Exam Format Idea

[stysebae]

Hi everyone,

I would like to suggest an idea for the evaluation of this course. Could we imagine to pass the exam collectively, as a main focus of this course is the community and the collaboration around an open source project?

However, it is not yet clear in my mind how it could be organized practically (with the whole class? in small groups of 5-6?), but if you agree with this general idea, we could define it more precisely later.

[ploum]

I welcome any idea and here are the requirements:

1. Every student should, at the end, receive a grade between 0 and 20. (mandatory by the rules)
2. I want a feeling of justice : more involvement and more understanding should mean more points (my own requirement)

[AlbertoSamele]

Interesting idea
Quick train of thoughts on the proposition:

• If done it this way, the contribution of each student could easily be tracked through GitHub or any other source control platform. I feel like this would take care the points 1. and 2. raised by @ploum
• More people = more time, it would become hard to coordinate a group (even if small!) in the "short" amount of time that we would normally have. Solution: extend the exam's time frame?
• If done by the whole class, there is a risk of the individual contributions being too fragmented and lack meaningfulness. Solution: the topics could be changed to be broader and more complex?
• Who chooses what each team member does? If the decision is to be made by the team itself, there is a fair amount of risk of some people being left with too little work to do, whether willingly or unwillingly, and this could negatively impact their evaluation. Solution: Maybe there could be a broad topic assigned the whole team / class, and each person is then assigned a specific thing to research on about that topic?
• In presence or online?
• Maybe the report could be written offline by the team members over the course of a few days, and then the various teams could all rejoin one day to have an in-person presentation. If the team ends up being comprised by the whole class, the presentation should not be done imo as it would be too messy
• If each person is only researching a specific aspect of a certain topic, it might be harder to assess and evaluate his actual understanding of the subject's topic as a whole (either for better or for worse)

[cdelzotti]

Quite an interesting idea I think, but I'm more for a multiple groups scheme (Maybe 4-5 people). From experience when a group is too large usually a few people end up speaking most of the time. I think it could be interesting to meet by groups talking about Open Source stuff. @ploum could participate in these conversations and give grades.

Of course, if someone is too shy or intimidated by a group discussion I guess he could still get a one-on-one with the teacher if he wants to.

[Clothildedevillenfagne]

It is a very good idea but we have to think about the fact that for shy people it is very difficult to interrupt a conversation to give their idea. For this reason we could give a time limit to each person to speak, but the inconvenience is that the time of the examination would be very long. I think the best solution would be to do small groups. But will we have to work together before the exam, prepare a topic?

Another question to raise would be the language in which the exam can be taken, if an Erasmus student for example does not understand the person in front of him it can cause problems.