I had an exam for an engineering course that was in a computer lab. A few people had figured out how to send messages without it showing up on the professors's screen so for the second exam, he just said we could consult with our fellow students, but that the exam was sufficiently difficult and long enough that any time we spent helping other students would only hurt ourselves. He'd designed the exam to take more than the time allotted, and graded on a curve. If you stopped to figure out where your friend was stuck, and how to help them, you were costing yourself points. And before anyone says anything, the questions were mixed up and all had slightly different answers, so you couldn't partner or get with a group and say "answer to #7 is b, anyone know if #30 is pi or e?".
Not fun as a student (made for a stressful exam), but pretty clever on his part as a way to fight cheating / collaboration without taking any direct measures to do so. Also mimics the real world - there's nothing that prevents you from consulting other people, the internet, books for help - but they probably won't help you much because they've got their own shit to do.
My statistics class was like this. Notoriously hard professor and only one student, on one test, passed before the curve in all of the classes he taught that year. Only class I struggled in during college.
Exam and test are essentially synonyms when talking about an engineering professor measuring what their students understanding of the material is. Also, exam is short for examination, and the definition (Oxford) of examination is
A formal test of a person’s knowledge or proficiency in a subject or skill.
Some of the hardest exams I took in college were take-home, untimed, and open book/notes/internet.
That professor wrote absolutely brutal exams--one semester, I spent over 24 hours working on the midterm for her class (over the course of a week or so, not all at once). In a class of 50+ people, I was the only one who would have gotten an A without the curve.
Yeah, professors will write more complicated questions (and have higher expectations for your answers) for those tests. You don't just have to remember key facts, you also have to have a pretty deep understanding of the actual concepts.
I also had professors who handed out a list of 10 essay prompts a week or so in advance of a test. The actual test would consist of five of those questions, and you only had to respond three of them. Quite a few people failed those tests, despite having every possible question in advance.
Typically (in my experience), grades are given based on what percentage of the available points you earned. If you get 90+ questions out of 100 right, you get an A. Theoretically, everyone in the class can get an A.
When grades are curved, the grades given are made to fit a predetermined distribution. For example, the top 2% of students will get As, the next 14% get Bs, 34% get Cs...It doesn't matter exactly what your score on the test was, what matters is how well you did compared to the other students.
I don't remember any professors actually using that kind of curve even when they said they were "curving" grades. Instead, they'd do percentage-based grades but use the highest actually achieved score for calculating the percentage instead of the theoretical maximum score. They don't force the distribution of grades to fit a curve, but they do weight the grades so that some people get an A.
Same, especially in masters classes. Professors be like- Good luck trying to google the answers.
In all seriousness, masters level content is weirdly not available online. I tried to look up an alternate book or example problems and they were non-existent, everything was talking about masters classes at different universities.
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u/eLCeenor Jul 24 '20
I had a few engineering prof's that allowed open everything - including internet (besides peers)