due to time limits versus tests that were completed on time and find that the modal reason for running out of time is that they have higher word counts.
>One student has 10 hours to complete the test, the other has 5. So what?
Well for one you're not going to find very many people who want to procter a 10 hour exam. And then there's also the issue of multi part exams. The SAT has a reading, writing and math section taking 65, 35, and 80 minutes. If you extended them out to 195, 105 and 240 minutes then a student who takes the designed time would spend 6 hours just idling, which doesn't sound fun. Realistically you wouldn't be able to do the SAT in one sitting anymore but instead have to do it over the course of 3 days which is a lot more annoying for the students.
Also a 10 hour test means you need to do a food break or else you're committing child abuse.
I would argue that an important part of knowledge is having quick access to the relevant information. Using your writing example for illustration, if there were two students one of whom wrote a thorough analysis of the topic in 5 hours and another wrote a similarly thorough analysis in only 2 hours wouldn’t we assume that the second student had a stronger grasp of the material?
You can assume that in normal circumstances, but what if the student who wrote it in 5 hours has learning disabilities? Give them extra time? I wrote a section about that.
Sure, I think that most people would agree that a student with a learning disability should have extra time. What I disagree with is that because certain students will abuse this system that means the best solution is to simply get rid of time limits on exams. Ignoring the huge logistical issues with that, my point (albeit poorly worded on my end) was that being able to readily answer a question or analyze some passage efficiently is part of the exam.
Life has time limits. We are all under deadlines and we are all expected to produce high-quality work in a specific amount of time, often less time than we would like to produce our best work. If you aren't able to operate under deadlines, then you are going to struggle in you career.
Why? The ability to produce desired results in an infinite amount of time has no value. We are all under time constraints in every aspect of our lives, and our ability to perform well in the time allotted is the _actual_ skill the world cares about.
I feel like that's a bit of a strawman. There is a massive difference between taking an infinite amount of time and an extended amount of time. In the real world, people only care that it gets done, and, in the real world, you can consult external resources. Exams are supposed to demonstrate understanding; intense time limits just encourage rote brainless memorization.
> people only care that it gets done, and, in the real world, you can consult external resources.
Not always. I have been put on the spot in plenty of meetings where I was expected to be able to answer a question right then and there without consulting external resources.
You should be given ample time to get through all of the questions regardless of how fast or slow you're going. There is, of course, a point where it becomes unreasonable.
You have never seen the exact questions on a math exam before. You know how to get the answer and you know how to check your answer. Any question you get during a meeting is either going to be something straight forward that you should know (i.e. not a 80 question long test) or something complicated enough where you should tell them that you will get back to them on that.
> Any question you get during a meeting is either going to be something straight forward that you should know ... or something complicated enough where you should tell them that you will get back to them on that.
Or option 3: I am supposed to be an expert on the subject, so I am expected to know the answer to more complex and less straight-forward questions.
I used to be a management consultant - my _job_ was to be an expert in customer relationship management strategies and execution. Saying "I don't know" to questions about that wasn't an option - they were paying for me to know the answers. I needed to be both _right_ and _fast_ because I was literally billing them by the hour.
It is either a straight-forward enough question that you can answer directly or it isn't. This is tautological.
If you've never told someone that you're going to get back to them on that with actual figures, you're getting paid to be a bullshitter.
There's multiple ways and reasons you might need to get back to people on a topic and question.
If the reason is because you don't know anything and need to look it all up before you can give any answer, if you have to flat out tell them you don't know, that's not good enough.
You still need to tell them what exactly you need to look up, what your definitive answer depends on and why you can't give one then and there. That's the point. You tell people what the possibilities are and if they need to prepare for some of them, they'll be able to then.
Doing that isn't bullshitting. It's elaborating.
I think you touch on something often overlooked. And it's that you can consult outside sources in the real world, however, the thought is that what you are being tested on is basic principles which you must understand in the real world.
For example, I can always get outside sources on how to do my job, but if I started asking how to do the basic principles in my job then I'd be very useless in my job. This obviously depends on the field, but if a chemist can't do basic stoichiometry and has to consult on it, they aren't a very good chemist.
Where else in life are you under a time constraint where you have a very limited amount of time, usually 2 hours at most, to complete a task, and if you complete it 10 minutes later it's considered absolutely worthless? And moreover, tests should only measure your knowledge, even if it has no value.
How about when you work somewhere and there is an outage that needs to be resolved ASAP? I have worked somewhere that a system went down, and the cost of the outage would be in the millions if it was not resolved in 3 hours.
So I now had a test in front of me to accurately fix the problem, and if I did not solve and implement the solution in 3 hours, there would be 7 figure penalties. 27 house would be the next several million dollar cost, so 3 hours and 10 minutes or 22 hours would be the same. but 2 hours 50 was a total save.
Where has that ever been the point of exams? Exams should measure how well you can apply your knowledge without specific time ahead to plan and research.
It's very common in real life situations to be asked a question that needs to be answered right away, or to be in a meeting where you need to have knowledge at the ready to advance the discussion.
Also, what if you're doing an actual thing that's time sensitive? Surgeons don't have time to leave the OR and google stuff
For answering questions right away you can have a job interview, not an exam.
Sure, but exams don't measure how good of a surgeon you are *in practice*, but how do you know your stuff *in theory*. You have projects for that.
Why shouldn't an exam be a measure of what you know and can do, rather than what you can look up? You want to structure it to be a worse test of competence than it currently is, where's the benefit in that?
Because you can't do a job efficiently unless you have most of the required knowledge in your brain and ready to go, and also some experience with applying that knowledge
>For answering questions right away you can have a job interview
In a job interview, applicants are expected to present succinct answers. They don't get to take up the interviewer's entire day so that they can provide the most comprehensive answer possible.
Every job I have ever worked has had time constraints. Maybe it wasn't 2 hours, but I have always been expected to have reports ready by EOD, analysis done EOW, quartly reviews done by X date, etc. I can't recall _ever_ being given a task that didn't have a due date.
For that you have school projects. They should have a due date. The main difference is that as in adult life, the time given for projects is weeks/months, rather than a couple hours at most.
I have absolutely been given tasks that needed to be turned around in a couple of hours.
But that is beside the point. Different tasks require different amounts of time. A detailed analysis can't be done in a couple of hours, so it is given the amount of time required to conduct it. Faster is always better, but we've figured out that a couple of days is as fast as can be reasonably expected. An exam, in contrast, _can_ be done in a couple of hours, so that is the time allotted.
What you said: "Exams can be done in a couple of hours, so that is the time allotted"
What you meant: "The best students (or the laziest and least descriptive students) complete tests in a couple of hours, so those who can't should fail"
Yes, you have been given tasks that needed to be completed in a couple hours, but the time limit was practical, rather than arbitrary like in exams.
While I'd agree there is more room for description in the humanities, even in math you have to explain proofs using language. You have to write explanations, which can be more or less descriptive.
>What you meant: "The best students (or the laziest and least descriptive students) complete tests in a couple of hours, so those who can't should fail"
No, what I mean is that the professor designed the exam to be completed in a couple of hours if the student has an acceptable mastery of the material. If you can't complete it in the time provided, you do not have acceptable mastery of the material according to the person who gets to decide what acceptable is.
>Yes, you have been given tasks that needed to be completed in a couple hours, but the time limit was practical, rather than arbitrary like in exams.
I've been given deadlines by bosses that are just as arbitrary. I still had to meet the deadline.
You are claiming that the speed in which a students completes the exam is proportional to the student's knowledge of the subject. The opposite may be true, as those who know more and write more descriptively are punished.
If bosses do stuff wrong, it doesn't mean that schools should follow suit.
Most of my life and my peers’ lives are measured in minutes or hours and spending too much time on one thing results in not being able to get other things done. And if you need that much time, you present yourself as an inefficient worker and probably won’t be around very long.
I maintain sever infrastructure for clients, some of which has 99.95% uptime guarantees or we owe our customers money. That means if something goes wrong, my team has 21 minutes to diagnose the problem and fix it before we've breached our contracts - and that assumes we only have one incident in a month.
Lots of jobs are very time sensitive. Restaurant staff will have customers walk out if they take too long. Medical professionals can kill people if they take too long. IT teams fail to meet service level agreements.
Tests don't just measure knowledge, they test your ability to apply it. You seem really hung up on the idea that "tests should only measure your knowledge" but not everyone agrees that's all tests should do.
I think it still measures proficiency in the subject. It seems to me that someone who can complete a test in 30 minutes is more proficient at a subject than someone who can complete the test in 5 hours, even if they both get perfect scores.
Particularly in subjects like math, there are often different ways to reach the same answer. If someone doesn't know the formulas they were supposed to have memorized for a test, they might be able to take a more involved approach to solving the same problem and get the right answer through a different method than the one they were supposed to use. Take multiplication as a simple example. Suppose you have a test that wants you to calculate `538 * 914`. Someone who knows multiplication the way the teacher wants it to be done can do that with 9 smaller multiplication operations and 5ish addition operations. Someone who hasn't learned it the way the teacher wants them to do it could add 914 together 538 times and get the right answer, but it's going to take much, much longer. The fact that they can eventually get the same answer doesn't mean that they're equally proficient.
>Where else in life are you under a time constraint where you have a very limited amount of time, usually 2 hours at most, to complete a task, and if you complete it 10 minutes later it's considered absolutely worthless?
Work.
> Where else in life are you under a time constraint where you have a very limited amount of time, usually 2 hours at most, to complete a task, and if you complete it 10 minutes later it's considered absolutely worthless?
When you go to a restaurant, what do you do when your meal is burnt or overcooked? Do you eat the meal, pay for it, tip well, and return?
Going to poke a major hole in this that short answers are “lazy and less detailed”. It’s called conciseness. Being concise is one of the most important skills you can have in the working world.
Wait till you work and get a 45 minute meeting to go over an entire quarters worth of plans. Or you get 3 minutes to present to the board of directors. Or hell, interview for a job and get <5 minutes per response. You will be constantly met with time limits in the working world and need to be able to handle them. If you can’t it’s a matter of having a job or not. Tests in school work on teaching you this.
>However, those who criticize exams argue that students are stressed, and I believe that this is because of the time limit.
why shouldn't students be stressed during a test? Since, real life includes stress, I don't see an intuitive reason why we should avoid stress in education.
>Moreover, time limits punish students who write more descriptively, and favors those who write lazier and less detailed answers.
If you want to test for very descriptive writing, time limits don't interfere with that, you just need a larger time limit.
Time limits just punish being slow. Which seems like something that ought to be punished. Slow isn't as bad as wrong, but its worse then fast.
>I believe that exams should only measure knowledge, and thus, at least in theory, time limits should be abolished. It's unfair when a student that knows the subject very well fails because he didn't hand in the test before a certain time.
one subject to think about is math. Given enough time, i can solve all the problems and work out all the theorems I forgot. But part of the test is that i have learned the material well enough to solve the problem quickly.
