I think that’s somewhat less of a worry with math and other subjects. You can plagiarize an English paper, but a student who has not been paying attention in calculus isn’t going to suddenly get it with Wikipedia. Although I suppose paying their math major roommate could be possible. If the class has homework covering a similar range, I’d think a take home would be similar in scope. Also, math problems are easier for a professor to change between semesters without rewriting the text part/word problems.
Ugh
140 minutes at a crack works out to what, two ~60 minute cycles with a 15-20 minute break? On non-test days this breaks out into two sessions.
If you must, test first. But any post-test time is basically a waste. You could do an immediate post-test-mortem key session, which is marginally useless than trying to put new material into a post-test brain.
That, or give fewer, longer, higher stake tests.
~20 year veteran mathematics instructor, full and adjunct
And be careful about smart phones, especially if your tests don’t mutate faster than influenza, and do vary the versions between sections. This will help to detect and document cheating.
When you give a test, your goal shouldn’t be to help them do well. Your goal should be to assess how well they actually understand the material. If a student can’t retain the information for an hour between the end of cramming and the start of when the test is handed out, then that student doesn’t have a good understanding of the material, and shouldn’t get a good grade.
Chronos, you’re technically right, but cerberus’s post #22 illustrates that you cannot assume that poor memory correlates with being a poor student. Well, it’s not even poor memory, the human brain cannot generally retain things well for a two hour stretch without breaks, and it cannot retain information if there are interruptions. There are many levels of subtlety between “give every student a smiley face and give the students with a zero an A minus minus” and “fail all those miserable bastards if they didn’t pick up the sentence you mumbled in the second week.”
Pretty much all information is temporary anyway. How long must you retain something before it counts as “truly understanding” it? Until the day you die? In that case we should all go to college and then be given our exams when we are 60 or 70 years old to test if we “truly understood” the material.
If cramming and regurgitating on a test is how you pass it, then so be it. Frankly I don’t care if you learned the material for just the 60 minutes on the exam or for the rest of your life. My job as a teacher was to assess whether you were able to demonstrate an understanding of the material covered in class. It wasn’t my job to make sure you “truly understood” it forever and ever and ever and frankly that kind of thinking is way too idealistic.
Test first! Lecture second. 