In the class I TA for, the students can go to the professor’s office hours after the midterm / final, and if they can solve the problem there, they still get… half of the points? I wonder how that one affects test-taking performance.
Also, this whole thing seems to be annoyingly resistant to Bayesian updates… “Every time I’m anxious I perform bad, and now I’m worried about being too worried for this exam”, and, since performing bad is a very valid prediction in this state of mind, worry is there to stay.
Maybe if the tests are called “quizzes” the students end up in the other stable state of “not being worried”?
I feel like it’s the students’ responsibility to calibrate their own personal correct amount of worry that it takes to make them study, regardless of what the thing is called? (Like if I say “This quiz is worth 50% of your grade,” they should be able to tell that it’s not really a quiz.) But at the same time, it sounds like some brains have this worry horizon where once they start worrying, then it’s all they can do. So we need to somehow calibrate the scariness of exams so that only a very small percentage of people fall off the worry horizon, because people who fail from not studying can just start studying. The stable state of not being worried is a good place! ^_^
This kind of reminds me of all of the (non-technical) articles about game addiction and how it’s in the designers’ best interest to keep everyone hooked but still high-functioning enough that we won’t outlaw WoW the way we outlaw harmful, addictive narcotics.
In the class I TA for, the students can go to the professor’s office hours after the midterm / final, and if they can solve the problem there, they still get… half of the points? I wonder how that one affects test-taking performance.
Also, this whole thing seems to be annoyingly resistant to Bayesian updates… “Every time I’m anxious I perform bad, and now I’m worried about being too worried for this exam”, and, since performing bad is a very valid prediction in this state of mind, worry is there to stay.
Maybe if the tests are called “quizzes” the students end up in the other stable state of “not being worried”?
I feel like it’s the students’ responsibility to calibrate their own personal correct amount of worry that it takes to make them study, regardless of what the thing is called? (Like if I say “This quiz is worth 50% of your grade,” they should be able to tell that it’s not really a quiz.) But at the same time, it sounds like some brains have this worry horizon where once they start worrying, then it’s all they can do. So we need to somehow calibrate the scariness of exams so that only a very small percentage of people fall off the worry horizon, because people who fail from not studying can just start studying. The stable state of not being worried is a good place! ^_^
This kind of reminds me of all of the (non-technical) articles about game addiction and how it’s in the designers’ best interest to keep everyone hooked but still high-functioning enough that we won’t outlaw WoW the way we outlaw harmful, addictive narcotics.
Brains are such a mess. ^_^