Optimal Weighting for Exam Composition

A problem faced by many instructors is that of designing exams that accurately assess the abilities of the students. Typically these exams are prepared several days in advance, and generic question scores are used based on rough approximation of the question difficulty and length. For example, for a recent class taught by the author, there were 30 multiple choice questions worth 3 points, 15 true/false with explanation questions worth 4 points, and 5 analytical exercises worth 10 points. We describe a novel framework where algorithms from machine learning are used to modify the exam question weights in order to optimize the exam scores, using the overall class grade as a proxy for a student's true ability. We show that significant error reduction can be obtained by our approach over standard weighting schemes, and we make several new observations regarding the properties of the "good" and "bad" exam questions that can have impact on the design of improved future evaluation methods

Fictitious Play Outperforms Counterfactual Regret Minimization

We compare the performance of two popular algorithms, fictitious play and counterfactual regret minimization, in approximating Nash equilibrium in multiplayer games. Despite recent success of counterfactual regret minimization in multiplayer poker and conjectures of its superiority, we show that fictitious play leads to improved Nash equilibrium approximation over a variety of game classes and sizes.Comment: Fixed a bug in the 5-player CFR implementation from prior version and reran the 5-player experiment