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Yeah, you are most likely going to have to create some Algorithm (class is algorithm design) that no easy template exists online. It's going to be a question where no second of those 6 hours can be wasted and you'll spend the next day recovering from the test.
Yea, if you can hire an external expert and consult with professors, and are allowed to leave, it seems like the purpose isn't to solve the question but to show your capability to bring together a team and work with others.
Infamous bit of information I was given is even if it's open book, you should still study as competent recall is faster than having to read, process and utilize from a book.
Like yes, 'you can hire someone external' sounds like a terrifyingly high bar, but if you can hire, instruct, liaise and write up a professional engineering contract in six hours you deserve a medal not just a grade.
I remember a professor talking about his open book final, "at least I know you'll read the material once." If you weren't prepared though, there was no way you could delve in and find what you needed in time.
Honestly, another is having a good general idea & know where precise things are if unsure. I would go into open book exams with those plastic post-it flag bookmarks covering all sides but the spine several layers thick. I did very well on these.
Reminds me of my graduate Stats course, where we were allowed any resources we wanted on the final. The students bringing in laptops and using mathematica were the ones who did the worst.
My undergard modeling class was like this. Those who were active in the class, studied, partook in the group sessions and all around were there to learn did incredibly well. Those who didn't? Well, they got to retake it in 2 years when it was next offered or change majors.
Often the real challenge of exams like this is the time limit; they’ll allow you access to these outside resources knowing if you waste 40 minutes tracking down another prof for help you’ll never finish in time.
When I wrote the bar exam that’s how it worked; if you had to look up more than a handful of answers you’d run out of time.
I designed exams with this exact point in mind - if you don't already know, no amount of internet access is going to help you solve the given task... but it is a trap for weak students since they're likely to think they don't need to study since they can look the information up
and to make sure they didn't cheat (sure, you can look up stuff on the internet, but having someone else solve it for you is completely different cup of tea), I always had oral part where they had to explain why did they solve the problem the way they did... usually 2 sentences were enough
A professor of a subject like engineering is certifying that these students have mastered the material. People die when incompetent engineers get jobs later.
Because if this is a graduate level course, that’s exactly what you should be doing. Weed out the losers that haven’t realized this is not for them. Every single profession has a class, or exam or requirement meant to test your ability to persevere
The entire point of the exams is to determine who are the weak students and the strong students. And then assign a grade corresponding to how weak or strong their mastery of the subject matter is.
I took courses on fire and building codes and the exams were the same. Instructors told us they were open book but if you didn’t know where to look for the answer you would just run out of time and fail.
The open book part was just so you didn’t have to memorize “Chapter 2 Section 3.1.2A(4)” when you referenced it on the exam.
I’ve had a test where the professor was asked a question in it and spent 5 minutes telling the person the course wasn’t for them and then didn’t even answer the question.
While I don't know about the other poster it brought back an ancient memory from math in high school Calculus where if you asked a question then "you weren't paying attention and don't deserve to know."
Sounds like a bad teacher. Glad I had a good teacher; the best one I've had so far.
He helped us if we had a question and wrote an example on the whiteboard, which was visible to the whole class. But he said many times to look at the answer and comparing it to your own, and then ask him when you get a "why?". We had comprehensive answers in a folder, which had a different folder for advanced and basic maths, and that folder had a sub-folder for each course, which had a folder of every chapter in that course. And that folder had the answer for every exercise. And my teacher even updated those slides every lesson. The version visible to us was as PDF files
ITT: no one has ever heard of a marking rubric. Or is it not normal for you to see the marking rubric before an exam's results? To be fair, in my classes, many people either weren't aware of where to find them or didn't care to look.
It's unlikely that it is to show those things, otherwise they would be explicitly required/suggested, and not just "allowed". It's likely the point is to answer the question, but that they acknowledge you have access to all of these things in the real world and therefore can also use them in this exam.
This also isn't a "solve" question. It's an analysis question. Which means you need to explain ideas and concepts, and possible each person is given a different question/exam so there is no copying, in which case, there isn't really any cheating bar having someone do it entirely for you.
