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Education and outreach

Education and outreach

Why now is the time to change bad exam habits

28 Apr 2021
Taken from the April 2021 issue of Physics World where it appeared under the headline "Changing bad exam habits".

Paolo Elias says that the COVID-19 pandemic offers the chance to revamp how we assess physics students at school and college

School pupils sit an exam
An open book A move towards creative problem-solving in examinations could help alleviate some of the stress faced by school and college students when taking more traditional tests. (Courtesy: Shutterstock/Monkey Business Images)

Physics is a versatile subject and the problem-solving skills you learn during a degree can be used in countless other career paths. During the first week of my physics undergraduate course at the University of Nottingham, UK, we were told that to become a good physicist we must use mathematical tools to approach a problem creatively and find a solution through critical thinking. Learning content for the sake of memorization for an exam was not encouraged.

While this problem-solving approach was central to my degree, I began to wonder why this was not assessed at an earlier age. If we are to become adept critical thinkers, then why should we only be evaluated on our ability to saturate our brains with equations and explanations, only to regurgitate them over a two-hour exam? Should we not instead train physics students at school to rely on problem-solving skills that have been developed over months and years? If nothing else, it would better prepare future science and technology students for the style of assessment they will face at university.

Cheat-sheet exams would allow for a greater focus on the application of content and problem solving rather than the recall of information

At a time when libraries of information can be carried around in a pocket, it seems counterproductive to test students on their ability to commit so much content to memory, not to mention the added anxiety of having to do so. Yet in the UK, school physics exams stubbornly remain “closed book”, with students given no resources beyond what is provided on the paper. With this year’s exams cancelled due to the global COVID-19 pandemic and replaced by teacher assessments, there may never be a better time to re-evaluate our assessment systems nationwide to better foster critical thinking and problem solving in students.

Semi-open book?

I have never particularly struggled with the “standard” style of examination, probably helped by years of script learning for my performing-arts hobby. Yet as a result of the pandemic, my third-year summer exams were changed to “open book” to accommodate students working from home. An open-book exam is where students are given any number of resources, including textbooks, handwritten notes or even Internet access. This has been shown to have several advantages, including reducing test anxiety and allowing students to utilize more critical and creative thinking when equipped with as many facts as possible.

However, despite these advantages, I found that my engagement with the content and level of preparation for the exam was reduced. This could have been because the open-book exam simply consisted of the same questions as the closed-book exam would have had. But if the questions had been specifically geared towards open-book examination, it might have made me apply, rather than recall, key physical concepts. Indeed, numerous studies have found that students tend to prepare less for open-book exams and as a result spend considerable time in the exam looking up answers in the resources provided. While open-book assessments benefit students’ mental health and lend themselves to more critical thinking-based questions, they are not without their flaws.

If we are to revamp how we test students in the physical sciences, the solution may come from taking the best attributes from both exam styles in the form of the open-notebook – or so-called “cheat sheet” –exam. Here, students can prepare a limited number of notes – usually a side of A4 paper or similar – to bring into the exam. There are several advantages in a move to cheat-sheet exams. For example, student engagement and preparation would remain at the current levels or improve as students are forced to fully review the content, organize the information and summarize the key concepts on a single sheet. There would be reduced test anxiety, again owing to the student’s ability to prepare for the aspects that most challenged them, and, crucially, cheat-sheet exams would allow for a greater focus on the application of content and problem solving rather than the recall of information. This would reward those who have put time into developing the key attributes of a good physicist.

Creative thinking

Closed-book exams can alleviate the stress of memorization for some students, but a self-prepared cheat-sheet would allow students to spend less time agonizing over basic descriptions of phenomena. Instead, they would be rewarded for probing creative uses of mathematical tools and considering their application to new challenges.

Given the upheaval of education during the COVID-19 pandemic, there can be no better time than now to change how we test physics students in schools and a move to cheat-sheet-style exams could be part of that solution. If we train our budding physicists to develop those critical thinking skills from a younger age, we may all see the benefits as they move onto university in the years to come.

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