important fruitful debate (2 Viewers)

[Majed]

++ [ originally posted by Ian ] ++
I don't know. I think that they've got the right idea, just poor execution. They need to do away with the whole pass or fail idea completely. Why not evaluate students based on what they've learned, rather than what they should have learned?

That's a good point. But I think it's too difficult to evaluate the students that way because it requires more individual attention. This of course is not very feasible to implement on a broad scale because most schools (or at least in the USA) have bigger problems; specially financially. I’m sure this is the case elsewhere too.

This issue is related somehow to standardized tests. These tests don’t accurately evaluate a student’s potential to learn/succeed.

 

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[Kaiser Franco]

The absence of a clear notion of failure, i.e. the ability to re-take an exam just a few months after not having passed it, and this ad infinitum, is the Nr 1 reason why, in Italy and Germany, to name but two countries, you have an army of + 25 year olds still studying political sciences or doing some other fecal degree.

Life's a ***** and it can and will slap you in the face. Better get used to it by trying a small aperitive at an early stage.

 

[swag]

Interesting, Kaiser F. Yet I would normally suspect that the notion of standardized testing would be all too foreign in a place such as Italy... where, in their own Italian vernacular, you don't take an exam, you give one. Reflecting more of an essay/debate-oriented approach towards any concept of passing or failing, rather than some sort of multiple choice exam with standardized answers.

 

[Kaiser Franco]

Oh yes a University exam in Italy will rarely consist of multiple choices. I had this friend who had a very special way of passing his oral exams. He would come up to the professor and say "listen, instead of you asking me questions about Jakobson's theory of meaning, why don't you listen to what I have to say on the matter and then decide whether I deserve to pass?" Sometimes his proposal would be met with an irrevocable "thank you for your time, you may now leave the room", but sometimes it would actually work. He never finsihed his studies though and now works as a clerk at the local Italian Communist Party branch.

I was quite shocked myself when I took the TOEFL in America. I mean, here is a test aimed at assessing whether you are capable of attending university in English and what do they ask you? To write an essay in English? To give an oral presentation? Nope, they ask you to scribble crosses into boxes. Go figure. For the record I got something like 600 points, whatever that is worth. Apparently it was suffcient to study in a good American uni, but by that time I already had decided I'd go back to the Old Continent.