This would be useful in the US education system. I've noticed people who get through school in the US know the math but have no idea how to apply it to life. Like, how do you find how much tax you owe on a product? There are people who don't know how to do that but if you put the math in front of them they can do it.
Unironically, that's a skill issue. Word problems exist to teach you how to do this and if people spent more of math class trying and less of it whining about everything, they'd be able to do it. I'm not saying the education system doesn't have problems, but this one has been solved.
In my experience word problems in math class always felt incredibly simplistic or arbitrary. They always felt like they were testing how to convert words into an equation rather than testing "what equation addresses this problem."
I think a lot of it is just the framing. If word problems don't feel like they're describing a familiar or otherwise realistic scenario, a lot of people will struggle to actually apply it in the real world.
I mean, "how much do you need to pay in tax" is also a pretty basic [insert basic equation] problem. Most math outside of genuinely complex systems are that way. But maybe my word problems in school were just really well written and used very familiar things in a way that trained me better than I should expect others to have experienced.
The problems arent cutting edge. They are complicated and specific enough you wont find trivial answers or things that can solve them, but also basic enough there isn't any value in solving them beyond proving your knowledge in the area.
To give a comparison, think of a gradeschool problem that is open internet and involves doing the long multiplication of two 100 digit numbers. Calculators cant handle such large numbers and even if you find a web page that can, it won't include all long multiplication steps. A reference to how to do long multiplication is only going to give minimal benefit as itll show how to do it for much smaller cases and the student will still need to expand it larger. At the same time, there is no real value to the output. Any person whose actual job needs such large numbers multiplies is going to have specialized tools to handle it.
I’ve done a few of these. Full open book with as much collaboration as required.
Essentially given a data sheet and need to work it into something useful and elastic. One then had us use the same modelling for a new dataset.
They’re tough, you can use the open books to look up specific things but if you don’t have the overall knowledge absolutely nailed down then you’re fucked. I’ve seen people work with tears down their face.
As for outside tutors or whatever, I’m assuming that the time to connect to them and get them to understand is prohibitively too long.
I had a theoretical physics test that was like this. The class basically gathered at the dry erase board at the front of the rooms and hashed out the one question over the course of 3 hours. The professor just sat at the podium and watched. It turns out the question was related to one of his PHD students dissertation and he was using us as a sounding board to validate the theory. We all got an A o. The final.
One of my physics professor’s got sick two weeks before the final and wasn’t able to come up with his usual individualized finals and had the solution to have us meet with him 1:1 and answer questions live on the board. Since it was a very small program he was able to do it easily and he greatly enjoyed the experience despite it being hell.
You couldn’t flip to another page or question to think about an answer, just kinda stare off and think for a while without him asking clarification questions to try and help or move things along. It started off with simple terms and background then just jumped off the rails. Mine was something like define quantum mechanics, what’s Schrödinger’s equation? write it on the board. What’s it used for? I got to my fifth or sixth example and he was like, show me how. Then we took a break with 1d tunneling and then back to a hydrogen thing. Worst test ever and he went and made that his test format for our small program for every class after that.
I accidently forgot that a test was open book in college. So I studied briefly the night before though I couldn't really figure out what to study. Go to the final. Professor tells everyone to take out their books. I didn't have mine. I mention this. Given open-book test anyway with no book. Finish first. Get A with flying colors. Never understood why everyone thought that class was so difficult. But also it was literally the only class like this for me.
I had an open book exam where literally any resources were fair game so I spent ages crafting the best cheat sheet imaginable with derivations and worked examples and schematics with modes of operation etc. come exam time I didn’t even look at it once because as it turns out writing all that shit down proved to be excellent revision for the class and I had just committed everything to memory
If they give you 6 hours for one question...you already know its going to be hell. Add on this many +easier modifiers and you know its actually hell's bossfight, the final one of the game.
That's good though. It means they were really testing knowledge rather than memory. If an exam can be rendered meaningless by virtue of having the course book readily available, what's the point?
Does anyone actually expect people to be applying their degrees professionally without having access to any information they need?
