I try to keep an eye on how people get to this blog, using WordPress and Google tools, and I especially take note of old posts that are still getting traffic.<\/p>\n

Apparently the most popular of my old posts is one I wrote almost two years ago about university exams.<\/p>\n

I’ve edited the post a little, and if you didn’t read it yet, you might want to check it out:<\/p>\n

\n

A Tirade Against Exams<\/a><\/h3>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

So why are exams a bad idea<\/em>\u00a0when you want to check whether a bunch of science undergrads understood what you taught them? Well, one part of the problem should be obvious to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of science:exams are not very good experiments.<\/em>\u00a0There is no way to control for\u00a0interference of irrelevant, extraneous factors<\/a>. When scientists conduct a study, in any field and with any methodology, they seek to control for irrelevant interferences. For example, when psychologists test hand-eye coordination, they\u2019ll do something like only taking right-handed people with healthy hands and eyes, in order to make sure that the results aren\u2019t skewed by irrelevant differences between individuals.<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t do anything like that in exams.<\/p>\n

Continue reading \u00bb<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ve also changed the blogs settings so that comments are now open on old posts, too (they used to close automatically after two months). Feel free to rekindle the discussion on the Tirade, or on any other old post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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