I teach a lot of students, I help a lot of students, and I hear a lot of students worried that the exam will annihilate them because the homework assignments were so difficult. It’s understandable. It’s also like saying you’re scared surgery will kill you because you were hit with a hammer once and scalpels are also a kind of tool. Homework assignments and exams are both parts of the course, but they’re different experiences designed to do different things.
An exam is a huge shared test designed to test everyone’s understanding of the subject in extremely limited circumstances. You don’t have any reference material, you don’t have much time, and much more importantly the university doesn’t have enough staff or money to deeply delve into your true mastery of the subject. If your exam has scantron sheets it’s because computers can crunch through ten thousand multiple choice questions in a second, give everyone a rough grade, and then everyone can go home.
Think about what that means for the exam from the point of view of the professors running it, not the students taking it. The exam has to be fairly fair. Surprising students with an unexpectedly difficult question guarantees a huge number of complaints, demands for remarking, or even having to scale the final result. I’m not saying courses can’t do it — courses can do whatever they want, and sometimes a professor wants to teach a lesson (because that’s their job!) — but in general end of year tests tend to be fair summaries of the entire course. They’re tests of what you should know, not MENSA-mastermind challenges of what a genius could work out.
Homework assignments are different. Homework assignments assume you have all the textbooks, all the internet, and all the time in the world. Usually you only have one or two of those three, and you definitely don’t have infinite time (you have other courses, and a life as well!). But the homework doesn’t care about that.
Homework isn’t really out to test you. There are marks, but only because most students simply wouldn’t do it if there weren’t. (Most students forget why they came to college in the first place.) Homework’s job is to make you think about things. That’s why there are so many problems which don’t have easy examples in the notes or textbook: if there were, students could just copy those across instead of thinking about the material.
The harder the question, the more it makes students think about the material, and the more attention students pay to that course. Which is what the professor wants! If you had a hard course and an easy one, the easy one gets much less time — and the easy course’s professor doesn’t want that. Hard questions keep students concentrating on the course all year long. The exam can only test them at the end. Remember what each is for and you’ll find them much more manageable.
An exam is a huge shared test designed to test everyone’s understanding of the subject in extremely limited circumstances. You don’t have any reference material, you don’t have much time, and much more importantly the university doesn’t have enough staff or money to deeply delve into your true mastery of the subject. If your exam has scantron sheets it’s because computers can crunch through ten thousand multiple choice questions in a second, give everyone a rough grade, and then everyone can go home.
Think about what that means for the exam from the point of view of the professors running it, not the students taking it. The exam has to be fairly fair. Surprising students with an unexpectedly difficult question guarantees a huge number of complaints, demands for remarking, or even having to scale the final result. I’m not saying courses can’t do it — courses can do whatever they want, and sometimes a professor wants to teach a lesson (because that’s their job!) — but in general end of year tests tend to be fair summaries of the entire course. They’re tests of what you should know, not MENSA-mastermind challenges of what a genius could work out.
Homework assignments are different. Homework assignments assume you have all the textbooks, all the internet, and all the time in the world. Usually you only have one or two of those three, and you definitely don’t have infinite time (you have other courses, and a life as well!). But the homework doesn’t care about that.
The harder the question, the more it makes students think about the material.
Homework isn’t really out to test you. There are marks, but only because most students simply wouldn’t do it if there weren’t. (Most students forget why they came to college in the first place.) Homework’s job is to make you think about things. That’s why there are so many problems which don’t have easy examples in the notes or textbook: if there were, students could just copy those across instead of thinking about the material.
The harder the question, the more it makes students think about the material, and the more attention students pay to that course. Which is what the professor wants! If you had a hard course and an easy one, the easy one gets much less time — and the easy course’s professor doesn’t want that. Hard questions keep students concentrating on the course all year long. The exam can only test them at the end. Remember what each is for and you’ll find them much more manageable.