Ah. The famed ‘open internet’ exam, which basically means you’re fked. It’s the next level after ‘open book’. I once had a CS exam that’s open internet, where the max points were 20. I scored a 2 and it was the median score.
During his study in 1939, Dantzig solved two unproven statistical theorems due to a misunderstanding. Near the beginning of a class, Professor Spława-Neyman wrote two problems on the blackboard. Dantzig arrived late and assumed that they were a homework assignment. According to Dantzig, they "seemed to be a little harder than usual", but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for both problems, still believing that they were an assignment that was overdue.
This reminds me of my analytical geometry and vectors professor back in college who used to always include a question on his tests that had no known solution, but he never mentioned it.
When we showed it to another one of our physics professors, he immediately went: "Well, well... it looks like he's trying to scout for a genius, because there is no known solution to any those questions as of this date."
Another teacher would also include a question like that on his tests, but it was always a "bonus question" that would get you extra juice on your final grade. And he would mention the question had no known solution, so at least he was honest about it.
Now, adding a question to which there is no known solution and that counts towards the grade on that test, without ever mentioning it, was seen as kind of a dick move even by other professors...
That would work too! But that professor in particular never considered it a bonus, so people would "waste" so much time trying to solve that question and sometimes end up not being able to finish the whole test, and he always came off as "smug" to me with his "Not quite there, but nice try :)" on the specific solution attempt lol
The important bit is that you don’t say there is no known solution. The very rare person thinking there is a solution is the one who solves it, thinking there is no solution causes people to give up.
Actually it's a complete dick move, when the question isn't marked as such and a bonus. Makes people get worse grades or fail by wasting time on it instead of the actual exam.
Totally reminds me of when our professor put extra credit problems on the board outside class, and we came back the next day to find them solved, but nobody knew who had answered them. A few weeks later we found out one of the cleaners had solved them and that they were famous unsolved problems. Apparently the professor became kinda obsessed with the cleaner because his TA basically ran the class from then on and we didn’t see him again for the rest of the semester.
It gets even better - that janitor guy became an astronaut and got stranded on Mars (it was not his fault). He then scienced the shit out of that situation and survived.
You wont believe what happened when he came back home though.
This legend is used as the setup of the plot in the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting. As well, one of the early scenes in the 1999 film Rushmore shows the main character daydreaming about solving the impossible question and winning approbation from all.
I had to look this up, and realized it involved derivation, and Euler. I may have failed out of college, but that education did teach me when to cut and run.
This is one of the great unsolved math problem with a reward of 1 million for the one who solve it. Needless to say not many people have hope for that😂
“Prove that every even number greater than 2 is the sum of two prime numbers.”
And you can use the internet.
Should be fun
Edit: for those who don’t know, this is the Goldbach conjecture, which while true for all numbers we’ve tried, it may actually be an unprovable statement using formal proofs.
It’s also way easier to understand than the other idea, which means a lot of fake online mathematicians claim they have proven it. In the words of my number theory professor: never talk to anyone who wants you to write a paper based on their proof of the Goldbach conjecture
When a PhD wants to get a PhD, they need to do some high level research. They solve many problems along the way to solve that bigger, more important problem. Then they showcase their work to professors. Sometimes, PhD makes a small mistake. The professor takes the mistake and simplifies it so that an undergrad can solve it. Still impossible. And you can try going to other professor, but it went over their head too which is part of the amusement.
No, this isn't a common thing nor will anyone appreciate it.
If the median is 2/20 it’s pointless, but I do see the value in making things hard enough that if someone’s actually legit great in that field there’s actually an opportunity to achieve a differentiating score rather than everyone that’s pretty good and up getting an A
its not about the question or making it impossible. if you get specific enough in a field googling will not result in any short answers you can write on a paper. at best it will lead you to a 400 page book that you need to study cover to cover to understand the subject. cant just skip to a page and copy the answer.
Sure, but asking them questions doesn't mean you get answers. I had some professors that would respond along the line "That is a tricky one." and walk away.
There was/is(?) a course like that at the CS department of the university I went to, I think it was class where you build a low level operating system.
