State Exams or Continuous Assessment

karaokeman

My friends and I were discussing it during the week.

I personally think CA is better for ALL university courses.

You will never be asked to sit down in any job to plan and write an essay in the space of an hour.

And lets not forget if courses are CA, the examiners can really mark you on how well you've researched the topic, this is a lot more important than how much you can learn off and regurgitate in an exam where you will forget everything after its done.

So what do you all think? Personally I'd be content writing a 1,000 word assignment every single week, if I didn't have the stress of sitting down to take an exam at the end of semester.

Battered Mars Bar

Get a job hippy

plein de force

CA definitely
its a hell of a lot more work plus you really have to know the topic. if something is 100 percent examination students can get by on just basic knowledge without really having to study the topic in-depth by regurgitating learnt off material

Helix

a bit of both, more heavily weighted towards ca

RachaelVO

State Exams, I managed to do reasonably well in the LC despite the fact I barely lifted a book until about 2 weeks before it started...

CA I'd of been Fubared!

partyatmygaff

CA all the way.

Case in point: Looking at one module I did last year, I spent 2x the time I spent studying for the final exam worth 80% as I did for a report worth 10%.

You can study for some exams in a day or two and still do well. Trying to write a decent 20 page report in two days however is more or less impossible.

Fromthetrees

I think we should all get stoned off our heads until jesus welcomes us into the kingdom of heaven.

eth0

CA is a load of shoite

You have gobsh1tes doing not a tap of work and plagiarising reports. There are lads in 3rd year electronic engineering who can't do the slightest bit of programming at all and ask 4th years "can you give me a hand with this If statement" or pick up a potentiometer and ask "what's this? a temperature sensor?"

There are lads getting their marks from the CA sponging off other people's work and they'll do a few easy questions in the exam to push them over the 40 but really they havn't a clue in the world

Capt'n Midnight

karaokeman wrote: »

So what do you all think? Personally I'd be content writing a 1,000 word assignment every single week, if I didn't have the stress of sitting down to take an exam at the end of semester.

What sort of half-arsed course are you doing :eek:

You wouldn't survive on one with an average of over 1,000 words a week AND projects AND exams.

entropi

CA deserves credit though, as not every course is suited to purely theory based exams twice or thrice a year. My own course would be fairly practical, so me having to sit 2 and 3 hour long written exams at the end of the year is pure bollox, when the majority of my future learning will be 'on the job' and continuous.

megaten

Kids wouldn't have time to be kids with continuous assessment.

Doc Ruby

eth0 wrote: »

CA is a load of shoite

You have gobsh1tes doing not a tap of work and plagiarising reports. There are lads in 3rd year electronic engineering who can't do the slightest bit of programming at all and ask 4th years "can you give me a hand with this If statement" or pick up a potentiometer and ask "what's this? a temperature sensor?"

There are lads getting their marks from the CA sponging off other people's work and they'll do a few easy questions in the exam to push them over the 40 but really they havn't a clue in the world

That would seem to be less of a problem with CA than one with the means of checking for plagiarism. In this day and age it should be doable to have different questions randomly assigned to students for each exam, and if they do manage to find another copy, it shouldn't be too hard to figure that out. You could even tailor the questions to check for that stuff.

I'd have to weigh in on the side of CA, as long as its weaknesses were addressed.

Owen_S

Something other than a memory test.

bullets

eth0 wrote: »

CA is a load of shoite

You have gobsh1tes doing not a tap of work and plagiarising reports. There are lads in 3rd year electronic engineering who can't do the slightest bit of programming at all and ask 4th years "can you give me a hand with this If statement" or pick up a potentiometer and ask "what's this? a temperature sensor?"

There are lads getting their marks from the CA sponging off other people's work and they'll do a few easy questions in the exam to push them over the 40 but really they havn't a clue in the world

All that does not change when these same people leave college
and start working in Company's. Some spend decades bull****ting their
way through to retirement getting by with playing office politics, licking peoples arses and talking through their own.



~B

Jester252

Had a module that was 50-50 CA and end of year exam but if your CA and exam did not match up you will lose some of the CA marks. The exam was the project work and it was piss easy

IM0

if were talking about closing the door behind me. Id say CA, but if I was still there EOY exams all the way!

CA is a killer

Sea Filly

karaokeman wrote: »

And lets not forget if courses are CA, the examiners can really mark you on how well you've researched the topic, this is a lot more important than how much you can learn off and regurgitate in an exam where you will forget everything after its done.

If you learn the material properly, it's not regurgitation, it will stay in your head. That's been the case for me, anyway.

I also think exams teach a person organisational skills and reasoning, both in the lead-up to the exams and once doing them. Plus, problems papers most definitely are not regurgitating, as you have to use your noggin.

