{"id":7944,"date":"2026-05-20T09:38:26","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T08:38:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/?p=7944"},"modified":"2026-05-20T10:44:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T09:44:15","slug":"confidence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/?p=7944","title":{"rendered":"Confidence"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One reason to subject students to “exam conditions”<\/a> is that it offers them an opportunity to experience what they are capable of. Obviously, the conditions must be reasonable and the prompt must be relevant to the course. But this is easy to ensure by giving students, say, three hours to compose a thousand words of coherent prose that answers a question they have been equipped to understand. The mere fact that (or degree to which) they understand the question gives them an initial indication of their mastery of the subject. The knowledge needed to answer the question that be acquired through, well, study, including reading, attending lectures, participating in discussions with fellow students, both in and out of class, and carefully thinking things through. The ability to compose two and half pages of prose in two and a half hours can be developed through deliberate practice during the semester, one composed<\/a> moment<\/a> at a time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We typically give our students 12 to 16 weeks to master a subject in this way. Our goal should be to give them confidence when forming beliefs, expressing them, and writing them down. Of course, that confidence should come with a measure of humility, a sense of limits, an understanding of where their knowledge can be applied and, importantly, an openness to being wrong, grounded in a sense, also, of the limited consequences of error. That is, a course at university should equip students to think about a subject. And when they “sit for the exam”<\/a> they should enter a space and a time that is familiar to them, it should be an experience that they have, in various ways, subjected themselves to, a discipline they have cultivated, not for the purpose of the examination, but for its own sake, and which just happens to be required by the conditions of that moment. It is a situation that they have learned to respect and it is by passing through this humbling, which the sincere student should never experience as humiliation, that they will gain their confidence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One reason to subject students to “exam conditions” is that it offers them an opportunity to experience what they are capable of. Obviously, the conditions must be reasonable and the prompt must be relevant to the course. But this is easy to ensure by giving students, say, three hours to compose a thousand words of … Continue reading Confidence<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7944"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7944\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7946,"href":"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7944\/revisions\/7946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inframethodology.cbs.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}