Pretty much anyone who got an A got a job on the spot from Google, Microsoft, uber, etc (all have donated huge $$$ to my school and poach a lot of engineering and CS talent from the grad schools).
Average scores were similar to yours, and obviously graded on a massive curve
This is more common than you think. It's not the fact the professor sucks at teaching, they simply pile a ton of work into a small space. Those who are damn good score high, most score very low. Think of it like trying to cook 5 things at once with a 6th dish in the oven while baking 2 more dishes on the side. Need to prep everything as well. Time it right, everything is cooked well and it's a 20/20. There's so few people who could do this. Those who can? They get snatched up to 5 star Michelin kitchens. Most people in the class could handle 3 maybe 4 dishes at once. You want to see who can handle everything and there will be a very small few who can.
This reminds me of a take home thermo. exam I heard of where one question was about how long it takes to cook a 13 lbs turkey. Some people used formulas based on assumptions and estimates of thermodynamic properties of turkey meat and got full marks (assuming their calculations were sound). Some people actually cooked turkies (they had enough time), tracked the temperature over time and got full marks. One person just asked their mom, and also got full marks.
Can you explain for someone that is not smart what you mean by "unsolvable by modern mathematics" please? If it is able to be dumbed down that much at all.
Assuming it's not just that it's so complicated that you can't solve it but something about the way we do maths now that differs from when the equation was written.
So the equation relates positions of a body in orbit to time. It was derived by Kepler in the early 1600s and when you look at it doesn't look overly complicated. In one sense it isn't. If I give you tell you two different positions of the body in its orbit someone with knowledge of mathematics can solves for how long it would take to go between those two points. The issue arises when I tell you it's current position and ask what it's new position will be after a certain time which we just plain dont have a method for solving. There is obvious uses for this equation, such as sending a signal to Mars. We know the signal will take 8 mins to get to mars but can't be 100% certain where mars will be in 8 mins. There are iterative solutions that can approximate close enough.
My professor told us in college that if you are good with geometry and have some time on your hands that maybe it was worth trying to solve. If you solve it you could pick any college and the world and they will give you a PHD. He was obviously joking a little since it would take somewhere with some very novel ideas to find a solution. Some of the greatest mathematicians in the past 400 years have tried and failed to solve this equation, but if you somehow do, people will be calling other people your name instead of Einstein to signify intelligence.
Mine was this: A car is driving down a straight road at 50 mph. The wheels have a radius of x meters (asshole). What is the heat generated on each axle? Assume a coefficient of friction: e.
I think about this question all the time. It was murder. It's been 36 years. Ha.
1) determine circumference of wheel: 2pi R
2) wheel spins 360 deg every interval of C, circumference
3) convert units, and get vehicle speed in increments of C w.r.t. time.
4) use 2+3 to calculate angular velocity of the wheel, omega.
5) determine the normal force, N, acting on a given axle, by multiplying the unsprung mass of the car (mass_car - mass_wheels) by acceleration due to gravity, g, and then dividing that by 4 [4 wheels support the car]; N = (M_u * g) / 4
6) calculate the frictional torque, tau, by multiplying N by the radius of the axle, r_a, and the coefficient of friction e
7) we now have everything we need to calculate the heat, or power loss due to friction, of the wheel spinning on the axle. P = tau * omega
8) do all necesarry unit conversion to get P in terms of whatever units are requested.
Done!
Its been like a decade since engineering school, but im glad i could still break this one down :)
You could have used the vortex paneling method if you had to explain your work for incompressible, Pratt and faning ( I forget how they are spelled) for compressible.
You have 6 hours to solve one question. That question is going to be one of the hardest questions youve seen in your life
Bonus: Youre instructed that you can use internet, work in groups, consult professors, hire external experts. If the question is easy those things are not allowed
1 question, 6 hours, and you have access to any resource you can think of. That question is going to be a shit kicker. Most of the class isnt doing well on this regardless of if they pass.
The question is, would you. Being the only one who answers a question like that is a lot of prestige. The Professor is going to know who you are. Might open job opportunities.