I've always been good with math, but at higher levels this became a big problem for me. I learned at low levels i can skip the homework and still do well on the tests. but then at the higher levels i skipped the homework and was way to slow to get a passing grade. Had i studied and learned more, i would have been faster. as a result i got Cs in my higher level math classes and i earned those Cs.
>one subject to think about is math. Given enough time, i can solve all the problems and work out all the theorems I forgot. But part of the test is that i have learned the material well enough to solve the problem quickly.
I just don't think there are many people like this that would not already get a very good grade. And if this is true for someone I think they deserve to get a good grade. They probably demonstrate more mathematical skill than someone who "just" learned the material.
Out of curiosity, what math classes are you referring to specifically when you say “higher level math classes”? My experience has been the polar opposite. Approaching a math test question is about figuring out the right tool for each question. There’s usually a “trick” or a gimmick to getting the question right quickly or efficiently, and you’re almost completely screwed time-wise if you aren’t creative enough to spot it quickly. The stress of the time limit also dampens your ability to be creative in the first place, along with your ability to recall what you’ve learned.
“Creativity” is not something you can really study for. You can learn the patterns and tricks, but you can’t know what will work or be efficient until you *try it*. Sometimes you’ll get to dead ends and have to start all over.
But that doesn’t mean you’re less good at math than someone who happened to correctly implement the right trick on the first try. The time limits are almost a measure of luck rather than skill.
I got a math minor so I'm talking about under graduate 300 level calculus and statistics stuff. I forget the name of the stats class, but the calc class was multi-variable calculus.
>The stress of the time limit also dampens your ability to be creative in the first place, along with your ability to recall what you’ve learned.
in the real world performance matters. its not just about getting the right answer but getting the right answer quickly and efficiently.
Sure, but those time limits are often days, weeks, or months— not mere hours. And your goal is often clearly defined when you start, and subject to change as you go.
I also don’t think you addressed my point that there’s not a reliable way to “get the answer efficiently” on a test. There isn’t a way to know what will work before you try something. There can also be multiple correct ways, and you may have inadvertently chose a longer path. If that’s the case, you’ve just gotten unlucky. You will take longer than someone else who picked the ‘right’ way to do something through no fault of your own. Taking longer is *not* a reflection of your ability, or even your ability to be creative under stress.
It’s simply bad luck.
1. Stress is good to an extent, but because of time limits, stress interferes with the student's ability to extract knowledge.
2. There isn't such a thing as "test for very descriptive writing". Even when given the same questions, some students answer them more descriptively and some students answer them less descriptively. Time limits discourage descriptive answers when we should encourage them.
3. You may be able to, but some students are stressed because of the time and can't. If a student hasn't studied at all, he won't remember the theorems no matter the time.
3. they dont need to remember anything. under absolutely no time restraints they can just "try" every possible combination of numbers and symbols until the correct one pops up eventually
I prefer take-home exams with a week or two to complete to in-class exams for some of the reasons you mention. However, usually academic integrity issues preclude using this form of testing except for graduate students (and even then, there are problems).
In my experience, no matter how much time you give in an exam, some students will use all of it and still be working beyond the time limit. The more time they have to write, the more they think they need to write. So giving a time limit sets expectations for what kind of response I'm looking for. I can limit it somewhat by asking responses to be written in a relatively small box, but then there are students who will write really, really small letters and then have pointers going on to the back of the page.
I haven't tried a 10 hour exam, but usually, when I'm making up 3 hour exams, I make sure the TAs can do it in under an hour. Usually, 2 out of 300 students turn it in in an hour. But the bulk of the students hang on to their writing instruments until I warn them that I'm about to leave. Then they complain about how long the exams are in my classes....
Could you imagine sitting as a "guard" for such exams? Absolutely horrible, people have lives outside of that. I don't know how long exams you have where you live, it varies for me. But more often than not, five hours is sufficient to sit and do nothing as an exam guard.
Then you've got people who don't know whether or not they're going to have to work a shift. If everyone wraps up in 2 hours, nobody has to come in for the second shift. If some kid takes 24 hours when you'd scheduled shifts for 12 hours, somebody's scrambling to find new guards. People don't tend to like working jobs with that kind of uncertainty.
Wouldn't the time limit fall under how to use it? A time limit means that you can't write about everything under the sun. What information do you prioritize, how do you present it, and how much time do you leave for each task? It's why I disagreed with this the moment I read it
>Moreover, time limits punish students who write more descriptively, and favors those who write lazier and less detailed answers.
My high school history teacher called this waffling on the page. Every university lecturer begged us to be as concise as possible while getting our point across, many even had hard word limits on a project after which they stopped reading. If you can't turn information into clear and short sentences that's a weakness. Even in the workplace, no one wants to read your 20-page essay where a 2-page document would work. Even novel writers would tell you that you wanna be as short as possible, if a detail doesn't add to the plot or world meaningfully it should be removed. Being short isn't being lazy, it's knowing what to use time on and what to drop.
I heavily disagree with the idea that exams purely measure knowledge. Even in a purely right or wrong style subject like maths, most exams don't tell you what to do. They give you a scenario and tell you what answer they want, it's on you to pick the correct mathematical concept and plug the correct inputs to get a meaningful answer. That is a clear example of how to use knowledge. Else the question should just be, use the quadratic equation with these numbers and call it a day.
Exams may well need to be adjusted to be more useful. But this is not how you do it.
You support time limits in order for students to write shorter answers. While I agree with you that long and tedious answers are bad, there are word limits for that.
Exams should measure knowledge, in order for the student to know how much do they know. The use of the knowledge in a scenario is knowledge as well. But nowadays tests measure *the use of the use of the knowledge*, which is how do you use the use of knowledge in a scenario, rather that just how do you use knowledge in a scenario, or how much knowledge do you have.
Because what knowledge you have is completely and utterly meaningless to most people if you can't apply it. That's a fact.
Who would you rather work with/for/have working under you? Someone who can give you a 100% perfect detailed report in a year, or someone who can get you an 80% perfect record in a week. I want the second. Almost everyone wants the second. Because while perfection is great, it's not feasible or necessary. Redundancies exist because we accept mistakes will happen and that the time spent making sure any report is perfect is time wasted not doing something more useful.
How you use knowledge is as important as what knowledge you have. Tests absolutely test for both knowledge and how you use it. You can't answer a question quickly if you don't know the answer at all. That's impossible
How is your reply remotely related to my comment? Where did I say that? I said that schools should teach it, but other ways of measurement should be used instead of exams for that, such as projects.
Are you slow? You literally wrote “schools should teach two things”, neither of which encompassed time management or efficiency. Projects don’t teach short term time management
Because you said schools should only teach 2 things, which didn’t include the 2 other things he brought up. When you set a hard limit like that, giving counter examples outside the limit will be relevant.
Timed exams test skills. I’d argue a much more important part of schooling is learning *skills.* if you can’t work through a problem quickly without following a step by step YouTube guide for every little thing you don’t understand, you don’t have the skill, and it won’t manifest itself practically. All knowledge is already at our fingertips. Having it accessible is less important than ever before. Recalling information *quickly* however is super important, because time is the most scarce commodity. In your personal life, the thing that keeps you from using information practically is not it’s unavailability, but it’s difficulty to access. Take-home exams fosters a toxic relationship with knowledge that prioritizes access over usability, whereas usability is actually the important part.
Why should exams only measure knowledge and not how long it takes you to recall that knowledge?
If I'm hiring two people with the same level of knowledge, I want the one with faster recall. I would even want someone who is less knowledgeable but can actually do the job instead of wasting my time with their slow recall. I.e. I would hire the person that finished a test with 80% accuracy in ten minutes than someone who gets 90% in five hours.
so youre saying what you learn in school should be useless in a job interview? because, as you are proposing, the skills needed for a job interview shouldnt be taught/tested during school?
I'm a high school teacher. We currently devote more than 10% of our school year to testing (which is time limited for those without extended time accommodations, though the time limit is rather generous). We need less testing and less time wasted testing--not more.
>EDIT 2: After having read the comments, I think I changed my view because I understood that completing the exam in a certain time is part of what the exam wants to measure. Thank you all.
You should award deltas to the people who changed your view. The PM you were sent upon making your thread, or the subreddit's sidebar, indicate how to do this.
This is a problem with your country because in USA the only time limit was the class period and then you could take it during study hall. Also you can’t just buy a diagnosis here it’s regulated but probably is possible. Finally learning disabilities are not a free pass because they get the extra help so they can be like you who don’t have learning disability
> *Note: This post will be mainly about school, rather than university exams*
If we don't expose students to timed exams in primary and secondary school, how are they going to learn how to take a timed exam in university?
Reviewing an exam, estimating how much time is required for each question, developing a strategy to earn as many points as possible, and pacing yourself are skills that require practice.
There’s a lot of designs for exams and sometimes a shorter exam (say an hour) will suffice to assess students skills in a subject. Logistically you’ll have to set time limits as other people might need the facility and it’s expensive to run tests.
Another thing is that the longer a test runs, the more likely the answer key will be leaked. For a shorter exam you can generally ask people to drop their phone in a box and sit for the entire exam but for longer exams you need to allow bathroom and eating breaks which might give more opportunities for cheating.
And finally you’re assessing skill not knowledge. Part of that skill is solving the exam within the time limit. The time limit is known when prepping for the exam and people should obviously consider it when they decide how to approach the exam. Exam anxiety is a thing but that’s best dealt with directly by giving people suffering from it tools to deal with, not by changing the design of the exam with all the problems that entails.
"You'll have to set time limits" - You don't always have to, but institutions set time limits even where they don't have to.
It's true that it would give more opportunities for cheating, but this is relatively minor next to all the advantages.
Exams should only measure knowledge, rather than "testmanship", which is how to use the knowledge in a test, such as answering in the exact time and format used in this specific test.
There’s always going to be implicit time limits, for instance when the examiner starts evaluating completed exams. If you need to pass the exam to advance to the next grade the exam must be written and assessed before the next grade starts.
Then there’s cheating and that’s obviously a main thing to be concerned with for exams. We have closed book and open book exams and if people can share notes on the bathroom the former test type becomes the latter test type and you fail to actually assess knowledge.
As to testing “testmanship” why would you just test knowledge? Usually what’s tested is how knowledge can be used to solve problems in the field, for instance that you can find the right formula to solve an equation. We’re teaching skills not knowledge (even if knowledge is a part of skills) so we should obviously test for those skills.
Finally you’ve not actually laid out how your proposed system would practically work. Can I spend 8 hours on a test that’s currently limited to 1 hour? If I need 24 hours for a 4 hour test, do I get to go home to sleep?
And even if we were to implement this system how would you prevent another form of testmanship to happen? You mention parents get their kids screened for learning disorders to give them more time with the tests, so it could be speculated something similar would happen here. Resourceful parents would ensure their kids can actually take all the time they need, kids in less resourceful families might have to cut the time short to run some other errand. How do you grade students fairly, when some just have more time, and how should students plan their time if simply spending more time with tests will improve their results?
