Exams and Evaluation

Questions and model answers

1. When you have an important exam coming up, how do you prepare?

   I start early, which sounds obvious, but for me it's mostly about protecting my sleep. If I leave everything to the last two days I end up staying awake until three, and then I'm useless in the actual exam — I can't hold anything in my head. So I work backwards from the date. I figure out how many chapters there are, divide them across the days I've got, and that usually turns out to be something manageable, like two hours a night. Written down like that, it stops feeling like this enormous thing I'm avoiding. The last day I don't study anything new at all. I just go over what I already know, which keeps me calm more than anything else.

2. Would you rather be graded on a final exam, or on work you do throughout the term?

   Throughout the term, definitely. One exam is just too much weight on a single morning. You could know the material perfectly and still have a bad day — you're ill, you slept badly, you get a question on the one topic you skipped — and there's no way to recover from that. Continuous assessment spreads the risk out. If one assignment goes badly, there are five more coming. Nothing single-handedly decides your grade, so you can afford one bad week. It also changes how you work, I think. When it's all one exam, you cram and forget. When it's spread across the term you actually have to keep up, and honestly, you remember more of it afterwards, which is supposedly the entire point of the term.

3. Tell me about a time you did better or worse on a test than you expected.

   Worse, and it still annoys me. It was a history test, and I'd genuinely prepared — I knew the dates, I knew the causes, I could have talked about it for an hour. But the whole paper turned out to be essay questions, and I'd been studying like it would be short answers. So I had all the material and… no idea how to shape it into an argument. I spent the first fifteen minutes just staring at the page. By the time I worked out how to structure anything, I'd lost a quarter of the time. What I took from it was that knowing the content isn't enough on its own. Since then I always ask what the format is before I start studying.

4. Do you think exams are still the fairest way to measure what a student knows?

   The fairest? Probably not, but I'm not sure we have anything better. The argument for exams is that everyone gets the same questions in the same conditions, and nobody can get help. That does count for something — with take-home work you never really know whose work it is, especially now. But exams only measure one narrow thing, which is what you can produce alone, under pressure, in ninety minutes. Plenty of capable people freeze in that situation, and plenty of people are just very good at exams specifically. Those two groups aren't necessarily the ones who understand the subject best. So I'd say exams are the most consistent method rather than the fairest one. Those aren't quite the same.

The Korean translation, the expression breakdowns, the reusable frames and the common-mistake notes for these four questions are in the book. The recording and this transcript are free, here and on YouTube.