Thursday, October 12, 2017

Some follow up on today's class session

First - I don't know enough about how Moodle works from the student's perspective.  Did anyone start a quiz, then log out, and later logged into Moodle and finished the quiz?  If so, could you either email me or comment on this post about how that worked?  Did it save your work and let you continue from where you left off?  I would like to advise students on this for the next quiz, but I don't know this so I am hoping that one of you does.

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Next, on creativity and whether some people don't like it, after class it occurred to me that some of you may have watched SpongeBob as a kid and enjoyed it then.  (I know about SpongeBob via my kids.)  There is a particular episode on "imagination"  that illustrates some of the points I was trying to make in class today and it is done in an entertaining way.  You can watch this clip and amuse yourself with it. 

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On objective performance measures, like multiple choice exams, it turns out it is not as cut and dried as I made it sound in class.  In some cases there is ambiguity over whether student A did better on the test than student B.  There is no ambiguity if A got all the questions right that B got right and then got some additional questions right that B got wrong.  In this case A definitely performed better than B.  But when A got some questions right than B didn't get and B got some questions right that A didn't get, then there can be ambiguity as to who did better.  In particular you can construct examples where A gets the higher score when each question is worth the same number of points, because A got more questions right in total, but where B gets the higher score if hard questions get more points than easy questions, because B answered more hard questions correctly.  Further, even experts might disagree as to which questions are easy and which are hard.  Now, it seems, what we referred to as an objective test has elements of subjectivity to it, based on how the questions are labelled.

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