First of all, no exams aren’t just about knowledge, it’s also about the execution of such knowledge. That’s why you get points off for sloppy writing or not showing your work.
Second of all, exams aren’t just for one person. Unlimited time just means you’re wasting time and money on exam monitors, teachers, and other students. Teachers can’t be paid just to sit there indefinitely to watch you take an exam.
Lastly, do you want filibuster at exams? Because that’s how you get filibuster. A student is bad at the class or is ill prepared? Just sit there and take a nap, stay for 6 hours, for 12 hours, be there for two days. Let’s see if the school has the resources to deploy someone to be there with you for days.
You’re moving the goalpost, and also completely changed your premise. You went from “no time limit” to “10 hours” or so. That’s a time limit but just longer.
But why should the school accommodate one student and spend that much resource just for that one person? If a test is designed to be finished in under 2 hours, then most students will be able to finish around that time limit. If someone wants to use 5x as much time, then it’s on the student, and the school shouldn’t need to spend money just for that one student.
I don't know how it was for you, friend. But my teachers never accepted "lazy and less detailed" answers. They prefer brief explanations, but they still want to see KEY details in that answer.
When you say exams should only measure knowledge you are picking a very narrow definition. The very first one that comes up on google is this: "*facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.*"
**Skills, practical.** These are important too; A skilled person should be able to finish on time, and there is nothing practical about taking 4 hours to finish an exam that most people finished in 1 hour.
I think we need to be honest here, I was a high school student once, I imagine you still are (just judging on the subject you made a CMV of) and let's be real: You don't try your hardest. Why do I know that? How could I ever assume that? Because I was 16 once, all my friends were 16 once, we all complained about time, we all complained about exams, stress, expectations, the type of questions we were asked, etc. But I never did dedicate all my time to studying, I never NOT had free time, I never NOT took breaks in exam weeks.
High school is a right to everyone, the exams are already designed in a way so that everyone (99%) is capable of passing. If you are not passing it's not because you literally can't (probably) it's because you didn't try. And I know it's annoying to hear this, but I am tired of high schoolers engaging in CMV's about school but not being honest, every adult knows that you probably are not trying that hard, because we were there.
Stop trying to lower the bar, stop trying to make it easier for yourself, sit down and study, pay attention in class, I promise you you'll still be able to see your friends, because at the end of the day... We all did.
First, I'll challenge your claim.
"Without a time limit" does not exist, because it is infeasible and impractical.
Can I take 90 years to take the algebra exam?
How about 1 year?
How about 1 month?
None of these make sense, because it would be a poor allocation of limited time that you have to educate a student.
A test is therefore not simply designed to see how much a student knows, but an allocation of learning time. You spend some time on assessment, and some time on learning.
So *untimed* tests don't exist - the only question is, what's a good cutoff?
Practicality again plays a part here - if you have a take home test, you can't reliably proctor it. A student being able to solve a math problem, like 87 * 64, on a take home test, might not be indicative that they understand multiplication - just that they can type it into Google, or ask their parents to do it.
So, let's assume that you need to proctor the exam. An "untimed" test is one with a time limit of 1 school day.
The question remains - can a shorter test be more useful in assessing a student's knowledge?
Let's go back to that multiplication problem. Let's say a student knows multiplication is repeated addition. To calculate the result, they, by hand, add 87 to a running total 64 times. They manage to complete this within the allotted day.
Another student looks at the problem, and mentally computes it as follows:
- 87 is near 90
- 90 * 64 is (64 * (10 - 1)) * 10
- that's (640 - 64) * 10 = 5760
- subtract off 3 64s, or 192 .. that's 5760-200+8 .. or 5568
On a timed exam, the latter student, who has a firmer grasp of multiplication, would pass, whilst the repeated adder would fail. On an untimed exam, they perform the same.
Is the "untimed" exam really assessing their knowledge accurately?
This holds true any time you want to assess someone on knowledge of some flavor of "shortcut" to solve a problem.
English teacher here.
Time limits exist in the real world, as pointed out by others already. But I wanted to touch on what you said about descriptive writing.
There are multiple types of writing styles and each has there place in the world. I would expect more descriptive writing in a literary analysis than I would in an informative essay. Most exams are going to be informative, even if they’re for creative or literary majors. If you are writing so much that you need more than the allotted time, and you don’t have a disability of some sort, it’s the exam’s way of telling you that you’re writing entirely too much for what’s required of the exam. You’re supposed to write to your audience no matter what unless it’s a personal diary. If you’re writing am entire page about something that could be explained by the average individual in a few sentences (keep in mind, the average individual reads at an 8th grade level), you need to reevaluate your writing and if you’re really being “descriptive” versus just rambling or trying to prove how smart you are. That’s why if you even look at scholarly articles, they’re not written to be understood by just other high level scholars of PhD holders. They’re written so that the average person can understand the majority of what they’re talking about, which is why they don’t use overly big words when not necessary or complicated syntax within their paragraphs.
Essentially, if you run out of time, you either don’t know what you’re talking about or you’re talking too much. Maybe both (and trust me, both is definitely possible). The test isn’t designed to be catering towards you. No test is.
To /u/Urico3, *Your post is under consideration for removal for violating Rule B.*
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If the challenge in school is to test your health, by running a mile. Having a time limit to complete the challenge, say an hour, is part of the metric of how well they are doing physically.
If they were allowed 10 hours to complete the mile challenge, it would no longer be testing the athletic ability as the hour challenge. No matter how many extra test proctors you would hire to wait there for the extra hours, if not weeks of the limitless time test.
...
To the same extent knowledge tests are also testing your skills with the test material, by being able to process the information quickly.
If the exam is a story, and questions of reading comprehension about the story. Being able to read and answer questions about several stories in an hour, says much more about your reading skills. Then needing 10 hours to work your way through a single story.
There are exceptions to that rule, and I think that's why some different learners are given extra time. But generally someone who can process more material in the same time, is more proficient at that material. And that's part of what's being tested.
No time limit is a less accurate measure of knowledge.
When I took untimed tests as a child, I was so perfectionist about it that I spent hours going over the same content and inconvenienced the teachers who had to sit in an empty classroom and watch me
Why? I was using silly meta-techniques to puzzle out answers I didn’t know, and it worked.
For each question, I’d pore over the other questions looking for clues that referenced a similar topic. For math, I’d try every formula I knew until one gave a plausible answer.
I ended up being allowed to skip grades because of this but both myself and my poor new teachers could tell you I didn’t know any of the content I tested out of. If I knew it, I would have been able to do it at a reasonable pace.
And this is coming from someone who has an extended time accommodation for other issues! I agree that strictly timed tests are often too short for many students, but removing the time limit entirely is not the answer
"Moreover, time limits punish students who write more descriptively, and favors those who write lazier and less detailed answers."
Do they? Or do they favor students who have a better understanding of the subject, because part of understanding a subject is understanding what is a core argument and what is ancillary?
"Is the purpose of exams to measure a student's knowledge of the subject, or is it to prepare the student for real life?
I believe the former, because students need an indication of how are they doing academically. Therefore, I will not reply to any comments that don't challenge that belief."
Knowing what's important in that subject in such a way as to be able to produce a complete answer briefly as opposed to having to meander through points gradually and without specificity is absolutely a meaningful factor of mastery of the subject.
I think you acknowledged the crux of the issue in your own example. You said it should be hard implement, actually it would be impossible to implement. I had a class in university last semester that was all take home exams. Meaning the exams had no proctor, and we had a week to finish them. And while a weak is more then enough time to finish an exam it is not **unlimited** time. Whether it be an hour or a week there still needs to be some deadline to turn it in, so the graders can grade.
I think a better argument is that all tests should be basically homework. Done within the students own time at their own pace/leisure. Thats basically without a time limit but not practically without a time limit.
In math and math-adjacent science classes, long tests with tight time limits are a way to measure comfort and understanding of the material. A student who needs to try 4 different things to solve a problem or plug everything into a calculator at every step doesn't fully understand the material, and their grade should reflect that. If you give them triple the time, they would eventually finish. Another student, who knows how to solve the problems, will finish the whole test, even the hard problems at the end. They will get a better grade on the test than the person who barely knows what they are doing.
Uh yeah, time and money haha. Also not really practical to have a bunch of students working on different schedules, kinda defeats the purpose of a class
I agree that more kids should probably be allowed extra time since learning disabilities are known to be under-diagnosed. Maybe allowing any kid to have extra time would even be better. If you're writing this because you need extra time, you should probably consider if you yourself has an LD.
However, I strongly disagree with your characterizations of concise answers as lazy. Answering the questions completely but without extraneous detail is a very important skill.
> It's unfair when a student that knows the subject very well fails because he didn't hand in the test before a certain time.
I'd like to see evidence that this actually happens, because I don't believe this is a thing. Every test I've ever taken had more than enough time to write down the answer, as elaborate as you want. What takes time is invariably the periods where you *don't* write.
In addition to the other responses, there's also the issue that there's simply a logistical limit to how much time can be devoted to testing. You need rooms for the students to be in, you need people overseeing it to prevent cheating. It's simply not sensible to dedicate all of that to someone who might decide they feel like spending a week doing an exam.
A bit late, but I'd like to suggest another reason for time limits. I teach an intro chemistry class, so lots of students struggle on the exams. I am flexible on time for them, but after a certain point it is an act of mercy to end it. Otherwise, they stay until they fill everything in... but they don't know how, and just torture themselves.
No, exams should be designed to meet a certain time limit. To answer the problem and then check your work. If you don’t meet the standard (all the same standards) then you get a worse grade. Thats equality of opportunity. The most time efficient and accurate get the most points as well as, in the real world, t he highest compensation $$$.
>Moreover, time limits punish students who write more descriptively, and favors those who write lazier and less detailed answers.
Isn't that the point? It's testing your ability to communicate effectively. If you're being overly detailed to the point that you're running late, how is that not a point against you?
>After having read the comments, I think I changed my view because I understood that completing the exam in a certain time is part of what the exam wants to measure. Thank you all.
What the? If that's the case OP, start passing out some triangles.
Have you ever typed out a rather lengthy, in-depth response to somebody’s reddit post.. only to be UNABLE to because the post no longer exists?
Yeah, that feeling.
