Comment Re:Just give unlimited testing time to everyone! (Score 1) 158
(I teach CS in college and grad school.)
You can't practically give unlimited time. An unproctored test will see massive cheating on the test. So if you want the output of the test to somewhat resemble the skill of the student, you need a proctor. And that proctor needs to go home eventually.
By the constraint of my university, most of my test are 75 minutes long. The way my tests are built, you probably should not need more than 45 minutes to answer everything. Yet, I always have students staying the entire time that is available.
During exam week, we have to give a full 150 minutes. Usually A students leave within 30-50 minutes. B students tend to leave within 40-60 minutes. C students will stay about an hour and a half. And D and F student will stay the entire time staring at their exam without having written anything on it for the last hour and a half; but still they will stay another 30 minute.
So unlimited testing time is just adding expenses and inconvenience without benefiting students at all.
For me, as an adult, I found that taking vitamin D, and magnesium threonate really helps with my memory and speed. I remember a CS teacher of mine said that for me, I was the opposite of most other students. I would be the first student to quickly grasp algorithms, and make connections and such, but I needed to improve on my code organization and syntax. One job I had a coworker that was the other way around, as he had a dual major in CS and English. We worked great together. I would come up with elegant ideas, and he would help organize them.