Exams and Death

If you think about exams as the high stakes equivalent in a student’s career as being equivalent to death in games (as I have, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this right? – and looking back through my backlog of starred posts, I think Mark was thinking like this as well when he was thinking like Will Richardson), take a look at Marty O’Hare’s article in The Escapist and replace games with courses and exams with fights or other things that can cause death.

One of the problems that we all know that students face is that high risk exams can literally make of break a life. For some instances, this level of risk is acceptable, but in many it is not. Med school would be one of those instances with an acceptable level of hig risk exam tolerance (or is it? should there be a ramping up of exam situations that will build skills for the students as opposed to topic end killers?), but I would think that Somecourse 101 would not be. I’m not saying this because I want to make things easier for students, on the contrary, I think that if you assess properly, you can groom better students as you don’t end up weeding out those that merely had a bad day on the final exam.

Marty proposes these five suggestions for the games:

1. The player should never be expected to save except when ending his play session.
2. The player should receive significant long-lasting penalties much more frequently than he should die. Small permanent penalties should be frequent and essentially unavoidable (but seldom imposed due to pure chance), to accustom the player to weathering setbacks rather than undoing them.
3. The player should never die (or receive another substantial penalty) for anything other than an elected risk. That means it should be possible for a player to see when he is getting in over his head, there should almost always be a way to get out of a potentially deadly situation, and random chance should have little influence in dying.
4. Accordingly, it should be possible for combat to end some way other than every enemy or every party member dying. Retreat should be reintroduced as a viable strategic option with more upside than reloading. Furthermore, the player (and the enemy) should be able to negotiate or surrender when doing so is plausible.
5. Failure should create possibilities rather than merely foreclose them.

I’m thinking that the analogues for exams could be similar:

1. Students should never have exams of any worth pop up on them
2. Small exams that are worth less marks (but with the opportunity for bonus to recover marks) should be the norm
3. There should never be a pass/fail situation that is forced on the student – find bubble students and work with them to get them up to speed
4. See point 2 for bonus marks
5. See point 3 for other ways to get up to speed

Any thoughts?