Tag Archives: education

Ideally, Exams Are for the Students

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I should preface this by saying I don’t actually know that much about education. I taught a bit in my previous life as a professor, yes, but I probably spent more time being taught how to teach than actually teaching.

Recently, the Atlantic had a piece about testing accommodations for university students, like extra time on exams, or getting to do an exam in a special distraction-free environment. The piece quotes university employees who are having more and more trouble satisfying these accommodations, and includes the statistic that 20 percent of undergraduate students at Brown and Harvard are registered as disabled.

The piece has kicked off a firestorm on social media, mostly focused on that statistic (which conveniently appears just before the piece’s paywall). People are shocked, and cynical. They feel like more and more students are cheating the system, getting accommodations that they don’t actually deserve.

I feel like there is a missing mood in these discussions, that the social media furor is approaching this from the wrong perspective. People are forgetting what exams actually ought to be for.

Exams are for the students.

Exams are measurement tools. An exam for a class says whether a student has learned the material, or whether they haven’t, and need to retake the class or do more work to get there. An entrance exam, or a standardized exam like the SAT, predicts a student’s future success: whether they will be able to benefit from the material at a university, or whether they don’t yet have the background for that particular program of study.

These are all pieces of information that are most important to the students themselves, that help them structure their decisions. If you want to learn the material, should you take the course again? Which universities are you prepared for, and which not?

We have accommodations, and concepts like disability, because we believe that there are kinds of students for whom the exams don’t give this information accurately. We think that a student with more time, or who can take the exam in a distraction-free environment, would have a more accurate idea of whether they need to retake the material, or whether they’re ready for a course of study, than a student who has to take the exam under ordinary conditions. And we think we can identify the students who this matters for, and the students for whom this doesn’t matter nearly as much.

These aren’t claims about our values, or about what students deserve. They’re empirical claims, about how test results correlate with outcomes the students want. The conversation, then, needs to be built on top of those empirical claims. Are we better at predicting the success of students that receive accommodations, or worse? Can we measure that at all, or are we just guessing? And are we communicating the consequences accurately to students, that exam results tell them something useful and statistically robust that should help them plan their lives?

Values come in later, of course. We don’t have infinite resources, as the Atlantic piece emphasizes. We can’t measure everyone with as much precision as we would like. At some level, generalization takes over and accuracy is lost. There is absolutely a debate to be had about which measurements we can afford to make, and which we can’t.

But in order to have that argument at all, we first need to agree on what we’re measuring. And I feel like most of the people talking about this piece haven’t gotten there yet.

Physics Gets Easier, Then Harder

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Some people have stories about an inspiring teacher who introduced them to their life’s passion. My story is different: I became a physicist due to a famously bad teacher.

My high school was, in general, a good place to learn science, but physics was the exception. The teacher at the time had a bad reputation, and while I don’t remember exactly why I do remember his students didn’t end up learning much physics. My parents were aware of the problem, and aware that physics was something I might have a real talent for. I was already going to take math at the university, having passed calculus at the high school the year before, taking advantage of a program that let advanced high school students take free university classes. Why not take physics at the university too?

This ended up giving me a huge head-start, letting me skip ahead to the fun stuff when I started my Bachelor’s degree two years later. But in retrospect, I’m realizing it helped me even more. Skipping high-school physics didn’t just let me move ahead: it also let me avoid a class that is in many ways more difficult than university physics.

High school physics is a mess of mind-numbing formulas. How is velocity related to time, or acceleration to displacement? What’s the current generated by a changing magnetic field, or the magnetic field generated by a current? Students learn a pile of apparently different procedures to calculate things that they usually don’t particularly care about.

Once you know some math, though, you learn that most of these formulas are related. Integration and differentiation turn the mess of formulas about acceleration and velocity into a few simple definitions. Understand vectors, and instead of a stack of different rules about magnets and circuits you can learn Maxwell’s equations, which show how all of those seemingly arbitrary rules fit together in one reasonable package.

This doesn’t just happen when you go from high school physics to first-year university physics. The pattern keeps going.

In a textbook, you might see four equations to represent what Maxwell found. But once you’ve learned special relativity and some special notation, they combine into something much simpler. Instead of having to keep track of forces in diagrams, you can write down a Lagrangian and get the laws of motion with a reliable procedure. Instead of a mess of creation and annihilation operators, you can use a path integral. The more physics you learn, the more seemingly different ideas get unified, the less you have to memorize and the more just makes sense. The more physics you study, the easier it gets.

Until, that is, it doesn’t anymore. A physics education is meant to catch you up to the state of the art, and it does. But while the physics along the way has been cleaned up, the state of the art has not. We don’t yet have a unified set of physical laws, or even a unified way to do physics. Doing real research means once again learning the details: quantum computing algorithms or Monte Carlo simulation strategies, statistical tools or integrable models, atomic lattices or topological field theories.

Most of the confusions along the way were research problems in their own day. Electricity and magnetism were understood and unified piece by piece, one phenomenon after another before Maxwell linked them all together, before Lorentz and Poincaré and Einstein linked them further still. Once a student might have had to learn a mess of particles with names like J/Psi, now they need just six types of quarks.

So if you’re a student now, don’t despair. Physics will get easier, things will make more sense. And if you keep pursuing it, eventually, it will stop making sense once again.