High-mark questions are NOT generous! It’s just more high stakes,
meaning more chance of losing marks, which can cause grade loss, so it’s
not good. Need to view exams as minimizing mark loss. Marks are not
gifts; instead it’s conditional on avoiding failure, and the marks of a
question have nothing to do with whether you avoid failure or not. Thus
teachers are trying to induce sycophancy. Teachers want people to feel
grateful to the institution so people become more compliant. People
treating marks as gifts leads to overconfidence and sloppy
errors.
The marks of a question are simply its weight in the final calculation.
They have no inherent generosity. A 5-mark question requires 5 units of
correct output; if the output is incorrect, the marks are withheld. If
there are more questions, there are fewer marks per question, but the
system is designed around exam graders being able to do their job too -
basically means the benefit per unit cost is very low