Ice Cream: Essential Ingredients for Marking Exams

On a somewhat related note, I have been known to consume ice cream when marking exams and assigning grades because it puts me in a better mood. https://t.co/adQcI2mamD

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) August 22, 2020

Another Sign of the Apocalypse: Oxford has Cancelled its Conventional Exams

And we are definitely in the end of times: University of Oxford has cancelled its conventional exams this year and is replacing them with alternative forms of assessment.

Crib Notes on a Fingernail (with \latex Notation)

If I were going to put mathematical formulas on my fingernail as crib notes, I'd also use \latex notation. :)

My favorite is the use of " \; ", which would allow the cheating student being modeled by the picture to ensure legible symbol spacing when writing exam solutions.

When will academics get rid of tests, quizzes and exams?

Cheating at UK's top universities soars by 30%https://t.co/46R8UZHS6I pic.twitter.com/KUDg0RGGCX

— Republic of Math (@republicofmath) April 29, 2018

A 1999 Death Knell for Examination "Blue Books"

This article from 1999 is "awesome" in historical context.

First, it's interesting to read about the origin of blue books. Here is part of it:

Michele V. Cloonan has a theory. As chairwoman of UCLA's Department of Library and Information Science, she believes they evolved from the cheaply produced, paper-covered school books, almanacs and novels known as the bibliotheque bleue, or blue library, in 18th century France.

Before the invention of chlorine bleach in 1774 revolutionized paper production, white books had to be made from white rags. Blue books came from blue rags, often from the old clothes of sailors. Blue paper was the cheap stuff, used for the covers of throwaway books.

And, earlier in the article, we have this excerpt: "Well, those exam booklets, after torturing college students with writer's cramp for almost 150 years, may finally be on the way out.

They're being replaced, of course, by the floppy disk." (LOL!)

And another beauty: "Equipped with the same level of encryption security used by the Federal Reserve Bank, the software makes cheating impossible." (LOL!)

And, of course, the blue book also ought to have a snake on it...

(Tip of the cap to @mathematicsprof.)

In Phase Space, No One Can Hear You Scream.

My students have their ODE (ordinary differential equation) final tomorrow morning, and I’ve got the perfect shirt to wear for the occasion: "In phase space, no one can hear you scream." pic.twitter.com/79hoysL80A

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) December 14, 2017

Some "Awesome" Exam Answers

Here are several exam answers that are both awesome and "awesome". Well, many of them have both qualities. I have seen a few of these before, but some of them are new. Enjoy!

(Tip of the cap to Aubri Hendrick.)

Congratulations to Dr. Puck Rombach!

My Ph.D. student Puck Rombach passed her dissertation defense (aka "viva") today with "Minor Corrections". It appears to be a relatively large number of minor corrections, but they're all eminently doable and it won't take long to dot all of the i's and cross all of the t's. You can find some of Puck's work on my website, as we have coauthored several papers. Puck's thesis is on a mixture of topics from pure graph theory (equitable colorings in random graphs), networks (core-periphery structure and centralities), and a couple of things that interpolate between these two extremes. The Examiners were Colin McDiarmid (internal) on the pure side and Alex Arenas (external) on the applied side.

CONGRATULATIONS, Dr. Rombach!

"Literacy" Test

The test that is discussed in this article is one of the "literary" tests that was used by Louisiana to disenfranchise black voters in the 1960s. Apparently, one is supposed to get 100% of these questions correct in 10 minutes, and many of them are worded in ridiculously convoluted manners (and I am pretty sure that a couple of them are technically --- one might say "literally" --- impossible if one takes the phrasing literally). Ouch!

(Tip of the cap to Andrew Waugh.)

Flipping the Test

A very cool test was given in a Behavioral Ecology class at UCLA. It sounds like it was a great learning experience for the students, and of course this story makes me think of a certain exam I once took in Philosophy of Probability. In both situations, the lessons from the course itself played center stage in the exam-taking strategy.

