{"id":2661,"date":"2018-08-27T15:35:26","date_gmt":"2018-08-27T15:35:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/?p=2661"},"modified":"2018-08-27T16:04:45","modified_gmt":"2018-08-27T16:04:45","slug":"blank-equivalent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/?p=2661","title":{"rendered":"Blank-equivalent"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An idea that I got from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cs.york.ac.uk\/people\/colin\">Colin Runciman<\/a>. When marking student work, and you come across a bad answer, ask yourself &#8220;is this <em>blank-equivalent<\/em>, i.e. does this show the same level of insight into the problem as if the student had written nothing?&#8221;. In many cases, the answer is &#8220;no&#8221;. We frequently fail to use points on the marking scale that are between zero and pass, particularly when marking short answer questions in exams. Thinking about &#8220;blank equivalence&#8221; gives us a tool to decide which answers genuinely show insufficient knowledge or skill to be worth any marks, from those that are still fails, but nonetheless show some insight.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps the idea of &#8220;blank-equivalence&#8221; is valuable elsewhere. Perhaps a work of art is not good enough to be worthy of critical attention and positive aesthetic judgement&#8212;but, it is still not sufficiently devoid of skill and imagination to make the same impact on the world as doing nothing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An idea that I got from Colin Runciman. When marking student work, and you come across a bad answer, ask yourself &#8220;is this blank-equivalent, i.e. does this show the same level of insight into the problem as if the student had written nothing?&#8221;. In many cases, the answer is &#8220;no&#8221;. We frequently fail to use [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2661"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2661"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2670,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2661\/revisions\/2670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}