No more need to study and cram.
Do you hate exams? Do you always feel like you’re trying to cram your brain full with just one more piece of knowledge that you’re going to forget as soon as you walk out of the exam room? You’re not alone!
Researchers at Stanford University and Google have developed an algorithm that can make exam taking unnecessary. Their artificial intelligence software can analyze the way you have performed on practice problems and get an idea of what you know and where you tend to go wrong.
Chris Piech at Stanford and his team had the software look at how over 1.4 million students performed on math problem sets on the Khan Academy online learning website and predict whether or not they would be able to correctly answer further questions. Using a neural network, they sorted the questions into different types depending on what math skills they were testing (square roots, slope of a graph, etc.), and the program was shown to be 85 percent accurate when looking at a few dozen previously answered questions.
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Tamara Sumner of the University of Colorado, Boulder told NewScientist that “[w]hat is particularly impressive is that this approach does not require significant human input to annotate training data or hand-craft models of expertise.” Researchers didn’t have to spend time classifying the problems or studying students’ answers to them.
Piech, who presented the results at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in Montreal, Canada, last month, said that it would be nice “if we could all afford a really expensive tutor who could spend time thinking about what you should learn.” He would like to see their software take on this role and not only predict whether a student could correctly answer a question, but also understand where he or she is going wrong and why.
“[I]f you pay enough attention to what a student did as they were learning, you wouldn’t need to have them sit down and do a test,” Piech said. A more advanced version of the software could make it possible to do away with exams altogether.
After all, the real purpose of an exam is to see what you have learned over a period of time, how you are improving, and where your skill level is at. Stressful and time-consuming situations don’t have to be part of the equation!
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