(Tip of the cap to Jasvir Grewal.)

The Proverbial Thesis Committee

I love this issue of PhD Comics showing a stereotypical PhD thesis committee.

I'm not actually any one of these stereotypes, and I read every word of all theses I examine.

I hope to grow up to be a guru someday, though. Mmmmm... cookies.

(Tip of the cap to Mariano Beguerisse Díaz.)

Exam Survival Skills

Grrr.... I know it's the same story every year and in every institution, but damnit some of my students still aren't bloody listening to me!

Is it really that hard to grasp the following exam survival skill: Write down the damn thing that you're calculating so that partially correct things are easy to find for someone who is grading 300 exams and is therefore going to be bored, exhausted, looking at things quickly, and not going to excavate things. (Floating vector identities are much easier to find if, for example, what you're actually trying to do is indicated in some sort of clear fashion!)

Giving that advice once makes sense, but stubbornness on that particularly point is just really damn stupid. (When you go into the forest, you don't annoy the bears; and when you're taking an exam, you don't annoy the graders.) I'm not giving such advice just for shits and giggles. Sigh...

Congratulations to Dr. Anna Lewis!

My DPhil student Anna Lewis passed her viva "today" (the 13th --- her exam started around the same time as my flight to LA). Anna has done some excellent work on protein-protein interaction networks and unsurprisingly passed with flying colors. She just has to make a few phrasing tweaks and she'll be done.

I was trying to send my congratulatory e-mail to her, but sadly the e-mail server seems to be broken.

An Excellent Statistics Question

Now here's a truly excellent statistics question.

Those of you at Caltech who also took Alan Hájek's "Philosophy of Probability" course will know exactly what this question reminds me of. :)

Hajek's test was the best test ever when it comes to exam-taking paranoia: It was multiple choice. For each question, instead of picking a correct answer, we assigned a probability of correctness to each possibility, and our score on each question was determined by a formula that included a logarithm. Woe to anybody who assigned probability 0 of correctness to a choice that turned out to be correct, because then one got a grade of -infinity in the course. The result of this was to ask oneself nervously on every question: Am I truly sure that I am 100% confident that this answer isn't right? (Not only that, but exactly how confident am I on every possible answer for every question?)

[The scoring methodology was announced before the exam when I took the course, so I computed beforehand exactly what I should place instead of '0' on the questions in which I was maximally confident that some choice wasn't correct.]

(Tip of the cap to Tammy Porter and Danny Suiza.)

"Is it Examinable?"

Today I have spent most of my time writing up the solution set to one homework problem and writing up the problem sheets for the final three problem sheets in the brand new statistical mechanics course that I am teaching at Oxford this term.

I am not yet done writing up these problem sheets, so I really ought to continue work on that, but there is a major issue that arises both in lecture material (the actual lectures as well as the notes that go with them) and in coming up with problem sheets. These can be summarized neatly by the question in the title: Is it examinable?

First, let me say that I hate this question. I completely understand why Oxford students---including the best ones---ask this, because a module's end-of-year exam counts for everything in providing official recognition of what a student did or did not learn in a course. This sets up a whole swath of entirely understandable but rather artificial motivations for our students. Simply, they are in many instances judged almost exclusively on their exam results, so students will concentrate on working in order to maximize those results instead of working to maximize their learning of the material. These two things can coincide (and might even coincide a lot in some cases), but there are crucial situations in which they clash against each other---and this is especially true in advanced classes:

(1) Exam problems are supposed to take 45 minutes and are split into parts that are meant to help guide the student. Real problems don't work that way. The guidance can often be helpful for the learning, so that doesn't particularly bother me, and indeed I think it is desirable to add such things to homework problems as well. The 45-minute thing is a huge problem, though, because to learn most material in any reasonable fashion (and especially once one gets to the third and fourth years of the course), one needs to think about much more difficult problems. And then students understandably start asking about what can be tested and what can't be.