Anyway, is there any university course out there that DOESN'T have CA as part of the curriculum?

philologos

karaokeman wrote: »

My friends and I were discussing it during the week.

I personally think CA is better for ALL university courses.

You will never be asked to sit down in any job to plan and write an essay in the space of an hour.

And lets not forget if courses are CA, the examiners can really mark you on how well you've researched the topic, this is a lot more important than how much you can learn off and regurgitate in an exam where you will forget everything after its done.

So what do you all think? Personally I'd be content writing a 1,000 word assignment every single week, if I didn't have the stress of sitting down to take an exam at the end of semester.

It depends on the subject doesn't it?

While I was at university a few people questioned why we had to write code out in exams for computer science courses, or what the point of exams in computer science even was.

In reality, now that I've gone for a number of interviews for programming jobs, I know that it is really important to know in depth about the programming languages on the spot, and to know in depth about algorithms etc in the case that you are asked about them.

For the interview I took for my current role I was interviewed for about an hour and a half on C# and the .NET Framework (answering questions about how it works, and how one would do varying things with it), and about the nature of object orientation as well as about my experience in problem solving in previous situations. I've also been asked to do code puzzles in interviews on pen and paper.

In some cases that kind of quick on the spot knowledge is required in the real world. Just because you do something in the space of an hour doesn't of necessity mean that you'll forget it, or that it won't be useful to remember it going forward.

Wattle

Definitely CA. Once a year three hour exams are just a test of who's got the most bionic writing hand. Especially in the likes of English and History. No time to reason, interpret, pause and reflect. Just get it all down in a mad sweaty rush.

saa

I am finishing my degree year with no exams but mostly CA, thesis then a few projects but its not official until the end of year so I only have provisional grades, it makes sense but with needing to have stuff in every two weeks at the same time as all the other deadlines and projects was stressful it was more realistic, why do we expect young people to learn all year, cram at the end and then prove their memory in a few hours.

A school near me growing up had halloween, christmas, easter and summer exams and that seemed to work out really well, it would be great if the leaving cert was more like this, you study everything for one year and then go into blocks of focused study on a small number of subjects while still touching on the other subjects and getting used to juggling multiple projects going on at once.

languagenerd

I think it needs to be a bit of both, as long as they're done right. Both have their pros and cons, so why not mix them to get the best of both?

C.A. does mean that one bad day won't ruin your grades, that your overall effort is taken into account, that people don't cram (as much!) and that everything can be examined in due course. However, it's usually done with access to secondary sources, so the student mightn't know anything about the topic and write an essay in a day by compiling random information from a load of sources and promptly forget about the subject as soon as it's handed in.

Exams are time-limited, they make people nervous and people do cram for them and forget it all the next day. But, in some cases at least, they test how well people know the subject and how well they can use the info they've learned without any help from Google or from the library. Plus when exams are at the end of a year- or two-year-course, the student has had time to build up their ability (especially in subjects like English essay-writing, in languages and in Maths) rather than being assessed on it right from the start when they mightn't yet fully understand it.

To give an example:
I'm doing a language degree atm - every week we hand in translations, essays and summaries, which are done at home with dictionaries, grammar books and the internet at hand. A lot of work goes into them, but if I'm honest, they don't really show how well we know the language, because everything is looked up before handing them in. Language exams test how much of the language we actually know (or at least, how much of it we can remember when nervous :P). And while I don't like them, I can see the point of it.

On the other hand, we do other subjects, such as linguistics, literature, politics and history, for which we hand in long term papers. I don't think exams work as well for these, because people cram for them, people get nervous and go blank, and people try to spill everything they know onto the page in a limited amount of time. The essays are much better for showing how we can analyse the subject matter and there's more time to plan them properly.

TL;DR: Both have their pros and cons, and totally depend on the type of subject in question!

Salty

I think a mix of both is good, but leaning on the CA side! I used to get really dreadful exam-anxiety, to the point where I had panic attacks in 3 of my LC exams last year and completely ruined my results, and my chances at doing a course I had lusted after for 2 years.

I'm at the end of my first year of an Arts degree, and one of my subjects is English. A year ago I would have descended into a complete panic at having to sit this exam, which is what I did last year in the LC, but this year my mind was much more eased because I knew I had some of the work done before I went in. Also, having to do that work meant that any questions based on those modules, I knew very well because of the research and hours of work I had put into those essays. I had no problems doing the papers, and no panic or excessive worrying in the lead up to them!

So yeah, from personal experience, CA helps with long-term learning, but is also much better for students like myself who might have problems keeping calm enough to actually show their abilities in a limited exam time.

Pedant

I'm for neural brain scans.