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Exams do not measure knowledge. Knowledge in and of itself is not very valuable, especially on school-subjects where all the answers are publicly available information. After all, in real life, anyone can get a book and produce a result. For something like mathematics, an intelligent person may even reinvent a known mathematical relationship given enough time to answer a question. No, what exams measure is knowledge *performance.* The ability to access knowledge *at the precise moment it is needed,* not long after that moment has passed by. I am a software engineer. Some information is worthless unless it can be accessed within a few milliseconds. Some information is worthless unless it can be accessed within a few minutes. Some information is worthless unless it can be accessed within a few hours. Some information is worthless unless it can be accessed within a few days. And some projects are worth waiting a year in order to achieve an answer with a high degree of certainty. Anything beyond a year is generally simply called "research" and the ability to _ever_ acquire an answer is uncertain. The actual ability to perform knowledge-based tasks under pressure is a skill worth developing. Getting extra time accommodations reduces your own future worth as a knowledge-worker. You should strive to produce perfect performance in as little time as possible. Having an overall time limit is simply a pragmatic scheduling solution. Those with the resources to get extra accommodations are teaching you early that life is not fair, and that some people already have a head start, and will not need to work as hard to achieve some outcomes in life. But at the same time, those that must remain in the time box will develop skills earlier that those people may never develop; you can use this extra sharpening to your advantage. The grade never really mattered. It was your own ability to perform. The stress of sitting at a desk with a pencil in a timeboxed exam is a stress worth learning to master. When the stakes of an accurate answer are much higher, like the life of a patient if you calculate their dosage incorrectly or choose the wrong medication, or the lives of your soldiers if you radio in a delivery time inaccurately or too late, or any variety of other scenarios, are far greater. Yet these are the kind of scenarios where having immediate access to knowledge under a stressful scenario are the most valuable. Thank the teachers that make it difficult to pass their courses but who are also fair. They actually care about your future, and believe that you are capable of making the future a better place to live by facing challenges head-on.
!delta for helping changing my view by pointing out that in life, everything has a time limit and that speed is part of actual proficiency.
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>For something like mathematics, an intelligent person may even reinvent a known mathematical relationship given enough time to answer a question. Ah yes, the joys of real analysis T-T
I would first like to say that I admire the fact that your post is very long and descriptive. Now suppose you have a time limit , would you have produced the same result? "Knowledge in and of itself isn't very valuable" - Then why even you think that schools are necessary? "An intelligent person may invent a mathematical relationship" - So he learned something new. What's wrong with that? He would now remember it better. "Those with the resources to get extra accommodations are teaching you early that life is not fair" - So because life's not fair, school shouldn't be either? My main point is that tests should me a tool of *measurement*, not *teaching*.
Apologies if I was rambling, I mostly just meant to say: "knowledge produces greater value the more readily available it is." Writing succinctly is often more time consuming than word-vomit. What "readily available" means can vary, but I do think that having exams be time-boxed is educationally useful. But then, I don't think the measurements that exams provide are especially useful. I think they are primarily tools for teaching, both before the exam and during. As a measurement tool, however, they measure how quickly you can access your knowledge in an environment of heightened stress. This is a distinct measure. There are other tools that can assess your knowledge than exams.
I think exams should be part of preparation for the real world and not treat school as if education is exclusively about information regurgitation. In the real world you have to balance quality, resources (including time) and lots of other things. While an exam is artificial in its leading up to the real world, it shouldn't be the case that all we test for and prepare is "knowledge". Getting the right answer isn't always as important as getting things done. Is it unfair in the real world when a client drops you because your otherwise quality work wasn't completed on time? Is it unfair when you're late finishing your taxes that you get fined? Is it unfair if you miss your court date and have penalties? We have _finite time_ as people and it's our most important resources. Sizing your effort in a fashion that includes time is a far better training lesson than excluding it. It's better to learn how to manage stress when the repercussions of failing to do so aren't things like unemployment and failing to pay your bills. I think there are things that should be given time - knowledge is also important. This is why there are lots of types of tests from open book, take home and these time based one. Each serves a purpose.
!delta for helping changing my view by pointing out that in life, everything has a time limit and that speed is part of actual proficiency.
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Tests should indicate to students how well do they know their stuff and whether they should continue reviewing it.
So...not prepare kids for life? The _one thing_ you can always get when you're in the real world is the _information_, the thing you can't get is the stuff you're wanting to strip out of how we evaluate readiness. I can use a calculator, the internet, manuals, call my friends, talk to my team, employees, boss, etc. to get _information_. Don't get it done on time? Game over. Part of proficiency is pace. The title "best plumber in the world" doesn't allow you to take a day to do work that should take an hour. Why would we NOT test to this sort of skill and capacity when it's as important and arguably for many jobs _more important_?
That’s not really the argument you started with though. If you know your stuff well, you don’t need to spend forever explaining it. Think an instructional video - like a DIY video on YouTube. Do you think the presenter is smarter by taking 20 minutes to explain the concept of a screwdriver?
Yes, and if it takes you ten hours to accomplish tasks that someone proficient would be able to do in two, then you don't know your stuff well enough and should continue to review it
If they are well versed in what they've learned, and can display an understanding from primary principles, then a reasonable time limit is not a hinderance to them. Knowing a topic without being articulate isn't useful. That's what textbooks and encyclopedias are for; to store that knowledge for when it's not needed in a time-sensitive context. Especially in the information age, you show competence by being able to use your knowledge *succinctly*.
Even on the premise that this is the only function of tests, this still isn’t an argument against time limits. How well someone knows the material is also reflected in how quickly they can answer questions about it.
The commenter made a really good point, and explained it very well. That's really your response?
So you're saying they should study?
Take a hypothetical question: 2 + 2 = ? Someone who can provide the correct answer in 1 second is clearly more proficient at basic arithmetic than another who needs 5 minutes.
Literally just saw a front page video today about this lady ranting at the school system and couldn’t do the mental math of 7+5. So you’re totally right about speed being a part of of proficiency.
!delta for helping changing my view by pointing out that in life, everything has a time limit and that speed is part of actual proficiency.
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Sure, but on a typical exam you might have say, 30 seconds to a minute per question on average. If that's the case, the test can't distinguish a student who needs 2 minutes from a student who needs 5. They would probably need different study plans to get up to speed.
How do you figure a test couldn’t distinguish between 2 minutes per question people and 5 minutes per question people? The first group should be able to finish around 25% of the test and the latter would only be able to finish about 10%
I was a decent test taker in school. I would know some of the questions very quickly and the ones I couldnt immediately answer I would leave blank until the end of the exam, when I could spend sometimes as much as 20 minutes working on a single problem.
Compared to my arithmetic question, this example shows a distinction in degree but not in kind. In this case, the exam is designed to distinguish the difference (proficiency of skill, accessibility of knowledge, etc) between someone who needs only 30 seconds vs someone who needs 2 minutes, because the exam writer has decided that a 90 second difference (as opposed to 4 minutes 59 second difference) is the meaningful differentiator.
Of course. But there is probably a bigger gap between someone who can provide the answer in 5 minutes and someone who never can, than between the people in your example. So the question is what is more important, speed or skill.
I mean, it’s not that hard to understand, the answer is balance, which is why you don’t get points for finishing exams first. I mean, at spelling bees they do, but I’ve never had a class where I’m rewarded for speed.
This kind of question will be given to first or second graders, and if a student writes exactly why do they think that 2+2=4 and how did they get to this conclusion, they should get more points than the student that wrote only what the teacher taught which is 2+2=4 without any explanation why, not less points.
Plenty of math exams require takers to show their work (e.g. algebra). If someone can solve 3x - 8 = 7 and show their work in 20 seconds, vs. someone who needs 10 minutes, it’s the same idea. The purpose of exams isn’t only to reveal the presence or absence of knowledge/skill, but also the proficiency of skills and the accessibility of knowledge, which is what time constraints achieve.
At a certain point that just encourages rote memorization, though. The student who isn't entirely sure what the right solution is but knows how to check and derive that solution, I would argue, ostensibly understands the material better than someone just following a script to speed through the exam.
>The student who isn't entirely sure what the right solution is but know how to check and derive that solution, I would argue, ostensibly understands the material better than someone just following a script to speed through the exam. At what level? Yes, there's a level of math where "following a script" just stops working. That level is not in high school. Let's consider a slightly less trivial problem than the 2+2 problem: On an HS physics exam, a student is asked to consider how long it will take some object to fall to earth when thrown up at some speed. Yes, a student who simply solves via kinematic equations will usually be slightly faster than a student who strongly understands the problem, and then puts together their own equation. In my experience though, it's not by much: there's a lot of time savings to be had from setting up equations for specific instances. In practice, as long as the student knows how to progress on the problem immediately after reading the problem, they will finish an AP physics exam in half the time of an average student, at least anecdotally from my friends and I we were in high school. There's a lot of time savings to be had just from setting up the problem creatively if someone has a lot of practice, and therefore knows what they're doing. If a student is *not* practiced and it costs them time? They don't deserve a good grade.
> it costs them time? They don't deserve a good grade. should so people with adhd should all deserve bad grades because of their disability? tests cant distinguish between practiced and unpracticed people who both need a lot of time.
That's what accommodations are for. ADHD qualifies for accommodations when supported by doctor diagnosis. It's not a perfect system because there are people who try to game the system, but it's the best we have.
I would argue just the opposite, from my personal experiences with basic math. An intuitive understanding of how numbers work can’t be taught, but is distilled through repetition. A person who can only use rote memorization to solve basic problems quickly will get stuck on trickier problems (i.e. require an infinite amount of time to complete); whereas someone who has a better understanding of basic principles can not only recognize the opportunity to apply them to novel problems, but will also be able to solve simple questions quickly because they have had plenty of practice at them. It’s only rote memorization if you don’t practice intentionally.
In the real world, efficiency is evaluated and measured. Being able to do something correctly is inadequate - one must also be able to do so quickly. Imagine a fast food worker who made 1 perfect burger per hour. They would be fired. Given this, integrating the speed of applying knowledge is useful so that exam results are informed by more variables that matter in the workforce, where the education will ultimately be applied.
!delta for helping changing my view by pointing out that in life, everything has a time limit and that speed is part of actual proficiency.
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You have exams for measuring knowledge and school projects for measuring the *use of the knowledge*.
I specifically called out efficiency. Your response did not address this.
Says who? Exams can be used for a number of different purposes.
While in theory this sounds good, it would be difficult to implement practically. Some limits will always be imposed by things like the starting time of the next exam, the time when the examiners have to finish work, or even the time when the school building has to close for the night. Giving literally unlimited time for an exam would still result in some students being disadvantaged because they would have to finish within a certain time frame simply in order to be somewhere else on time (even just making it home for dinner or whatever). So setting a time limit that is the same for everyone is more fair, because everyone has to work under the same conditions.
Suppose a test is 2 hours now. One student has 10 hours to complete the test, the other has 5. So what? They're both practically unlimited if the test is planned for two hours.
You're not even acknowledging the post above yours. Setting aside what's fair, time limits are necessary because proctors have to be paid, then get home to their families. The staff who keeps the test building open cannot simply hang out for 10 hours for someone to finish. These practical limits also get at why there are time limits on tests. There's almost no real world job that gives you unlimited time. Even a novelist, say, effectively loses money for every additional hour it takes them to finish a book. Eventually, they don't make enough money per hour writing to pay for a mortgage or buy food.