(2) As soon as one indicates that something is "not examinable", most students here (again, even the best ones) will typically not spend any more time trying to learn it, because the incentives they have been given by this system tell them that that is the optimal thing for them to do. So I can't blame them.

(3) Points (1) and (2) come into conflict a lot, as one wants to be reasonable (and, indeed, one has to be reasonable) regarding what can be asked on an exam, but there are things that one should learn from an advanced course in a certain subject---and those things are important for research, general education about problem-solving, and possibly even later classes.

(4) In my third-year and fourth-year courses (and beyond), I like to bring in some ideas from current research and to prepare my students for thinking about problems that have not been completely solved. In fact, at this stage of my students' education, I think that it is not just important but genuinely crucial to do this. One way to help do such things is to have some open-ended issues on some homework problems. This will help them not just for the material related to the course, but for other things, such as new applications of such material, modelling issues, and other really important things that many (and perhaps most) of these students need to learn for research, their future jobs, etc. Of course, if a student knows something is not examinable, the incentives at Oxford make it very difficult for such endeavors to work as intended. Sigh...

(5) For advanced courses, I would rather have examination via some kind of project or an open-ended exam (or both) and that would help get around these issues, but it's very difficult to set up such things here.

(6) I'm sure there are other things, and of course many of the things that I have mentioned above are deeply correlated with each other, but a fundamental observation remains: There are so many ways that examination can just get in the way of education---and the latter is obviously my goal when teaching a course!---and the inevitable "Is it examinable?" question that pops up so frequently around Oxford really underscores these conflicts.


OK, now I am going to stop ranting (at least temporarily) and get back to work.

MIT Entrance Exam from 1869-70

Here is MIT's entrance exam from 1869-70. How well would you have done?

(Tip of the cap to Tim Chartier.)

Quote of the Day: Oxford Don Edition

Today's quote is just priceless: "The verb in the sentence is the equal sign."

(To get the proper ambience, you have to imagine these words coming from an old Oxford professor with a stuffy British accent. I won't say who uttered this beauty, and the context---arguing grammatical structure on the wording of an exam---makes the whole thing even more awesome.)

Congratulations to the 08-09 mathematical modelling MSc students!

Today we finished the vivas (thesis defenses) and awarded the diplomas for the mathematical modelling and scientific computation MSc (Masters) students for 2008-2009. We also awarded 5 "distinctions" (out of 18 students). I was the advisor or co-advisor of 4 of the 18 students. Two of my students received distinction, and one of my students (Ben Franz) won the Nuclear Electric prize for best overall student in the cohort. It just goes to show how far one can get by working on a project on cow synchronization. (Naturally, my other 2 students also performed well.) When giving out the results, we didn't have any stories amusing incidents like we did last year. I couldn't find a blog entry about last year, so let me briefly recount the story here:

The students line up alphabetically to come into a room and formally be given their results one by one. There was one student (I don't remember whom) to whom we forgot to tell some germane piece of information so we had to call him back in. Then we realized we had forgotten to tell him something else, so we called him back in again. Between one or both of his appearances in the room, other students had gotten their results. Then after we had called him back in twice, we decided we should call him back in a third time a little bit later just to screw with him. That incident remains perhaps the funniest moment I've experienced at Oxford, and it's certainly one of my best memories here outside of things of the form 'quality time with good friends'.

Anyway, congratulations to all of the students who graduated today! (And that would be all 18 of the students, by the way. We didn't fail anybody this year.)

I think the best quote that might have come from this is one I heard about second-hand---namely, a rather distraught statement of "I just had to read 100 pages about hypergeometric functions!"

By the way, John Ockendon ("Ock") says I should give a shout out to our esteemed External Examiner from Limerick, who came to Oxford armed with the knowledge that I have strong opinions and tend to be very passionate about things. I'm glad I have established my reputation. Also, I was once again the strictest Examiner by far this year. So end my duties as an MSc Examiner. (Two more years as a Part C Examiner, and then all of my Examiner duties will be over for a very long time.)

