Cheating? Of course it is but….
At the University of California at Los Angeles, a student loaded his class notes into a handheld e-mail device and tried to read them during an exam; a classmate turned him in. At the journalism school at San Jose State University, students were caught using spell check on their laptops when part of the exam was designed to test their ability to spell.And at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, after students photographed test questions with their cellphone cameras, transmitted them to classmates outside the exam room and got the answers back in text messages, the university put in place a new proctoring system.
Yes, it’s cheating. I know it is and it’s wrong. But let’s look beyond that for a minute and abandon our stranglehood on traditional means of testing.
Let’s take an alternate look at the UofNevada students. Pretend that they’re in a world history class. One of the questions is "Who won the war of 1812?" They message the question to a friend, and a friend messages the answer back. Problem solved. I know that the intent was to get the student to memorize the answer, but is memorizing a fact really more important than being able to find the necessary answers under adverse conditions? Let’s say the quesiton was, "Why was the War of 1812 inevitiable?" That requires much more than a simple one word answer. Nobody is going to text in that one. They could text in a couple of conditions, but the student is still going to have to synthesize the information and compse an answer. And isn’t that what we want them to do?
When I was working on my B.A. at UofIowa, there were more than a few times that I had open book tests. I hated them. Why? Because without fail they were always much harder than ‘close book’ tests. They rarely asked easy questions. They required you to really think critically and prove your ideas with facts.
I’d love to see professors make more tests open book, open PDA, open Wikipedia and open cell phone. Let students use every resource available, but still make them prove that they understand what they’re talking about.
Which prepares them more realistically for the world they’re going to encounter when they leave school?
Leave a comment
Oooooo, open book tests are the worst Steve. But your point is well received; students, and teachers for that matter, should be taught to think critically and practice those skills on a weekly basis if not daily. Too often I’ll see my kids trying to “slide” through an assignment or project and I’ll have to get out one of my many graphic organizers to force them to write out their thoughts, support arguments, and/or slow down their work in order for reflection to occur.
Ben
5/31/2006
[...] Steve at teach42.com posted one example that speaks of the irrelevancy of traditional instruction and assessment methods. Memorization of facts should not be the goal of instruction in the 21st Century — our goal should be helping students to understand how to acquire, understand, and use information (sounds a bit like higher level Bloom’s doesn’t it?). [...]
Change Agency - Advocating a better education system for the 21st Century. » Promoting the New Models
6/4/2006
I believe this is cheating but the guy makes a good point i think that his thought should be put into use
Devin
8/28/2008
ya, cheating is bad, but if ur gonna talk about cheating, talk about the parents that donate all kinds of stuff to a school so that their kid can go there (high school and college.)
Amani
12/11/2008
In the first two paragraphs what’s being talked about is most definately cheating. I’d also like to say that I agree with open book tests because it gives you a good amount of details to use, and what you are responding to has to do with something that is right in front of your eyes.
Max
12/15/2008
The point of those “cheatable” questions is not merely to test our application of knowledge. While its true that in real life we won’t need to think that way, we will need to work hard; which is a necessary skill to answer those types of questions. I agree that open note/book tests are difficult, but I feel that it is rightfully so. In real life, we won’t be tested on a fact we remember, we will have to apply information sitting in front of us.
Ken
3/31/2009