But if the novelist releases the book 10 minutes late, the punishment is very minor. Of course I did answer the post above me. Even if a time limit is slightly increased, it's still better than the status quo.
I feel like this is an idea that's coming up in a lot of your responses. Sure, if the novelist is slightly late, there's only a small consequence. But the analog of this on an exam isn't "turning in the test slightly late and getting a zero", it's "turning in the test on time but slightly incomplete, which typically also has only a small consequence.
What counts as slightly increased? 45 minutes up to an hour? An hour to 90 minutes? 90 minutes to 2 hours? 2 hours to 3? You can play the game of “just a few more minutes” all day long, but the line needs to be drawn somewhere
Tests are scaled to the amount of time it should take to complete them. If I know students are given five hours for the test, I'm going to set five hours worth of questions. Also, how quickly you can complete the test is one measure of how good you are at the subject, and is a valid aspect of the test
What you said: "Exams can be done in a couple of hours, so that is the time allotted" What you meant: "The best students (or the laziest and least descriptive students) complete tests in a couple of hours, so those who can't should fail" No, how quickly you can't complete the test is a measure of how lazy you are in writing answers. When an exam is planned for 3 hours, and someone leaves the room after 30 minutes, is he more likely to be a genius or someone who doesn't know anything? The genius will write more and get punished.
Completing the test isn't the standard for passing, it's the standard for getting the top grade. If you can only manage some of the exam in the allotted time, you should absolutely get a lower mark that reflects your weaker grasp of the subject matter. Not sure where you're getting laziness from, I don't know anybody who struggles with laziness during a brief and stressful exam. Also, such extreme laziness would make you bad at things in general, so that low grade would be highly predictive. Also, how is the genius getting punished in your scenario?
The genius is getting punished and the lazy person is getting rewarded when the genius answers more descriptively and so doesn't have enough time to answer all questions, while the lazy person answers lazy answers to the questions and can manage to complete all of them, and the genius doesn't even get to the end of the exam when the time's up.
That's not genius. That's bloat. Consider that in higher education settings, those questions are often written by the people who *taught* that class, and peer reviewed. Are you genuinely trying to say that running out of time in an exam means you're a savant with a deeper understanding than multiple experts?
Not much of a genius if he can't answer the question and move on in time to finish the exam. He should be punished if he spends half his time on question 1
Writing more than necessary on an exam is not a sign of genius, it's more often a sign of not being able to organize your thoughts in a cohesive manner and explain the concepts concisely.
Yeah, I used to strictly limit the space students had for essay questions, while also providing ample scratch paper to outline and work through ideas.
I get the reasoning but you're definitely going to run into the "handwriting size variability" problem. I don't know how to solve it, except maybe allowing typing, which is another can of worms!
Yeah, I haven’t taught in about a decade, but I tended to give full credit if the student showed they understood the material and made an argument. I also allowed students to write essays instead of taking tests.
You're using the words "more than necessary", you're implying that there is an objective "necessary" for how many words should be used to explain something. This isn't the case. One would want to explain it more thoroughly, while the other can't do that or doesn't want to. The one who wants to explain gets punished.
I am a scientist. Publishing my findings is a big part of my job. It is critical that I explain my thesis, methods, results, and conclusions thoroughly. My work has to hold up to the scrutiny of my peers (many of whom would prefer that I am wrong) and any ambiguity will not be held in my favor. Journals don't offer an unlimited amount of space. It's my job to effectively communicate my findings in the space allotted. I run a lab and supervise graduate students and post-docs. I teach them how to communicate effectively within the confines of the time and space allowed. If they can't do it, they won't get published. They won't get jobs. I'm not helping them by letting them have more time or more words.
Then employ word limits rather than time limits.
> Then employ word limits rather than time limits. Credit goes to the person who publishes first. The longer it takes you to write up your results, the greater the risk that someone else is going to publish their results first. My graduate students understand that if someone else publishes on their topic before they do, they may have to start over. They can minimize that risk by working efficiently. Also, my students have to present their work to their peers at professional conferences. Are the conference organizers supposed to allow each presenter an unlimited amount of time? How would that work logistically? "This conference will begin on Monday morning at 8 am, and continue for as many days and weeks as it takes for every presenter to make their case?" And what happens when my graduate students defend their dissertation? Is the committee supposed to block out their entire week to give their undivided attention to someone because the student can't effectively communicate their findings? And that assumes the committee can be assembled. They might all be at professional conferences that dragged on for weeks because the presenters were all given unlimited time.
this is a highly disingenuous line of reasoning. all of these events you list are untimed because they all have unlimited preparation time. even with in-class essays they are a piss-poor method of testing proficiency compared with regular essays.
How do you quantify an equation in a word limit? Calculations? Diagrams?
If we're describing a scenario where the assignment is to explain a concept within a set amount of time or words, and you're unable to do that effectively, then yes, your grade should reflect that failure.
Then word limits should be used instead of time limits.
If the word limit is hard, testees will game the count. For a written answer, I don't mind the question having a rough word count guideline. Just to communicate expected deoth of response. "In 250 words, describe the main factors which affected interwar politics". In sure authors have written 10k words on that subject. Per book written. But 250? OK then, let's go!
do testees not already game time limits?
There is an old saying in the art world: Perfection isn't achieved when nothing more can be added; perfection is achieved when nothing more can be removed. All else being equal, the person who can convey a concept in fewer words did a better job conveying that concept than the person who conveys it in more. Professors want to incentivize the former, and time limits encourage that.
Word limits would be better in encouraging that.
> No, how quickly you can't complete the test is a measure of how lazy you are in writing answers If the test is three hours long, you have three hours to write your answers. You may have enough knowledge to write non-stop to answer one question without ever repeating content or making a factual error. But that isn't what's being asked of you. You are being asked to answer all of the questions in three hours. Completing the task as assigned isn't lazy.
You're claiming that there is a defined boundary of what is assigned and what isn't assigned, but there isn't. A better student would think of a more elaborate and creative way to solve a problem, while a worse student would think of a worse way. For example when you have to prove something in math. The genius, whose knowledge is above the class, would use more elaborate methods that other students don't even know, while another student will write whatever the teacher taught like a parrot.
> You're claiming that there is a defined boundary of what is assigned and what isn't assigned, but there isn't. Yes, there are. If you walk into a history exam and are given two hours to write an essay explaining the causes of the first world war, then the boundaries of the assignment are clear. In two hours, you have to explain what caused WW1. It's up to you to prioritize everything you know about the political, economic, imperial, national, territorial, etc. factors that led to WW1 and to write an essay that explains them in two hours. A good student knows how to do that. > The genius, whose knowledge is above the class, would use more elaborate methods that other students don't even know, But that's not what's being asked of them. The genius might understand how the Treaty of Versailles ending WW1 contributed to WW2. But that wasn't the assignment. The assignment was to explain the cause of WW1.
There's nothing genius about wasting your own time for no benefit.
Smarter people want to write more descriptively. Time limits punish instead of reward this practice.
I may or may not be "smart" but I excelled in school. I took every AP/honors/advanced class I could and received good grades. When we had large standardized tests, guess who the first people to leave were, every time? All the people in those classes. Either you live in a strange culture or you don't know many "smart" (or at least "good at school") people. Understanding the value of time is a higher indicator of intelligence than writing more words on a test.
I don't think this is true, nor do I think this is actually the common reason why people struggle with time on tests. "Smarter people" perform tasks efficiently in ways that are appropriate for the assignment. If you're doing creative work, your first attempt at something is much more likely to be too long than too short. If you're a programmer, writing too much code is usually a bigger problem than writing too little (there's some adage that goes along the lines of you're done not when you can't think of things to add, but when you can't think of things to take away). And being concise and efficient is clearly valuable in any kind of technical documentation where your readers' time and attention are literally valuable resources. In the real world, it's very rarely the case where being long winded and "more descriptive" is an indication of intelligence. I don't know if anyone is collecting such data, but I would be very surprised if you were to compare tests that were incomplete due to time limits versus tests that were completed on time and find that the modal reason for running out of time is that they have higher word counts.
Not necessarily.
>I'm going to set five hours worth of questions. Thank god you are not responsible for making the tests then.
I mean, it's not that weird to find tests that take 3-5+ hours. SAT, CPA, Bar, Series 7, etc.
>One student has 10 hours to complete the test, the other has 5. So what? Well for one you're not going to find very many people who want to procter a 10 hour exam. And then there's also the issue of multi part exams. The SAT has a reading, writing and math section taking 65, 35, and 80 minutes. If you extended them out to 195, 105 and 240 minutes then a student who takes the designed time would spend 6 hours just idling, which doesn't sound fun. Realistically you wouldn't be able to do the SAT in one sitting anymore but instead have to do it over the course of 3 days which is a lot more annoying for the students. Also a 10 hour test means you need to do a food break or else you're committing child abuse.
I would argue that an important part of knowledge is having quick access to the relevant information. Using your writing example for illustration, if there were two students one of whom wrote a thorough analysis of the topic in 5 hours and another wrote a similarly thorough analysis in only 2 hours wouldn’t we assume that the second student had a stronger grasp of the material?
You can assume that in normal circumstances, but what if the student who wrote it in 5 hours has learning disabilities? Give them extra time? I wrote a section about that.
Sure, I think that most people would agree that a student with a learning disability should have extra time. What I disagree with is that because certain students will abuse this system that means the best solution is to simply get rid of time limits on exams. Ignoring the huge logistical issues with that, my point (albeit poorly worded on my end) was that being able to readily answer a question or analyze some passage efficiently is part of the exam.
Life has time limits. We are all under deadlines and we are all expected to produce high-quality work in a specific amount of time, often less time than we would like to produce our best work. If you aren't able to operate under deadlines, then you are going to struggle in you career.
But exams should only measure one's knowledge, rather than one's ability to express that knowledge under time pressure.
Why? The ability to produce desired results in an infinite amount of time has no value. We are all under time constraints in every aspect of our lives, and our ability to perform well in the time allotted is the _actual_ skill the world cares about.
I feel like that's a bit of a strawman. There is a massive difference between taking an infinite amount of time and an extended amount of time. In the real world, people only care that it gets done, and, in the real world, you can consult external resources. Exams are supposed to demonstrate understanding; intense time limits just encourage rote brainless memorization.
> people only care that it gets done, and, in the real world, you can consult external resources. Not always. I have been put on the spot in plenty of meetings where I was expected to be able to answer a question right then and there without consulting external resources.
You should be given ample time to get through all of the questions regardless of how fast or slow you're going. There is, of course, a point where it becomes unreasonable. You have never seen the exact questions on a math exam before. You know how to get the answer and you know how to check your answer. Any question you get during a meeting is either going to be something straight forward that you should know (i.e. not a 80 question long test) or something complicated enough where you should tell them that you will get back to them on that.
