Will I include the glossary in the exam?
A student writes:
Dear Dr. Patt,
You said you would provide us with all the material
we need to complete the exam. Does this include the
vocab list? Or is this something we should include
in our body of knowledge. In the practice exam you
provided, it asked us about "prefix property".
Luckily, (without looking at the vocab list) this
had a straightforward definition that one could guess
using context clues. However, there might
be others out there that are not so intuitively
obvious. What do you think?
<<name withheld to protect the student wondering what to put on 3 sheets
Nope. I will not be including the glossary in the exam. The purpose
of the glossary is to help you to not have to scavange through all the
recommended books, and perhaps some others, looking for the meaning
of a term or concept that I covered in class. Sort of a textbook,
without the well ordered arrangement of topics. So, to include that would
be like making the exam open book. If I ask you to differentiate a couple
of terms, I am not really interested in having you look them up in the
glossary, and barf what you find onto the page.
Of course that means you either memorize all the terms, or I pick terms
to ask you about that are central to what we have been talking about that
you have already internalized them. You say, "Luckily, (without looking
at the vocab list) this had a straightforward definition that one could
guess..." Luckily? ...or, just maybe I picked terms that a student paying
attention in class would have internalized by the time the quiz came along.
I hope you don't have to memorize any of the terms in that glossary. I also
hope that if you go through the list to refresh your understanding, you will
find that yes, you have internalized them. My job: ask you about terms in
such a way that if you memorized them, you would not be able to answer the
question.
Good luck tomorrow.
Yale Patt