Word: exam
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...review" quickly degenerates into a question-and-answer session where the students abandon any pretension of having paid attention all semester and the professor any hope that they did. The audience asks thinly disguised questions directly from the exam sheet, and more often then not, the professor responds with a neatly packaged answer--dashing the hopes of anyone who bothered to prepare that they haven't spent their time and effort in vain...
Even if such a session doesn't make a mockery of academic rigor, advance question exams reward sloth and punish initiative. If you've loyally gone to class, you can expect a crescendo of phone calls from distant acquaintances starting in reading period and culminating two days before the exam. After a day or two the pattern becomes recognizable...
This represents the essential flaw in giving out exams questions in advance. For too many students, the exam winds up testing how smart their friends are, and how well the other members of their study group prepared their assigned questions. Some final clubs even have lists of answer's on file...
...regular exam, help from friends can help make up for semester-long slacking. But even the most diligent tutoring cannot ensure that someone who has blown off a class will not slip up on a standard exam. On an advance question final, only the most actively misanthropic loner is ever in danger of getting a deserved low grade...
Considered in the abstract, giving out exam questions in advance doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Students have to write out answers to a series of essay questions, without considering the course material as a whole...