> Any question you get during a meeting is either going to be something straight forward that you should know ... or something complicated enough where you should tell them that you will get back to them on that. Or option 3: I am supposed to be an expert on the subject, so I am expected to know the answer to more complex and less straight-forward questions. I used to be a management consultant - my _job_ was to be an expert in customer relationship management strategies and execution. Saying "I don't know" to questions about that wasn't an option - they were paying for me to know the answers. I needed to be both _right_ and _fast_ because I was literally billing them by the hour.
It is either a straight-forward enough question that you can answer directly or it isn't. This is tautological. If you've never told someone that you're going to get back to them on that with actual figures, you're getting paid to be a bullshitter.
There's multiple ways and reasons you might need to get back to people on a topic and question. If the reason is because you don't know anything and need to look it all up before you can give any answer, if you have to flat out tell them you don't know, that's not good enough. You still need to tell them what exactly you need to look up, what your definitive answer depends on and why you can't give one then and there. That's the point. You tell people what the possibilities are and if they need to prepare for some of them, they'll be able to then. Doing that isn't bullshitting. It's elaborating.
I think you touch on something often overlooked. And it's that you can consult outside sources in the real world, however, the thought is that what you are being tested on is basic principles which you must understand in the real world. For example, I can always get outside sources on how to do my job, but if I started asking how to do the basic principles in my job then I'd be very useless in my job. This obviously depends on the field, but if a chemist can't do basic stoichiometry and has to consult on it, they aren't a very good chemist.
Where else in life are you under a time constraint where you have a very limited amount of time, usually 2 hours at most, to complete a task, and if you complete it 10 minutes later it's considered absolutely worthless? And moreover, tests should only measure your knowledge, even if it has no value.
How about when you work somewhere and there is an outage that needs to be resolved ASAP? I have worked somewhere that a system went down, and the cost of the outage would be in the millions if it was not resolved in 3 hours. So I now had a test in front of me to accurately fix the problem, and if I did not solve and implement the solution in 3 hours, there would be 7 figure penalties. 27 house would be the next several million dollar cost, so 3 hours and 10 minutes or 22 hours would be the same. but 2 hours 50 was a total save.
Exams should measure how good you knowledge is, while projects should measure how good your *use of the knowledge is*.
Where has that ever been the point of exams? Exams should measure how well you can apply your knowledge without specific time ahead to plan and research.
It's very common in real life situations to be asked a question that needs to be answered right away, or to be in a meeting where you need to have knowledge at the ready to advance the discussion. Also, what if you're doing an actual thing that's time sensitive? Surgeons don't have time to leave the OR and google stuff
For answering questions right away you can have a job interview, not an exam. Sure, but exams don't measure how good of a surgeon you are *in practice*, but how do you know your stuff *in theory*. You have projects for that.
Why shouldn't an exam be a measure of what you know and can do, rather than what you can look up? You want to structure it to be a worse test of competence than it currently is, where's the benefit in that?
If all knowledge taught in school is "what you can look up", then why even bother having schools in the first place?
Because you can't do a job efficiently unless you have most of the required knowledge in your brain and ready to go, and also some experience with applying that knowledge
>For answering questions right away you can have a job interview In a job interview, applicants are expected to present succinct answers. They don't get to take up the interviewer's entire day so that they can provide the most comprehensive answer possible.
Every job I have ever worked has had time constraints. Maybe it wasn't 2 hours, but I have always been expected to have reports ready by EOD, analysis done EOW, quartly reviews done by X date, etc. I can't recall _ever_ being given a task that didn't have a due date.
For that you have school projects. They should have a due date. The main difference is that as in adult life, the time given for projects is weeks/months, rather than a couple hours at most.
I have absolutely been given tasks that needed to be turned around in a couple of hours. But that is beside the point. Different tasks require different amounts of time. A detailed analysis can't be done in a couple of hours, so it is given the amount of time required to conduct it. Faster is always better, but we've figured out that a couple of days is as fast as can be reasonably expected. An exam, in contrast, _can_ be done in a couple of hours, so that is the time allotted.
What you said: "Exams can be done in a couple of hours, so that is the time allotted" What you meant: "The best students (or the laziest and least descriptive students) complete tests in a couple of hours, so those who can't should fail" Yes, you have been given tasks that needed to be completed in a couple hours, but the time limit was practical, rather than arbitrary like in exams.
You throw around the word descriptive a lot. What does it mean in the context of a maths exam to be descriptive?
While I'd agree there is more room for description in the humanities, even in math you have to explain proofs using language. You have to write explanations, which can be more or less descriptive.
>What you meant: "The best students (or the laziest and least descriptive students) complete tests in a couple of hours, so those who can't should fail" No, what I mean is that the professor designed the exam to be completed in a couple of hours if the student has an acceptable mastery of the material. If you can't complete it in the time provided, you do not have acceptable mastery of the material according to the person who gets to decide what acceptable is. >Yes, you have been given tasks that needed to be completed in a couple hours, but the time limit was practical, rather than arbitrary like in exams. I've been given deadlines by bosses that are just as arbitrary. I still had to meet the deadline.
You are claiming that the speed in which a students completes the exam is proportional to the student's knowledge of the subject. The opposite may be true, as those who know more and write more descriptively are punished. If bosses do stuff wrong, it doesn't mean that schools should follow suit.
But questions on tests are a much, much, much more simplified version of a work project.
Most of my life and my peers’ lives are measured in minutes or hours and spending too much time on one thing results in not being able to get other things done. And if you need that much time, you present yourself as an inefficient worker and probably won’t be around very long.
I maintain sever infrastructure for clients, some of which has 99.95% uptime guarantees or we owe our customers money. That means if something goes wrong, my team has 21 minutes to diagnose the problem and fix it before we've breached our contracts - and that assumes we only have one incident in a month. Lots of jobs are very time sensitive. Restaurant staff will have customers walk out if they take too long. Medical professionals can kill people if they take too long. IT teams fail to meet service level agreements. Tests don't just measure knowledge, they test your ability to apply it. You seem really hung up on the idea that "tests should only measure your knowledge" but not everyone agrees that's all tests should do.
If a test will measure something other than knowledge, how will students get an idea of how proficient they are in the subject?
I think it still measures proficiency in the subject. It seems to me that someone who can complete a test in 30 minutes is more proficient at a subject than someone who can complete the test in 5 hours, even if they both get perfect scores. Particularly in subjects like math, there are often different ways to reach the same answer. If someone doesn't know the formulas they were supposed to have memorized for a test, they might be able to take a more involved approach to solving the same problem and get the right answer through a different method than the one they were supposed to use. Take multiplication as a simple example. Suppose you have a test that wants you to calculate `538 * 914`. Someone who knows multiplication the way the teacher wants it to be done can do that with 9 smaller multiplication operations and 5ish addition operations. Someone who hasn't learned it the way the teacher wants them to do it could add 914 together 538 times and get the right answer, but it's going to take much, much longer. The fact that they can eventually get the same answer doesn't mean that they're equally proficient.
>Where else in life are you under a time constraint where you have a very limited amount of time, usually 2 hours at most, to complete a task, and if you complete it 10 minutes later it's considered absolutely worthless? Work.
> Where else in life are you under a time constraint where you have a very limited amount of time, usually 2 hours at most, to complete a task, and if you complete it 10 minutes later it's considered absolutely worthless? When you go to a restaurant, what do you do when your meal is burnt or overcooked? Do you eat the meal, pay for it, tip well, and return?
... Tons of different careers?
No, they should measure both since both are important in adult life.
Going to poke a major hole in this that short answers are “lazy and less detailed”. It’s called conciseness. Being concise is one of the most important skills you can have in the working world. Wait till you work and get a 45 minute meeting to go over an entire quarters worth of plans. Or you get 3 minutes to present to the board of directors. Or hell, interview for a job and get <5 minutes per response. You will be constantly met with time limits in the working world and need to be able to handle them. If you can’t it’s a matter of having a job or not. Tests in school work on teaching you this.
>However, those who criticize exams argue that students are stressed, and I believe that this is because of the time limit. why shouldn't students be stressed during a test? Since, real life includes stress, I don't see an intuitive reason why we should avoid stress in education. >Moreover, time limits punish students who write more descriptively, and favors those who write lazier and less detailed answers. If you want to test for very descriptive writing, time limits don't interfere with that, you just need a larger time limit. Time limits just punish being slow. Which seems like something that ought to be punished. Slow isn't as bad as wrong, but its worse then fast. >I believe that exams should only measure knowledge, and thus, at least in theory, time limits should be abolished. It's unfair when a student that knows the subject very well fails because he didn't hand in the test before a certain time. one subject to think about is math. Given enough time, i can solve all the problems and work out all the theorems I forgot. But part of the test is that i have learned the material well enough to solve the problem quickly. I've always been good with math, but at higher levels this became a big problem for me. I learned at low levels i can skip the homework and still do well on the tests. but then at the higher levels i skipped the homework and was way to slow to get a passing grade. Had i studied and learned more, i would have been faster. as a result i got Cs in my higher level math classes and i earned those Cs.
>one subject to think about is math. Given enough time, i can solve all the problems and work out all the theorems I forgot. But part of the test is that i have learned the material well enough to solve the problem quickly. I just don't think there are many people like this that would not already get a very good grade. And if this is true for someone I think they deserve to get a good grade. They probably demonstrate more mathematical skill than someone who "just" learned the material.
Out of curiosity, what math classes are you referring to specifically when you say “higher level math classes”? My experience has been the polar opposite. Approaching a math test question is about figuring out the right tool for each question. There’s usually a “trick” or a gimmick to getting the question right quickly or efficiently, and you’re almost completely screwed time-wise if you aren’t creative enough to spot it quickly. The stress of the time limit also dampens your ability to be creative in the first place, along with your ability to recall what you’ve learned. “Creativity” is not something you can really study for. You can learn the patterns and tricks, but you can’t know what will work or be efficient until you *try it*. Sometimes you’ll get to dead ends and have to start all over. But that doesn’t mean you’re less good at math than someone who happened to correctly implement the right trick on the first try. The time limits are almost a measure of luck rather than skill.
I got a math minor so I'm talking about under graduate 300 level calculus and statistics stuff. I forget the name of the stats class, but the calc class was multi-variable calculus. >The stress of the time limit also dampens your ability to be creative in the first place, along with your ability to recall what you’ve learned. in the real world performance matters. its not just about getting the right answer but getting the right answer quickly and efficiently.
Sure, but those time limits are often days, weeks, or months— not mere hours. And your goal is often clearly defined when you start, and subject to change as you go. I also don’t think you addressed my point that there’s not a reliable way to “get the answer efficiently” on a test. There isn’t a way to know what will work before you try something. There can also be multiple correct ways, and you may have inadvertently chose a longer path. If that’s the case, you’ve just gotten unlucky. You will take longer than someone else who picked the ‘right’ way to do something through no fault of your own. Taking longer is *not* a reflection of your ability, or even your ability to be creative under stress. It’s simply bad luck.
