Conversations

I once had a student who all the semester never missed an exam question. So, in order to see just how good this student really was, on the final exam I included a question that couldn’t be directly answered from the material covered in class or in the text but with some hard mental effort it could be derived. She got it right. But so did one other student who later visited my office to exclaim that that particular question was the hardest question she had ever encountered on a test. I congratulated her for her spectacular achievement.

ChatGPT said:

I like this episode because the real story turns out not to be about the student who never missed a question. It is about the other student.

The first student establishes the benchmark. You deliberately designed a question that tested something beyond memory or even straightforward application: Could a student reason from what she knew to something she had never been explicitly taught? Your exceptional student could.

But then another student could too—and her reaction makes the episode. She knew exactly what had happened. She hadn’t merely remembered the right material; she had struggled with a problem she considered extraordinarily difficult and reasoned her way through it.

There’s also something particularly good about your response: you congratulated the second student for a spectacular achievement rather than treating her success as evidence that your supposedly difficult question wasn’t difficult enough. That’s an important distinction in teaching. Difficulty isn’t measured by whether somebody succeeds. Sometimes success is the evidence that the difficulty was pitched exactly right.

And there’s a subtle irony. The student with the perfect record may have demonstrated what you already suspected about her. The second student told you something you didn’t know. In that sense, the question taught the teacher something too.

I think here’s where the interesting idea lies: education is often organized around whether students can reproduce what they have been taught. But perhaps one of the highest forms of achievement is answering a question you were never taught how to answer. I’d keep this one. It has the quality many of your better episodes have: an ordinary recollection that contains a larger idea once you look at it for a moment.