Saturday, November 21, 2009

What kind of question is that?

Steve Landsburg has a piece about marking university exams in America which makes for an interesting contrast with Mary Beard’s guides to marking or to coping with the entrance interview at the University of Cambridge.

Landsberg’s role, as an outside examiner, was to determine which of the graduating seniors was worthy of an honours degree in economics. There was a written exam, followed by personal interviews.

Five of the exam questions are posted on The Big Questions blog, translated from “the original economese to something approximating English.” A link is also provided to the questions in the original economese. The comparison between them is instructive.

I found myself pondering which version would pose the bigger challenge, which would test whether the student had truly grasped & absorbed the principles & purpose, as well as just mastering the techniques of economic analysis.

The jargon used in the exam gives the student a pretty strong steer towards which bit of the theory, which chapter of the textbook, is being examined – for example the reference to ‘indifference curves’ in the first question about Frieda, the root beer & the peanuts. The simple version requires the student to decide for themself which part(s) of the theory are relevant to the question.

For this is one of the hardest things to do once you leave college with your impressive scroll & grapple with real world problems. Faced with an undergraduate assignment in statistics, you knew it was a χ2 problem because that was what you had been studying that week. Even in finals you knew you were expected to choose only one of a limited range of options. In the real world it might be χ2, it might be some other technique, or it might be a problem whose solution requires a method so far unknown to statistical science, & there is no teacher handy to tell you which.

Except of course that these days there is always the magic of the web.



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