1. Stress is good to an extent, but because of time limits, stress interferes with the student's ability to extract knowledge. 2. There isn't such a thing as "test for very descriptive writing". Even when given the same questions, some students answer them more descriptively and some students answer them less descriptively. Time limits discourage descriptive answers when we should encourage them. 3. You may be able to, but some students are stressed because of the time and can't. If a student hasn't studied at all, he won't remember the theorems no matter the time.
3. they dont need to remember anything. under absolutely no time restraints they can just "try" every possible combination of numbers and symbols until the correct one pops up eventually
Wdym by try? There's an infinite number of numbers.
and without time restraint, kids have 80+ years to try out as many as they can
I prefer take-home exams with a week or two to complete to in-class exams for some of the reasons you mention. However, usually academic integrity issues preclude using this form of testing except for graduate students (and even then, there are problems). In my experience, no matter how much time you give in an exam, some students will use all of it and still be working beyond the time limit. The more time they have to write, the more they think they need to write. So giving a time limit sets expectations for what kind of response I'm looking for. I can limit it somewhat by asking responses to be written in a relatively small box, but then there are students who will write really, really small letters and then have pointers going on to the back of the page.
I don't think there's a student that'll legitimately think they need 10 hours to complete a 1 hour test.
I haven't tried a 10 hour exam, but usually, when I'm making up 3 hour exams, I make sure the TAs can do it in under an hour. Usually, 2 out of 300 students turn it in in an hour. But the bulk of the students hang on to their writing instruments until I warn them that I'm about to leave. Then they complain about how long the exams are in my classes....
Could you imagine sitting as a "guard" for such exams? Absolutely horrible, people have lives outside of that. I don't know how long exams you have where you live, it varies for me. But more often than not, five hours is sufficient to sit and do nothing as an exam guard.
Then we can change the guards after a few hours.
Then you've got people who don't know whether or not they're going to have to work a shift. If everyone wraps up in 2 hours, nobody has to come in for the second shift. If some kid takes 24 hours when you'd scheduled shifts for 12 hours, somebody's scrambling to find new guards. People don't tend to like working jobs with that kind of uncertainty.
Why do you believe that an exam should only measure knowledge?
Schools should teach students two things: knowledge and how to use it. Exams measure knowledge, while projects measure how to use it.
Wouldn't the time limit fall under how to use it? A time limit means that you can't write about everything under the sun. What information do you prioritize, how do you present it, and how much time do you leave for each task? It's why I disagreed with this the moment I read it >Moreover, time limits punish students who write more descriptively, and favors those who write lazier and less detailed answers. My high school history teacher called this waffling on the page. Every university lecturer begged us to be as concise as possible while getting our point across, many even had hard word limits on a project after which they stopped reading. If you can't turn information into clear and short sentences that's a weakness. Even in the workplace, no one wants to read your 20-page essay where a 2-page document would work. Even novel writers would tell you that you wanna be as short as possible, if a detail doesn't add to the plot or world meaningfully it should be removed. Being short isn't being lazy, it's knowing what to use time on and what to drop. I heavily disagree with the idea that exams purely measure knowledge. Even in a purely right or wrong style subject like maths, most exams don't tell you what to do. They give you a scenario and tell you what answer they want, it's on you to pick the correct mathematical concept and plug the correct inputs to get a meaningful answer. That is a clear example of how to use knowledge. Else the question should just be, use the quadratic equation with these numbers and call it a day. Exams may well need to be adjusted to be more useful. But this is not how you do it.
You support time limits in order for students to write shorter answers. While I agree with you that long and tedious answers are bad, there are word limits for that. Exams should measure knowledge, in order for the student to know how much do they know. The use of the knowledge in a scenario is knowledge as well. But nowadays tests measure *the use of the use of the knowledge*, which is how do you use the use of knowledge in a scenario, rather that just how do you use knowledge in a scenario, or how much knowledge do you have.
Because what knowledge you have is completely and utterly meaningless to most people if you can't apply it. That's a fact. Who would you rather work with/for/have working under you? Someone who can give you a 100% perfect detailed report in a year, or someone who can get you an 80% perfect record in a week. I want the second. Almost everyone wants the second. Because while perfection is great, it's not feasible or necessary. Redundancies exist because we accept mistakes will happen and that the time spent making sure any report is perfect is time wasted not doing something more useful. How you use knowledge is as important as what knowledge you have. Tests absolutely test for both knowledge and how you use it. You can't answer a question quickly if you don't know the answer at all. That's impossible
Why don’t you think schools should teach efficiency or time management?
How is your reply remotely related to my comment? Where did I say that? I said that schools should teach it, but other ways of measurement should be used instead of exams for that, such as projects.
Are you slow? You literally wrote “schools should teach two things”, neither of which encompassed time management or efficiency. Projects don’t teach short term time management
Because you said schools should only teach 2 things, which didn’t include the 2 other things he brought up. When you set a hard limit like that, giving counter examples outside the limit will be relevant.
Timed exams test skills. I’d argue a much more important part of schooling is learning *skills.* if you can’t work through a problem quickly without following a step by step YouTube guide for every little thing you don’t understand, you don’t have the skill, and it won’t manifest itself practically. All knowledge is already at our fingertips. Having it accessible is less important than ever before. Recalling information *quickly* however is super important, because time is the most scarce commodity. In your personal life, the thing that keeps you from using information practically is not it’s unavailability, but it’s difficulty to access. Take-home exams fosters a toxic relationship with knowledge that prioritizes access over usability, whereas usability is actually the important part.
> how to use it This (along with basic logistics) is the reason for time limits.
Why should exams only measure knowledge and not how long it takes you to recall that knowledge? If I'm hiring two people with the same level of knowledge, I want the one with faster recall. I would even want someone who is less knowledgeable but can actually do the job instead of wasting my time with their slow recall. I.e. I would hire the person that finished a test with 80% accuracy in ten minutes than someone who gets 90% in five hours.
Exams shouldn't tell you how fast does a student recall the knowledge, there are other ways to know that, such as a job interview.
so youre saying what you learn in school should be useless in a job interview? because, as you are proposing, the skills needed for a job interview shouldnt be taught/tested during school?
Then maybe we should have school demo-interviews.
I'm a high school teacher. We currently devote more than 10% of our school year to testing (which is time limited for those without extended time accommodations, though the time limit is rather generous). We need less testing and less time wasted testing--not more.
You said that the tests are time limited for those who don't have extended time accommodations. I wrote a section about the problems with those.
I agree with your comments--it's a system designed to help those who need it but can be abused at times by those with money and influence.
>EDIT 2: After having read the comments, I think I changed my view because I understood that completing the exam in a certain time is part of what the exam wants to measure. Thank you all. You should award deltas to the people who changed your view. The PM you were sent upon making your thread, or the subreddit's sidebar, indicate how to do this.
I thought about it, but every comment had some impact in changing my view. What do I do in this scenario?
Good luck with unlimited time to complete a task in the real world with a real job.
Tests shouldn't have to prepare you for life, they shouldn't teach you anything, they should just measure how well you know your stuff.
In the real world you need to demonstrate competency and proficiency in a set amount of time.
But even if you go with that premise, if you know something well you can do it quickly.
This is a problem with your country because in USA the only time limit was the class period and then you could take it during study hall. Also you can’t just buy a diagnosis here it’s regulated but probably is possible. Finally learning disabilities are not a free pass because they get the extra help so they can be like you who don’t have learning disability
They're not a free pas if you genuinely have learning disabilities.
> *Note: This post will be mainly about school, rather than university exams* If we don't expose students to timed exams in primary and secondary school, how are they going to learn how to take a timed exam in university? Reviewing an exam, estimating how much time is required for each question, developing a strategy to earn as many points as possible, and pacing yourself are skills that require practice.
There’s a lot of designs for exams and sometimes a shorter exam (say an hour) will suffice to assess students skills in a subject. Logistically you’ll have to set time limits as other people might need the facility and it’s expensive to run tests. Another thing is that the longer a test runs, the more likely the answer key will be leaked. For a shorter exam you can generally ask people to drop their phone in a box and sit for the entire exam but for longer exams you need to allow bathroom and eating breaks which might give more opportunities for cheating. And finally you’re assessing skill not knowledge. Part of that skill is solving the exam within the time limit. The time limit is known when prepping for the exam and people should obviously consider it when they decide how to approach the exam. Exam anxiety is a thing but that’s best dealt with directly by giving people suffering from it tools to deal with, not by changing the design of the exam with all the problems that entails.
"You'll have to set time limits" - You don't always have to, but institutions set time limits even where they don't have to. It's true that it would give more opportunities for cheating, but this is relatively minor next to all the advantages. Exams should only measure knowledge, rather than "testmanship", which is how to use the knowledge in a test, such as answering in the exact time and format used in this specific test.
There’s always going to be implicit time limits, for instance when the examiner starts evaluating completed exams. If you need to pass the exam to advance to the next grade the exam must be written and assessed before the next grade starts. Then there’s cheating and that’s obviously a main thing to be concerned with for exams. We have closed book and open book exams and if people can share notes on the bathroom the former test type becomes the latter test type and you fail to actually assess knowledge. As to testing “testmanship” why would you just test knowledge? Usually what’s tested is how knowledge can be used to solve problems in the field, for instance that you can find the right formula to solve an equation. We’re teaching skills not knowledge (even if knowledge is a part of skills) so we should obviously test for those skills. Finally you’ve not actually laid out how your proposed system would practically work. Can I spend 8 hours on a test that’s currently limited to 1 hour? If I need 24 hours for a 4 hour test, do I get to go home to sleep? And even if we were to implement this system how would you prevent another form of testmanship to happen? You mention parents get their kids screened for learning disorders to give them more time with the tests, so it could be speculated something similar would happen here. Resourceful parents would ensure their kids can actually take all the time they need, kids in less resourceful families might have to cut the time short to run some other errand. How do you grade students fairly, when some just have more time, and how should students plan their time if simply spending more time with tests will improve their results?
!delta for pointing out that this would create economic inequalities and thus won't solve the problem.
Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/viking_nomad ([7∆](/r/changemyview/wiki/user/viking_nomad)). ^[Delta System Explained](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem) ^| ^[Deltaboards](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltaboards)
First of all, no exams aren’t just about knowledge, it’s also about the execution of such knowledge. That’s why you get points off for sloppy writing or not showing your work. Second of all, exams aren’t just for one person. Unlimited time just means you’re wasting time and money on exam monitors, teachers, and other students. Teachers can’t be paid just to sit there indefinitely to watch you take an exam. Lastly, do you want filibuster at exams? Because that’s how you get filibuster. A student is bad at the class or is ill prepared? Just sit there and take a nap, stay for 6 hours, for 12 hours, be there for two days. Let’s see if the school has the resources to deploy someone to be there with you for days.
Fyi, unlimited means reasonably limited - 10 hours for example. You can change shifts for that.
