It sounds like a lot of you are not too surprised if this 30% chance materialises,” Dan replies. “You take precautions against it. The rain, if it co… - David Franklin

Now – those who got it right. On the count of three, I’d like you to sit down if you’d seen the question before. 1, 2, 3!” Everyone who was standing sits down. This gets a huge laugh. The students who got the answer wrong suddenly feel much better about their mistake: in a Harvard class, not a single person got it right unless they had seen it before.

For these ‘future leaders’ in the classroom, it is more important to understand the psychology of certainty. Often, we believe what we want to believe. Dan starts with an example of the 2016 Presidential Election in the United States. He asks the question: “Relative to what you expected to happen, how surprised were you when you learned that Trump had won the election?

With these issues in mind, Dan has a unique way of tying exams into the learning process. After attending a workshop run by the Nobel Prize winner Carl Wieman, he was converted to the idea of two-stage exams. The first stage of the exam is the same as any other. The second stage brings the students together in groups of four, and gives them all a subset of the questions they just answered in the first stage. The students are encouraged to discuss their answers in their groups, and they all submit a second version. Groups who manage to improve upon the students’ individual scores get a small boost in the final outcome.