Colloquium: Exams with More Learning and Less Stress with a Computer-Based Testing Facility
ABSTRACT:
Exams are an important tool for summative assessment, whose utility has only grown with the advent of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, because they can be implemented in a trustworthy manner. But exams are generally not well liked by either students or faculty. Students find them stressful. For faculty (and their course staff), they represent a large administrative burden to write, proctor, and grade. This large burden means they are done infrequently in many classes, but this infrequent testing encourages cramming and leads to high test anxiety.
In this talk, I'll share (1) research on the benefits of frequent testing and "second-chance testing" (optional exam re-takes) on increased student learning and decreased test anxiety, (2) research on patterns of cheating on unproctored online assessments, and (3) how we've reduced the instructor workload at Illinois to implement frequent testing through our Computer-Based Testing Facility (CBTF). The CBTF is a collection of proctored computer la…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus room: Gates Center (CSE2), G20 | Amazon Auditorium. Accessibility Contact: dso@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Tuesday, February 10, 2026, 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM.
Gates Center (CSE2), G20 | Amazon Auditorium.
For more info visit www.cs.washington.edu. Presidents' Day
Holidays
No classes. Most University offices and buildings are closed. Check with specific offices to confirm.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Winter. Event Types: Academics.
Monday, February 16, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. Ph.D. Dissertation Defense Talk: Title TBA
Speaker: Bowei Chen, Advisors: Brian Curless, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, Steven Seitz, Supervisory Committee: Brian Curless (Chair), Steven M Seitz (Chair), Jeffrey A Bilmes (GSR, Electrical and Computer Engineering), Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, Abstract TBA.
Friday, February 27, 2026, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM.
Ph.D. Dissertation Defense Talk: Accelerating Collective Communication for Distributed Machine Learning
Speaker: Liangyu Zhao, Advisors: Arvind Krishnamurthy, Ratul Mahajan, Supervisory Committee: Arvind Krishnamurthy (Chair), Akshay Gadre (GSR, Electrical and Computer Engineering), Baris Kasikci, Ratul Mahajan, Abstract TBA.
Friday, March 6, 2026, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM.
Ph.D. Dissertation Defense Talk: Closing the Gap Between Seeing and Speakingin Vision-Language Models
Speaker: Jieyu Zhang, Advisors: Ranjay Krishna, Alexander J. Ratner, Supervisory Committee: Ranjay Krishna (Chair), Alexander J. Ratner (Chair), Zaid Harchaoui (GSR, Statistics), Ali Farhadi, Luke Zettlemoyer, Abstract TBA.
Monday, March 9, 2026, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM.
Instruction Ends - Winter 2026
Dates of Instruction
Instruction ends.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Winter. Event Types: Academics.
Friday, March 13, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. Final Examinations - Winter 2026
Dates of Instruction
Week of final examinations for winter quarter.
Event interval: Ongoing event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Winter. Event Types: Academics.
Saturday, March 14, 2026 – Friday, March 20, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. Quarter Break - Spring 2026
Dates of Instruction
Break between winter and spring quarters.
Event interval: Ongoing event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Spring. Event Types: Academics.
Saturday, March 21, 2026 – Sunday, March 29, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. Instruction Begins - Spring 2026
Dates of Instruction
Instruction begins.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Spring. Event Types: Academics.
Monday, March 30, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. Distinguished Lecture Series: Mike Dodds - Forthcoming
Abstract is forthcoming. Bio:
Mike Dodds joined Galois in 2017 as a Principal Scientist. He specializes in applying formal methods to systems engineering problems in areas such as cryptography, distributed protocols, cyber-physical systems, and hardware semantics. Much of Mike’s work has focused on building tools that can be used by non-expert developers as part of their regular engineering workflow.
Mike has led a range of projects at Galois, including our work on CN, a unified testing and verification tool for C code; Daedalus, a safe parsing language developed under the DARPA SafeDocs project; c2rust, a transpiler used by several popular Rust crates; and several verified cryptography projects using SAW and Cryptol, including a long-running collaboration with Amazon Web Services on core components of their AWS-LibCrypto library.
Mike received his PhD from the University of York, UK, in 2008, under the supervision of Dr. Detlef Plump. He then spent four years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus room: Gates Center (CSE2), G20 | Amazon Auditorium. Accessibility Contact: dso@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, April 16, 2026, 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM.
Gates Center (CSE2), G20 | Amazon Auditorium.
For more info visit www.cs.washington.edu.