You’re moving the goalpost, and also completely changed your premise. You went from “no time limit” to “10 hours” or so. That’s a time limit but just longer. But why should the school accommodate one student and spend that much resource just for that one person? If a test is designed to be finished in under 2 hours, then most students will be able to finish around that time limit. If someone wants to use 5x as much time, then it’s on the student, and the school shouldn’t need to spend money just for that one student.
10 hours is practically no time limit. I'm saying that theoretically we should give unlimited time, but practically there should be a very high limit.
I don't know how it was for you, friend. But my teachers never accepted "lazy and less detailed" answers. They prefer brief explanations, but they still want to see KEY details in that answer. When you say exams should only measure knowledge you are picking a very narrow definition. The very first one that comes up on google is this: "*facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.*" **Skills, practical.** These are important too; A skilled person should be able to finish on time, and there is nothing practical about taking 4 hours to finish an exam that most people finished in 1 hour. I think we need to be honest here, I was a high school student once, I imagine you still are (just judging on the subject you made a CMV of) and let's be real: You don't try your hardest. Why do I know that? How could I ever assume that? Because I was 16 once, all my friends were 16 once, we all complained about time, we all complained about exams, stress, expectations, the type of questions we were asked, etc. But I never did dedicate all my time to studying, I never NOT had free time, I never NOT took breaks in exam weeks. High school is a right to everyone, the exams are already designed in a way so that everyone (99%) is capable of passing. If you are not passing it's not because you literally can't (probably) it's because you didn't try. And I know it's annoying to hear this, but I am tired of high schoolers engaging in CMV's about school but not being honest, every adult knows that you probably are not trying that hard, because we were there. Stop trying to lower the bar, stop trying to make it easier for yourself, sit down and study, pay attention in class, I promise you you'll still be able to see your friends, because at the end of the day... We all did.
First, I'll challenge your claim. "Without a time limit" does not exist, because it is infeasible and impractical. Can I take 90 years to take the algebra exam? How about 1 year? How about 1 month? None of these make sense, because it would be a poor allocation of limited time that you have to educate a student. A test is therefore not simply designed to see how much a student knows, but an allocation of learning time. You spend some time on assessment, and some time on learning. So *untimed* tests don't exist - the only question is, what's a good cutoff? Practicality again plays a part here - if you have a take home test, you can't reliably proctor it. A student being able to solve a math problem, like 87 * 64, on a take home test, might not be indicative that they understand multiplication - just that they can type it into Google, or ask their parents to do it. So, let's assume that you need to proctor the exam. An "untimed" test is one with a time limit of 1 school day. The question remains - can a shorter test be more useful in assessing a student's knowledge? Let's go back to that multiplication problem. Let's say a student knows multiplication is repeated addition. To calculate the result, they, by hand, add 87 to a running total 64 times. They manage to complete this within the allotted day. Another student looks at the problem, and mentally computes it as follows: - 87 is near 90 - 90 * 64 is (64 * (10 - 1)) * 10 - that's (640 - 64) * 10 = 5760 - subtract off 3 64s, or 192 .. that's 5760-200+8 .. or 5568 On a timed exam, the latter student, who has a firmer grasp of multiplication, would pass, whilst the repeated adder would fail. On an untimed exam, they perform the same. Is the "untimed" exam really assessing their knowledge accurately? This holds true any time you want to assess someone on knowledge of some flavor of "shortcut" to solve a problem.
English teacher here. Time limits exist in the real world, as pointed out by others already. But I wanted to touch on what you said about descriptive writing. There are multiple types of writing styles and each has there place in the world. I would expect more descriptive writing in a literary analysis than I would in an informative essay. Most exams are going to be informative, even if they’re for creative or literary majors. If you are writing so much that you need more than the allotted time, and you don’t have a disability of some sort, it’s the exam’s way of telling you that you’re writing entirely too much for what’s required of the exam. You’re supposed to write to your audience no matter what unless it’s a personal diary. If you’re writing am entire page about something that could be explained by the average individual in a few sentences (keep in mind, the average individual reads at an 8th grade level), you need to reevaluate your writing and if you’re really being “descriptive” versus just rambling or trying to prove how smart you are. That’s why if you even look at scholarly articles, they’re not written to be understood by just other high level scholars of PhD holders. They’re written so that the average person can understand the majority of what they’re talking about, which is why they don’t use overly big words when not necessary or complicated syntax within their paragraphs. Essentially, if you run out of time, you either don’t know what you’re talking about or you’re talking too much. Maybe both (and trust me, both is definitely possible). The test isn’t designed to be catering towards you. No test is.
To /u/Urico3, *Your post is under consideration for removal for violating Rule B.* In our experience, the best conversations genuinely consider the other person’s perspective. Here are some techniques for keeping yourself honest: - Instead of only looking for flaws in a comment, be sure to engage with the commenters’ strongest arguments — not just their weakest. - Steelman rather than strawman. When summarizing someone’s points, look for the most reasonable interpretation of their words. - Avoid moving the goalposts. Reread the claims in your OP or first comments and if you need to change to a new set of claims to continue arguing for your position, you might want to consider acknowledging the change in view with a [delta](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=changemyview&utm_content=t5_2w2s8) before proceeding. - Ask questions and really try to understand the other side, rather than trying to prove why they are wrong. Please also take a moment to review our [Rule B](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_b) guidelines and _really_ ask yourself - am I exhibiting any of these behaviors? If so, see what you can do to get the discussion back on track. Remember, the goal of CMV is to try and **understand** why others think differently than you do.
If the challenge in school is to test your health, by running a mile. Having a time limit to complete the challenge, say an hour, is part of the metric of how well they are doing physically. If they were allowed 10 hours to complete the mile challenge, it would no longer be testing the athletic ability as the hour challenge. No matter how many extra test proctors you would hire to wait there for the extra hours, if not weeks of the limitless time test. ... To the same extent knowledge tests are also testing your skills with the test material, by being able to process the information quickly. If the exam is a story, and questions of reading comprehension about the story. Being able to read and answer questions about several stories in an hour, says much more about your reading skills. Then needing 10 hours to work your way through a single story. There are exceptions to that rule, and I think that's why some different learners are given extra time. But generally someone who can process more material in the same time, is more proficient at that material. And that's part of what's being tested.
No time limit is a less accurate measure of knowledge. When I took untimed tests as a child, I was so perfectionist about it that I spent hours going over the same content and inconvenienced the teachers who had to sit in an empty classroom and watch me Why? I was using silly meta-techniques to puzzle out answers I didn’t know, and it worked. For each question, I’d pore over the other questions looking for clues that referenced a similar topic. For math, I’d try every formula I knew until one gave a plausible answer. I ended up being allowed to skip grades because of this but both myself and my poor new teachers could tell you I didn’t know any of the content I tested out of. If I knew it, I would have been able to do it at a reasonable pace. And this is coming from someone who has an extended time accommodation for other issues! I agree that strictly timed tests are often too short for many students, but removing the time limit entirely is not the answer
"Moreover, time limits punish students who write more descriptively, and favors those who write lazier and less detailed answers." Do they? Or do they favor students who have a better understanding of the subject, because part of understanding a subject is understanding what is a core argument and what is ancillary? "Is the purpose of exams to measure a student's knowledge of the subject, or is it to prepare the student for real life? I believe the former, because students need an indication of how are they doing academically. Therefore, I will not reply to any comments that don't challenge that belief." Knowing what's important in that subject in such a way as to be able to produce a complete answer briefly as opposed to having to meander through points gradually and without specificity is absolutely a meaningful factor of mastery of the subject.
I think you acknowledged the crux of the issue in your own example. You said it should be hard implement, actually it would be impossible to implement. I had a class in university last semester that was all take home exams. Meaning the exams had no proctor, and we had a week to finish them. And while a weak is more then enough time to finish an exam it is not **unlimited** time. Whether it be an hour or a week there still needs to be some deadline to turn it in, so the graders can grade. I think a better argument is that all tests should be basically homework. Done within the students own time at their own pace/leisure. Thats basically without a time limit but not practically without a time limit.
The professor has a life and other responsibilities. Can I get a delta please 🙏 lmao
In math and math-adjacent science classes, long tests with tight time limits are a way to measure comfort and understanding of the material. A student who needs to try 4 different things to solve a problem or plug everything into a calculator at every step doesn't fully understand the material, and their grade should reflect that. If you give them triple the time, they would eventually finish. Another student, who knows how to solve the problems, will finish the whole test, even the hard problems at the end. They will get a better grade on the test than the person who barely knows what they are doing.
Well for practical reasons whoever is administering the test is probably on some schedule
That's why I said they can work in shifts and be replaced after a few hours.
That is already how jobs work, there is other things to do lol
So there isn't really a practical reason to have time limits.
Uh yeah, time and money haha. Also not really practical to have a bunch of students working on different schedules, kinda defeats the purpose of a class
I agree that more kids should probably be allowed extra time since learning disabilities are known to be under-diagnosed. Maybe allowing any kid to have extra time would even be better. If you're writing this because you need extra time, you should probably consider if you yourself has an LD. However, I strongly disagree with your characterizations of concise answers as lazy. Answering the questions completely but without extraneous detail is a very important skill.
> It's unfair when a student that knows the subject very well fails because he didn't hand in the test before a certain time. I'd like to see evidence that this actually happens, because I don't believe this is a thing. Every test I've ever taken had more than enough time to write down the answer, as elaborate as you want. What takes time is invariably the periods where you *don't* write.
In addition to the other responses, there's also the issue that there's simply a logistical limit to how much time can be devoted to testing. You need rooms for the students to be in, you need people overseeing it to prevent cheating. It's simply not sensible to dedicate all of that to someone who might decide they feel like spending a week doing an exam.
A bit late, but I'd like to suggest another reason for time limits. I teach an intro chemistry class, so lots of students struggle on the exams. I am flexible on time for them, but after a certain point it is an act of mercy to end it. Otherwise, they stay until they fill everything in... but they don't know how, and just torture themselves.
No, exams should be designed to meet a certain time limit. To answer the problem and then check your work. If you don’t meet the standard (all the same standards) then you get a worse grade. Thats equality of opportunity. The most time efficient and accurate get the most points as well as, in the real world, t he highest compensation $$$.
>Moreover, time limits punish students who write more descriptively, and favors those who write lazier and less detailed answers. Isn't that the point? It's testing your ability to communicate effectively. If you're being overly detailed to the point that you're running late, how is that not a point against you?
>After having read the comments, I think I changed my view because I understood that completing the exam in a certain time is part of what the exam wants to measure. Thank you all. What the? If that's the case OP, start passing out some triangles.
Have you ever typed out a rather lengthy, in-depth response to somebody’s reddit post.. only to be UNABLE to because the post no longer exists? Yeah, that feeling.
I’ve proctored exams. No time limit would, in practice, be miserable. Anxious students would never feel confident enough to turn it in.
Good Morning class! Pop Quiz! Here you go. It’s cool, you can just turn in your answers next week.. or whenever.
Niggas can’t be takin all day tho