Advanced math is super important for understanding computer graphics, but what exactly was this exam testing? The rotation and projection matrices were even given in the exam booklet. It wasn't testing your understanding of computer graphics, it was all testing how quickly you can multiply a 4x4 matrix by a 4x8 matrix without ****ing up.

IMO, one principle of our institutions of higher learning seems to be the selection of students with certain 'meta'-learning skills. I'm mostly thinking about the ability to effectively (and promptly) expand some very compressed piece of information (perhaps a sparsely stated / open-ended problem, some obscure jargon or technical acrobatics, or anything that requires a great deal of 'unpacking'). The extent to which so much value is placed on the exercise of competent thinking and not on the thoughts themselves seems to follow from the scarcity of expert attention at the research level. In other words, it's more important that you could understand god-knows-what should Expert A start spewing irreplicable insight at you. So it's not so important you're doing anything of real value 100% of the time. In principle, you can do that on your own time (nevermind that competing in classes doesn't leave all that much time to do so, however).

I'm not really sure what use this style of learning is for people who don't plan to go into academic research, and having such an aptitude for on-the-fly learning is beginning to make less and less sense as education (and research) becomes much less of an oral tradition.

Industry does benefit from the university system as a (very inefficient) way of filtering out the people who, for one reason or another, might screw up at work. (They're also getting the taxpayer to shoulder some of the burden of some of the training that will ultimately earn revenue for the company.) If the students don't plan to go into some obscure area of academic research, I don't see the harm in knocking some common sense into the curriculum and allowing the students to learn some much more practical things that they might actually ever use. Probably a good place to start is to stop training students in lieu of providing a chance for them to educate themselves.

Perhaps the 'meta'-learning skill I was reaching for already has a name ("intelligence").

Although I'm not sure if multiplying matrices by hand is a complete test of your intelligence.

(In fact I know it's not, I mean come on, how much of an objective test can this be when you've got half the student population spending most of their waking hours worshiping totally useless* facts for the majority of their young adult lives.)

* mostly because so many of them will never use these facts again, ever, though not the least because of all the lost opportunities in our system of education to actually 'learn' something for once

Every thread I participate in turns into a rant on education. Hmm.

I'm certain this thread was one before your participation effected discussion.

This thing just doesn't stop!!!!

but to be fair they won't graduate as many worthless degrees if they didnt make it easier

Sorry, instead of talking (about talking (about education)), I merely needed to go back to school to learn to read (the title (of the thread)).

I had an exam Monday with an 8 question T/F section, where every question wrong was -3%, every question right was +3%, and no answer was 0. Trying to decipher probability jargon to figure out if they're asking a trick question or not was fun. Also fun is 48% of your grade on an exam being tied to 1/5 of the exam. -_-

To. Discourage. Guessing.

Because I don't always spend thousands of dollars to take a test that determines my future employment opportunities, but when I do I guess.

Also the general physics courses (freshman/sophomore level for engineers) at my university are all multiple choice exams. ~23 questions, anywhere from 2 to 5 answers per question. If you mark multiple answers, they'll give you partial credit if one of them is right, but there's no partial credit for work. To be fair, these courses are around 800 students, but it still is a ****ty way to test something where a sign error is ridiculously easy, and they always have +/- answers on the exam just to **** people over (really fun in E&M).

I'm generally really good at multiple choice.
I used to hate essay questions, but I discovered how much I like them when I realized they don't actually care about your opinion, they just want to see if you can express an opinion. And, if it's a regular public school essay question, they don't even care about that, they just want you to fill up space. So I would mostly just adopt inane, absurd, or useless positions and come up with inane, absurd, or useless reasons to support them. Bull****ting is the most important skill to learn in school.

-Another important thing to note about tests is when a math or science problem asks "why" you arrived at an answer, they're really asking you to show your work. But if they wanted that, they should have asked for that, beating around the bush will get you intentionally unhelpful answers like "I think Tosh is the student with the correct answer because that's my cat's name." Being up-front about what you want is the second most important skill to learn in school.

My experience is if the problem asks "Why?" they typically want some proof that you understand qualitatively or intuitively what's going on, not just show work. Showing work is implied on any math or physics exam I've ever taken.

I made a choice between buffalo wings and nachos one time. I think that qualifies as multiple choice. I ended up choosing nachos, because I was afraid buffalo wings would give me heartburn, but then the nachos gave me really bad indigestion.

Since that day I've never eaten anything but buffalo wings. It's been a week and a half, and my life has never been better.

Technically, a choice between buffalo wings and nachos is true/false.

I CAN COUNT TO TACO