A noticeable feature of my workshops was the quiz structure. The main purpose of the quizzes, in my mind, was not to grade the students but to give them honest feedback about their current level of competence and test performance. I could give them hard problems in the section because they worked on them in groups, but on quizzes if they worked on the problems in groups they could mask their own weaknesses. So I chose to give hard-exam level quizzes on which they worked for half an hour individually, stopped and then had five minutes to “cheat”. They could ask each other anything but were not allowed to write down anything. Then, after drawing a line on their quiz paper, they could make corrections to their quiz that would count for credit.
The effect of this was to allow me (and the student) to see what their solo performance level was and what their performance was with a few hints. There is a significant difference between a student who is one little idea away from solving a problem and a student who is totally unprepared and this quiz structure distinguished the two. And the overall effect of the quizzes was to battle-harden the students, in some sense, so that they could accustom themselves to the stress of exams and exam difficulty in a safe environment.
– Eric Hsu 1998-04-01