Oxford history course employs take-home exam to help women

[Ryika]

That's the kind of thing that makes me think that a pseudo-"gender-segregated" school system has some merit. Essentially, have two types of schools that focus on the strengths that the genders tend to have, allow students to choose the opposite school if they think that they'll do better there, and there we go. Of course there are a lot of problems with that concept, but it would certainly fix the issue of differences in strengths and weaknesses between the genders. Currently it seems that boys are very much disadvantaged during the earlier years, and that at the high-level stuff, girls have problems keeping up.

 

[Zkribbler]

Making all tests be "take home" tests will make a lot of these programs easier.

I don't know why the article is calling it a "take-home test;" it's a friggin' term paper.

I always found them much harder and more time consuming than a final exam.

 

[warpus]

I don't know why the article is calling it a "take-home test;" it's a friggin' term paper.

I always found them much harder and more time consuming than a final exam.

Oh, it's a term paper? That's completely different then. How could you even do a term paper sitting in-class, with a 2 hour time limit?

 

[Gen.Mannerheim]

Oh, it's a term paper? That's completely different then. How could you even do a term paper sitting in-class, with a 2 hour time limit?

My Chinese History professor was fond of assigning in-class multi hour papers, what an annoying semester that was...

 

[warpus]

My Chinese History professor was fond of assigning in-class multi hour papers, what an annoying semester that was...

I mean, I've taken history classes in university, and the exam was often 2 or 3 long essay-like questions that require you to fill out a page or 2 with text.

But that's very different from a term paper, which is usually much longer than that, and requires a lot more effort and research.

 

[Gen.Mannerheim]

I mean, I've taken history classes in university, and the exam was often 2 or 3 long essay-like questions that require you to fill out a page or 2 with text.

But that's very different from a term paper, which is usually much longer than that, and requires a lot more effort and research.

Exactly. The course was on Chinese Military History, and twice during the course we were expected to bring in our research materials for our topic (mine was the Chinese defense of Shanghai) and write between 5-10 researched pages during the course of 3-4 hours. Afterwords she reviewed them (less for grammar than for thesis, argument, & use of sources), then return them to us to incorporate into our main research papers. I get the logic behind what she was trying to do, by GOD did it make for some cramped writing hands...

 

[dutchfire]

It just won't work very well for things like mathematics or computer science, for instance. At least the exams I had to sit through in university were testing my ability to think critically on the spot and to apply what I have learned to questions I have never seen before. That was always a big portion of exams. If I was asked to answer these questions at home, it would be a lot lot easier and would not really be testing my understanding of the material. In those disciplines "take home" exams focus on completely different dynamics.

I did a few "take home" exams in Mathematics and they were fine. The advantage is that you can ask much more difficult questions in a take home exam, since people have more time. Rigorous proofs are also a bit easier to do that way, since you avoid getting stuck in details down a wrong path. Oral exams were usual for the more rigorous courses though, this allows the examinator to decide how rigorous all of the details have to be done. Oral exams are labour intensive for the teacher though, so they can only be done for smaller courses.
Most of my programming courses had hand-in exercises only. But they were mostly rather applied, elective courses, where that makes sense. I appreciate that there's a difference between programming and computer science here.

 

[warpus]

I did a few "take home" exams in Mathematics and they were fine. The advantage is that you can ask much more difficult questions in a take home exam, since people have more time. Rigorous proofs are also a bit easier to do that way, since you avoid getting stuck in details down a wrong path. Oral exams were usual for the more rigorous courses though, this allows the examinator to decide how rigorous all of the details have to be done. Oral exams are labour intensive for the teacher though, so they can only be done for smaller courses.
Most of my programming courses had hand-in exercises only. But they were mostly rather applied, elective courses, where that makes sense. I appreciate that there's a difference between programming and computer science here.

See, I think it fully depends on the type and level of math.

I went to a math heavy university. The exams were tough. A common way of testing us would be to show us a type of question we have never seen before. So for example, say that we studied a 2-dimensional form of an equation and ways to apply it to a specific set of data, in class. The exam might then ask us to expand that to a 3-dimensional way of thinking and apply it to a problem on the fly, given a limited amount of time, and no way to check that the equations we (come up with on the spot) are valid or not.

Or the question might ask us to solve a type of problem that we have never seen before by merging two concepts we did study. The student's task was to reason through the problem and attempt to merge the two concepts so that they work together, bypassing any issues that you might run into along the way.

