Setting Mature Exams!

I'm going to keep this post short and come straight to the point:

There are two ways of setting exam papers:

1) Give questions/problems of different levels of difficulty (easy, medium, difficult) and differentiate between students obtaining different grades accordingly.

2) Give difficult problems only, look at how far students are able to progress in solving them, use step-marking to assign a score, and differentiate between students obtaining different grades accordingly.

The second method is more sound because it prepares you for the real world - where everyone gets to face exactly the same challenges, everyone is required to solve difficult problems, and what's important is how far you are able to progress on those difficult problems. Absolutely no one comes to help you pass with easy problems 😊!

Students and teachers/professors both need to have the maturity to stick to difficult exams. Honest feedback on where one stands at any given time is the best strategy to prepare for success in the real world. It's far better to get low grades, even fail once in a while, in college and use the feedback to work harder, than get fluffy grades in college through easy exams and/or grade inflation and then struggle in the real world because you weren't prepared for the difficult stuff.

Note: I believe there are many Indian universities that have been leaning towards the first (not sound) method claiming alignment with Bloom's Taxonomy (further claiming that this is the "universally accepted model" in US universities - which is simply not true).

That's a flawed argument on two counts:

1. Bloom's taxonomy has itself been questioned. Here are two articles to get you started: i) Here's What's Wrong With Bloom's Taxonomy: A Deeper Learning Perspective (Opinion) and ii) Why It May Be Time to Dump Bloom's Taxonomy – TCEA TechNotes Blog.

2) We can certainly learn from different theories of knowledge, learning and teaching paradigms to raise our instruction standards - but when it's time to test our students for the real world, we need to do that without going soft on them to avoid sending underprepared graduates out and disadvantaging them in their careers.