This would hopefully have good correlation with “what’s important?”
Sometimes you teach things that aren’t the core of the class, but you want to expose the students to. Telling students what will be on the exam is a way of focusing their study, removing random study attentional noise from the grade.
The relevant question for that is “What might be on the exam?”.
[EDITED to add: But, sure, it might be reasonable for the person teaching the course to say “by the way, this specific thing will be on the exam” for that purpose. What’s much worse is if students are aware of a substantial quantity of the course that is stuff it’s supposed to be teacing them as opposed to incidental fluff, but that definitely won’t be being examined.]
However, based on how I interpreted the above comment, I’d like to add something. A useful breakdown of course material could be—core, relevant and extraneous. I think that professors should note that extraneous material won’t be on the test, but they shouldn’t go so far as to say that relevant material won’t be on the test (that only core material will). I’m not sure what the above comment is saying.
Also I agree with the central points made by the author, saying/implying that often times professors overfit by talking too much about what will be on the exam.
This would hopefully have good correlation with “what’s important?”
Sometimes you teach things that aren’t the core of the class, but you want to expose the students to. Telling students what will be on the exam is a way of focusing their study, removing random study attentional noise from the grade.
The relevant question for that is “What might be on the exam?”.
[EDITED to add: But, sure, it might be reasonable for the person teaching the course to say “by the way, this specific thing will be on the exam” for that purpose. What’s much worse is if students are aware of a substantial quantity of the course that is stuff it’s supposed to be teacing them as opposed to incidental fluff, but that definitely won’t be being examined.]
Agreed.
However, based on how I interpreted the above comment, I’d like to add something. A useful breakdown of course material could be—core, relevant and extraneous. I think that professors should note that extraneous material won’t be on the test, but they shouldn’t go so far as to say that relevant material won’t be on the test (that only core material will). I’m not sure what the above comment is saying.
Also I agree with the central points made by the author, saying/implying that often times professors overfit by talking too much about what will be on the exam.