Or you might be asked to prove a theorem you have never seen before.

Generally these types of questions made up a big chunk of our exams, because they were designed to test us on our understanding of the material, and the "big picture implications". It's one thing to memorize formulas and theorems, anybody can do that. It's another to be given a type of question you have never seen before in your life, and to try to apply what you do know about relevant material and to come up with a method for solving that type of question.

If we were given such exams as take-home, we could easily sit there for hours and decipher what sort of approaches would work for these questions. We have never seen them before, but the internet probably has. So that aspect of testing a student and his/her knowledge of the material would be lost in this case.

Mind you not all math classes were like that. Some in first year were purely of the "You memorize the formulas and we'll give you questions that match up to them" variety. But yeah, a big chunk of the math and compsci I took would just not work if all of our exams were "take home". Take-home tests would never be able to test that certain "do you understand this material or are you just memorizing formulas?" aspect of a student's understanding of the material. Like I said I can see it working with History, English, etc. but a lot of the type of math I took? It just wouldn't work.

 

[dutchfire]

Our math was so difficult that you couldn't find the answer on the internet. (To be honest, math stackexchange has gotten a lot better over the years.) That would be an issue for first year calculus or linear algebra though. Those wouldn't typically be done as a take home exactly for that reason.

All serious academic mathematics research takes more than 3 hours to perform even the smallest serious task, and usually requires both actual work time and time to contemplate, so I'm not sure why you'd want to cram your exam into a 3 hour format.

 

[warpus]

Our math was so difficult that you couldn't find the answer on the internet. (To be honest, math stackexchange has gotten a lot better over the years.) That would be an issue for first year calculus or linear algebra though. Those wouldn't typically be done as a take home exactly for that reason.

All serious academic mathematics research takes more than 3 hours to perform even the smallest serious task, and usually requires both actual work time and time to contemplate, so I'm not sure why you'd want to cram your exam into a 3 hour format.

I mean it was pretty brutal, and we all hated it, but it did seem to do a good job of identifying those students who were perhaps good at memorizing formulas but not so good at understanding the basics of the material and how to apply it to new concepts. You had to think "on your feet" during those exams and so people who couldn't do that would eventually drop out of the program.

That's probably why they did it, to weed all those students out. And I can't think of a good way to do that sort of test on a take-home exam. It's easy enough to do well on take-home assignments and essays. Just put in enough time, have good connections with other students in class, go to the TA sessions, and do some research online.. A whole bunch of my classmates were amazing at assignments. They did them in groups, they could do research, see how problems are best approached, and slowly but surely arrive at an essay or assignment that will get them a good mark. But then they write one of those exams I described above, and.. nope, you need other skills to do well on one of those exams, and that's exactly what those exams were designed to test - how well you are able to think on your feet and reason through types of problems you have never seen before.

 

[Yeekim]

I would be more worried of people cheating by letting others do a significant amount of work on the paper or in the extreme case, paying a ghost writer to do it. A take-home exams introduces unfairness because of the different amount of resources students have at their disposal.

Ditto.

 

[Camikaze]

The implication from the OP seems to be that the course is somehow being 'dumbed down' by switching to take home exams. That makes a massive assumption that a take home exam is easier than a timed/fixed 2-3 hour exam, which I can only assume must derive from never having done both types of exams in a humanities context, or not being very good at studying (and thus thinking that the more usual style of exam is harder than it is). The more logical assumption would be that the thought process behind this change is "this would make for a better and tougher exam, and as a bonus, there also happens to be research which suggests it'll clear up the gender gap".

 

[Valka D'Ur]

A history course at Oxford University has replaced one of its exams with a take-home version, in an effort to improve the marks of female students:

http://www.news18.com/news/world/ox...-to-help-women-get-better-grades-1429299.html



Is it just me, or is this kind of insulting to women? Does equality of outcome need to be a goal of ours? Are take-home exams better than timed exams?

If the implication is that women in general can't handle timed, in-class (or in-exam hall) tests, then yeah, it's a bit insulting. Some women handle that just fine. Some don't. I'd have a very hard time now, since I can't physically hold a pen and write for long periods of time anymore, and my handwriting is much worse than it was 25-30ish years ago when I was still taking college courses.

If the problem is that some women in class have children and are unable to dedicate as much time to the class, or something similar, then the article didn't touch on that. Or did it, and I missed it? Most university classes I've been in have had exceptions for assignments and exams for students who were in special circumstances. ADHD type students were given extra time, some students were able to write the exam at different times, etc.