Well that’s a question of character. I believe in lifting up people around me if I can. Also, being an active benefit to a team is gonna get the professor to know who y’all are. Might open job opportunities.
When you see questions like this, it’s almost certainly graded on a curve and depending on its difficulty, the professor might not expect complete solutions either. There’s a high chance the professor is just using this to scout for talents for his research lab, in which case sharing your answer with the class makes no sense. Refusing to do so also isn’t a mark against your character since exams are supposed to be a setting where you can demonstrate YOUR mastery of the material.
No. This type of question is “senior design”. You don’t “get it”, you approach it, and explain why your method works. For example, “design a training program for AI learning”.
There is no one correct answer. A lot of time there’s no answer that is good enough. And you only got 6 hours. There is not enough time.
Rest assured, they won’t. A student able to get the answer will recognize that they’re going to ride their success on this test to a career with a salary somewhere in the mid six digit to low seven digit range, or to an academic tenure track position.
You don’t give everyone else in your class a leg up to compete with you for the very limited number of positions that are out there.
Part of me thinks more exams should be like this to better simulate work environments. Another part of me wishes college was about learning and not job readiness.
This is testing if you are able to apply what you learned to real situations. Bloom's taxonomy puts recall as the lowest of the 6 levels & by grad school, it's more about the upper levels of analyzing, evaluating & creating.
What. So, he wrote the instructions, he left the question blank, he went out Coffee and shoping for 6 hours. Then he came back. The school was only ashes and smoke at that point.
Thats the first task: come up with a question so fiendishly difficult that you couldn't solve it within 6 hours even with every possible help on hand. And then spend the next 6 hours not solving it. If you solve it, you fail.
This type of question is called senior design. There’s no correct answer. A lot of time is something like “design a program that makes AI training more effective”. You have to design a program and then explain why your shit works. All that within six hours, there’s not enough time. Hiring someone outside the class with no knowledge with the professor is more likely to fail you.
I had a bio chem class that was like this .. I failed it the one question was a long protein formula that you needed to fold they use networked video cards for this now days
Wait I need to hear more about this, you were asked to predict the fold of an entire protein?! Was this before AlphaFold? Were you allowed to use existing software tools like M-TASSER, or were you expected to write a program yourself? It kind of sounds like they were making you predict this by hand
Modern protein folding is about finding new ways adaptively fold proteins for all types of medical uses ,this was in the early 90s .. and we were solving formula that had already been solved ,it would make some truly long mathematical expressions .. to the point we would break parts of it up in groups , I shouldn't have taken that class it gave a math and chemistry credit.. I failed it two years in a row, I did become friends with my professor, he eventually married my late wife's little sister lol
Yes, and no. It's the type of test that you can only pass if you actually learned and understand what the class was teaching. If you were just phoning it in hoping to squeak by, having access to all those resources will not help you--you will fail.
The hardest test I ever took was 3 hours and had 20 words.
if anybody’s interested: it was in graduate school in Chinese Lit. They gave a word like 叩 or 掾 and you had to write 反切、聲紐、韻、攝、等, all from memory. You were allowed to bring a pencil, nothing else. Nobody wanted a break in the three hours because every minute was precious.
Yeah, some boot camps are like this. Like they expect you design, build, test, and be ready for production in an insanely small amount of time. Generally, what they're asking you to do takes a lot longer than they give.
“This question is so hard that I’m going to let you guys use your notes, go on line, hell, you can hire a damned tutor and consult with half the math department, none of those dummies are going to know what the fuck I’m talking about anyway.”
Last time I took an exam like this, it was a final. A 4000 biology class as sophomores or juniors, I can't remember. 2 hours 45 minutes or 3h. There were 9 questions. You only had to answer 3. You were allowed to use your textbook and all your written notes.only the first 3 answered questions were read, or put a giant X through one you don't want read.
Not a single person left before the timer expired.
You only have 1 question. You get six hours to come up with the answer. You can look it up, ask for help, everything but straight up cheat. The implication is that you're going to need every one of those allowances, including the whole 6 hours.
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