On a somewhat unfortunate note, I am feeling extremely depressed at the moment, though there isn't any good reason for it. The chemicals in my body simply aren't cooperating, and I have managed to get into a depressive episode. I even saw it coming, but my efforts to avert it weren't successful.

The Sounds of Silence

Wow, it's been 5 days since I posted anything. That's an eternity of silence for me.

I don't have much to say at the moment, and the entries I plan to write are rather long ones (and I am way too tired to do that right now), so here's a summary of what I've done since I wrote the last entry on Friday night. I have been sleeping rather poorly for the last couple of weeks, so I've definitely been quite tired lately. The one nice thing about insomnia, however, is that I've put a lot of time in revising several papers. I have also spent some time reading a novel and have finally ordered a digital camera, though it looks like that won't arrive until after I return from Venice on the 4th of July. Anyway, here is what I have been doing:

Friday night: I saw Transformers 2.

Saturday: I finished small revisions on a just-accepted paper (my survey/review article on community detection). These were practically all adjustments that I decided for myself that I wanted to make, as the journal accepted the article 'as is' aside from minor changes in format to be consistent with the journal's requirements. I then worked on revising a draft of a different paper and then went to a friend's house for dinner. (I was my usual stubborn self about eating what she cooked, but the company was excellent. I knew all of the guests, which helps my social comfort level.) I read a bit as well, of course.

Sunday: I finished my pass through that paper and then did some other work and novel reading.

Monday: I worked a bit on my scholarpedia article on solitons, which ought to have been finished a while back. I also read a little of the dissertation I was supposed to read (and the novel, of course) and then started revising a draft of another paper that landed on my desk during the evening. I finally also started Okami---I had previously only gone through the introductory sequence.

Tuesday: I finished going through the previous paper and I made some revisions to yet another paper (though I didn't make a full pass through it but rather just attacked specific parts). I then played some Munchkin Quest and had a bit of trouble with an ancient, lightning-fast potted plant. I was at level 10 when the game ended, but I didn't quite win.

Today: Part 1 of Examiner MEGA-meeting. When we were not making decisions about the final grades of some of Oxford's finest students, we also went to lunch and dinner.

Tomorrow: Part 2 of Examiner MEGA-meeting. Then maybe I'll get back to working on another of the papers that I hope to submit imminently (if one is on my desk) or I'll get farther into the dissertation, which is on conformal field theory. At night is the SCR leavers party for some of my colleagues who are retiring or otherwise moving on. Last year's was quite fun---the speeches reminded me a bit of the ones at Lloyd House's beach trip.

Friday: Lots of meetings with students, which I backloaded onto Friday because I couldn't make the normal times today and tomorrow due to the MEGA-meeting. Then the plan is to have late lunch/early dinner with a friend on Friday and then perhaps to read, play Okami, or crash.

Saturday: I will need to get some stuff ready for Sunday's trip to Venice. I might also take a look at the slides for my talk and work on a paper. I'm guessing some Okami and reading will also be on the docket. Maybe I'll also go see Fermat's Room? Sleep would also be nice...

Sunday: I fly to Venice for the NetSci 09 conference. Sadly, my digital camera isn't slated to arrive until after my return.

(Approximate) Quote of the Day: Overheard in the Clarendon Building

This afternoon, I was in the reception hall for the big lecture theatre in the Clarendon Building just before Michael Berry's talk. One physics professor asked another if he was done with grading exams, and here was his approximate response: "I finished a few days ago. Since then, I've been working on bloody papers and acting smug."

Comment: Here, here!

Stay Tuned

Many years from now, when I am no longer employed by Oxford, I swear I should write a fucking tell-all book about how Examinations and assessment really seem to work. In the meantime, I hope you can be patient. (And maybe by the time I leave, I'll even figure things out enough to make my descriptions coherent.) Not that the book would be interesting, mind you, but at least it would satisfy my deeply-seeded need to rant when things infuriate me.