IMO this is just a case of the university being too lazy to try to accommodate the people affected, and are instead implementing a solution that's easier to implement because it affects all students in the class instead of focusing on those with the problem.

Possibly, but we're talking about undergraduates - the number of those with children is pretty negligible, and certainly not close to 5%. The story also says that the paper 'can be done at home', not that it needs to be. If you find it easier to do it the old-fashioned way, it sounds like you will still be able to, and that will probably be the norm. Not to mention that there will be other exams at the end of the course, so this is more an experiment in ratios than a change in how things are done generally.

Children aren't the only reason why some female students might have difficulty keeping the same exam schedules as everyone else.

Jobs, caring for elderly parents/grandparents, some other situation that means they can't do the exam at the same time as everyone else, or in the same way...

When I was in the B.Ed. program in college, not one of my advisors told me about arranging my classes to have an open morning or afternoon so I could do my practicum hours. So it turned out that I had to sandwich them around my final exams, over a 2-week period in December. That was a godawful nightmare, and if any of my instructors had offered me a take-home option, I'd have jumped at it.

I would be more worried of people cheating by letting others do a significant amount of work on the paper or in the extreme case, paying a ghost writer to do it. A take-home exams introduces unfairness because of the different amount of resources students have at their disposal.

It's possible that some people do cheat. I certainly noticed which of my typing clients were doing just the bare minimum to get by, and sometimes they'd ask me things like, "Do I have a thesis statement? If I don't, could you make one up for me?"

Well, no. Of course not. I wouldn't even make up a title for them if one was lacking. I did phone them and explain the situation - that their paper had to have a title page, with a title and their name on it (someone actually asked why - and I had to explain that their name had to be on the assignment so the instructor would know who to give the grade to), and that I'd put any title on it they said - but it had to be their title.

One of my regulars had a take-home anthropology exam. So he asked me to type it for him, and at some point in the paper, I saw a mistake. It was a pretty basic one, and I had to stop and think if I was going to do anything about it. It's one thing to fix an absent-minded mistake such as someone saying the French Revolution started in 1993 rather than 1793, but this was an exam.

So I compromised. I knew the mistake was there, and I knew the student's work well enough to know that it was one of those errors he wouldn't normally have made. I decided to phone him, explain the situation, and ask if he wanted me to change anything - but it would have to be his changes, not mine - or if he just wanted to leave it as is.

This resulted in a conversation in which I read him the paragraphs that were problematic, he thought about it, saw where he'd made the mistake, and he decided how he wanted to fix it. So then he dictated the changes he wanted made, and that's what I typed.

Was that ethical? Strictly speaking, no. It was an exam, and he'd had an advantage the other students in his class didn't have: a typist who had taken physical anthropology, knew where he'd messed up, and was willing to make the effort to give him a chance to fix it.

Was it good for customer relations? Yep. When this student went off to university, he mailed me his papers to type, instead of getting someone local to do them.


The closest thing I ever had to a take-home exam was in my physical geography course. I'd blanked on the essay question about the water cycle. For some reason I just couldn't remember it, so I put down what I did remember, and it was awful.

When we got the exams back, my mark was just shy of an A. The instructor told me, "I know you can do better with that question" (we'd had it as part of the lab assignments and I'd gotten an A for it that time). Then he told me to take it home, redo it, and bring it back first thing in the morning. If I did it right, he'd bump my grade up to an A.

Well, you'd better believe I worked on that essay question - diagram and written part. I turned it in on time, and got my A.

 

[Narz]

Essentially, have two types of schools that focus on the strengths that the genders tend to have, allow students to choose the opposite school if they think that they'll do better there, and there we go.

That sounds nice, I went to an all boys boarding school for a year and semi-segregated schools for the rest of my high school years. In your scenerio I would choose the mostly-girls school in a minute

 

[warpus]

The implication from the OP seems to be that the course is somehow being 'dumbed down' by switching to take home exams. That makes a massive assumption that a take home exam is easier than a timed/fixed 2-3 hour exam, which I can only assume must derive from never having done both types of exams in a humanities context

I suppose perhaps I do fall into this camp, because I do not come from a Humanities background..

But I mean, isn't it natural to assume that an exam you get to take home and have 24 hours to complete is going to be easier than one you'll only have 2 hours to complete, without the possibility any outside help?

I've done both types of exams, and the "sit in class and have proctors walk around and make sure nobody's cheating and keep an eye out on things" type of exam was always much more difficult than the "take it home and do it at your own pace and grab a beer too if you want and do it in your pajamas" type of exam

I think the most important thing to get out of my posts in this thread (if there is one) is that while the take home test might not necessarily be less difficult, you will not be able to test the same dynamics you can with a sit-in exam. So one aspect of testing the student is thrown right out the window when you do a take-home exam.

Mind you this is coming from someone who was taking Humanities courses as electives only. These were my "easy" courses

 

[Zelig]

"Easy" or "difficult" don't really mean anything in this context. Exam grades only really matter relative to other students. You basically have three inputs for exams: time (from when you receive it, to when it's due), preparedness, and smartness. For in class exams, the only thing you control is preparedness. For take-home exams you control both time and preparedness.

As for which is better, well, in general, I would consider "take home exams" (which sounds like a fancy term for coursework) to be better as frankly, they are more likely to represent the situation you're in outside of academia. I mean, I'm a civil engineer (I guess it could be different for other careers...), if I need to know something about the subject, I have piles of reference books and the entire internet to look it up in, I have colleagues to discuss the subject with, and I'm never on a 90 minute deadline. The conditions in which the exams I took at university occurred have never applied to me during my career, nor has the way I prepared for the exams (grinding through past exam papers). On the other hand, writing a technical report on some work I've done is at least somewhat similar to some of the coursework I did at university.

Despite all these resources, professionals still manage to turn in miserable work.

 

[metatron]

A take-home examination is only easier if it is testing the same things that a timed in-class examination tests.

As per not just the article but the actual quoted internal documents the intention is just that.

"it was proposed that a takeout exam with questions similar to that in a timed exam should be implemented"

The implication from the OP seems to be that the course is somehow being 'dumbed down' by switching to take home exams. That makes a massive assumption that a take home exam is easier than a timed/fixed 2-3 hour exam, which I can only assume must derive from never having done both types of exams in a humanities context, or not being very good at studying (and thus thinking that the more usual style of exam is harder than it is). The more logical assumption would be that the thought process behind this change is "this would make for a better and tougher exam, and as a bonus, there also happens to be research which suggests it'll clear up the gender gap".

Actually the more "logical" path would be to take the article (and its fluffy tone) at its word, assume good faith and consequently some congruence between the frame of mind of the author and that of the reponsible parties at Oxford and accept that the allmost explicitly stated goal that women/girls are goddamnit supposed to come out ahead like everywhere else in education is in fact the overriding motivation and that anything our good friend Cami is making up from pure supposition (and in direct contradiction to further information in the actual article) is little more than backwards justification for partisanship's sake.

The implication from the OP seems to be that the course is somehow being 'dumbed down' by switching to take home exams. That makes a massive assumption that a take home exam is easier than a timed/fixed 2-3 hour exam,

No.

The starting post doesn't say that in any way shape or form.
The starting post assumes that a take home test is - for whatever reason - more advantagous for women, because that's what the freakin article says.

 

[Commodore]

My kneejerk reaction to this was that this is ridiculous since they are willing to do this for women and not men. After thinking about it though, my opinion is more "meh, who cares?" As long as the exam is still fulfilling its purpose of having students demonstrate their mastery of the subject matter, then there's no issue.

 

[El_Machinae]

It seems like when boys are doing worse, we place the blame on the boys. When girls are doing worse, we place the blame on the system. Is that an accurate assessment?

Nearly all scientific evidence points to boys and girls having basically similar levels of net intelligence. The intra-sex variance is higher than the inter-sex variance. And university courses are a broad enough subject where we're actually looking for net competence. If there is a huge difference in test outcomes, then it's a problem with the test. University tests aren't IQ tests.

One colleague of mine specifically designed his tests for maximum retention. He would regularly peruse the literature, and would note what types of tests resulted in test-takers being able to remember and use the information in two to three years. And so, the grading would sort students on current competence, but would also maximally create future competence. The idea being that people are paying for both an education and a certification.

 

[Yeekim]

Well, there is an obvious reason why exams are traditionally taken in a timed and controlled environment under supervision - i.e. to minimize cheating.
However, since the course under question is history, rather than e.g. engineering or medicine, I guess that risk would be more acceptable to general society.
Hence, meh.