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Laptop Exams?
Orion316 asks: "One of the classes I am in just had an open laptop, open Internet examination with us e-mailing the answers to the prof. This is an open laptop examination. You may bring your laptop to the examination with its wireless modem. During the examination you may search for and read materials from the course Web site or from other sites on the Internet. I was wondering what thoughts people have on this." This is one of the cooler things I've heard of in a while. It was only a matter of time before the new technology started to affect us in ways we might not have predicted before. Who would have thought that the spiral notebook would ever become obsolete when it came to schooling?
Everything weeds out the poor, what is your point?
We were laughing. "Ha! I've got this test wired! I know everything about non-ideal equations of state now, and when to use which one!"
Meanwhile I suppose the professors were laughing at us ... homework doesn't make people study, but tell them they can bring in one sheet of paper for an exam, and they will knock themselves out preparing that sheet!
I agree with you mostly when you talk about technology giving us tools for teaching. More useful tools are definitely cool, although I personally don't think it's worthwhile usually to watch videos in class (it's usually a way for the teacher to get through the day hung over) especially when I have a TV and vcr at home.
However with the following:
A century ago, wealthy families would spend huge sums so tutors could pay individual attention to a student. Now we can envision a day when all students get individual attention, from computerized teaching systems that have instant access to information unobtainable scant years ago.
Do you really think that there can be anything better than a tutor? I mean one human passing information directly to another, this has been the basic form of education since... forever. I mean who cares if the teacher is looking at you through some Virtual Classroom Network from 2000 miles away, but it should be a REAL teacher who can act as a REAL tutor, not a database of information! Sheyat that's what the library is for. Not saying we couldn't have better internet libraries, but we don't want to replace human teachers!
Rohit
I think this is a good idea. In real life, if you have trouble doing a certain job (or an assignment) you search the internet for more information. So why not do the same thing during an examn? This is the biggest problem with exams, they only test the capability to learn, not the capability to use certain information sources (like the internet) to fit your needs.
The beginning of the digitally poor and rich comes upon us at last. Those with faster, better Laptops and Internet access have an unfair advantage. Don't tell me the poor students will have to make do dragging in their Dreamcast to surf the net to level the playing field.
Now if the school gave away Laptops to its students, that would be a different story
you always pay for it somewhere. Either you shell out the $3000 for a laptop or they raise tuition by $4000.
-red
I'd say the school is gettting a head start on
changing the carriculum to reflect what the
students will be facing in the near future.
The majority of jobs will be small groups... not
individuals... so you better learn how to work
effectively in a small group now.
Go figure
Umm...I'm pretty sure the artical in question wasn't referring to Rose-Hulman. I know, because our laptops don't have wireless modems, and in general, we aren't allowed on the network/internet during tests. We don't even use the damn things much except for maple or word processing.
an open grits exam would kick ass.
Jackasses use computers?
I dunno about you folks... but I'm getting tired
of seeing the results of letting
immature 3 year olds post on slashdot.
I'm in favor of banning AC's by IP address... except
that the majority of them use dynamic ip's...
what can you do. *shrug*
It's like a a story told about an intro engineering class in which the final exam was one question: You've got a 5 pound pot roast, how long, and at what temp do you have to cook it, for the center to be 150 degrees.
One student assumed that pot roast, being meat, was mostly water, and solved the problem by figuring out the answer for a similar volume of water. He got a C.
One student bought several pot roasts and followed the experimentalists method, and cooked each of them, averaging out the temperatures and times. He got a B.
A third student called his mother, said "Mom, how long do I have to cook a 5 pound pot roast?" and got his answer that way. He got an A.
America has a huge divide in wealth, and already many poorer people can't go to college because of cost (the uk has just gone down the same road). You already have a level of advantage between people who can afford to just study for 4 years and those who are forced to work their way through, this would surely just increase this gap even further - think how many hours working at Burger King it'd take to buy a new laptop
Pardon me, but your statement regarding some folks not being able to afford college in the US is, uh, whacked.
In the US, people can join the military if they want cash for school. They can go reservist, which means they can be in school while in the service earning money for school. The only people who couldn't do that are people who don't qualify for the military (if they don't qualify physically they may be able to get a scholarship/grant based on disability. If they don't qualify, uh, mentally, then they shouldn't be going to school, anyway). The only other category I can think of who wouldn't be able to do this would be pacifists/conscientious objectors, in which case they must answer the question of whether their ethical/moral beliefs are worth more to them than their education.
Sure, it's kind of like signing a few years of your life away (and possibly all of it if war and bad luck are combined) but it's a way that all people have open to them to pay for school.
I swear, the next time I hear someone whine about how they can't afford to go to school, I'll strangle them. The world is filled with perfect examples of people who were too poor to go to school and somehow *did.* If you can't apply a little ingenuity and figure out how to get the cash to go to school... Well, you probably should let someone else have the seat in class.
everybody gets student loans to go to school that are backed by the federal government and if you are a college student using federal backed loans you can borrow from the government to get your computer. I did. It's easy. If you're poor, do you want to stay poor or do you want to learn and cast off your poverty? Regardless on whether or not the feds should be backing and regulating loans they are so getting a computer is no big deal and is *not* a boundary for the poor.
No, Rose-Hulman does not have a wireless network. What they have done is set it up so that there are network connections in every single class room and dorm room on campus.
what did you study? - computer science...? don't think you'll find a more multi-disciplinary subject than engineering - just because you are going to be tied to a compiler for the rest of your life....
yeah, not like everyone needs a fast pc or even color. I take notes on my Geobook NB-60, which I got at a pawnshop for 170 bux. It doesn't even have a hard drive, just non volatile ram and a floppy drive and the GEOS OS. Maybe you computer science guys may need more, but the cost of being wired are dropping fast. My notes are just as good as they person next to me with a PII 400 and Win 98 and MS Office 2000 with tons of shit running in the background and a big fat desktop image. I feel like I am driving a vw bug next to a hot rod, but I get by!
Reading through the comments, I think that a lot of people seem to be concerned that students will cheat by talking to each other online or otherwise sharing answers with their neighbors. Wlodek Bryc has developed an online test-taking system called Online Exercises which not only is capable of generating different numbers for each student's exam, but it also frees students to take the tests at home if desired; each test can be timed and a submission will only be accepted within the timelimit.
think about...taking a test on a laptop? get real...if you can't do the math or know the material beforehand why bother? looking it up on internet using a wireless modem is also a waste. the only exception i see to using a computer for a test is if it's using some really expensive program or uses proprietary hardware... the only possible classes i see using computers on tests are engineering, cs, and possibly psychology classes. math classes usually require you to use a graphing calculator at most, and even then you're screwed if you don't know the material... also, laptops cost way too much(which of course is supposed to be the point of this posting), plus the risk of a notebook being stolen is much greater than a nice clunky desktop, especially those nice big full tower cases that weigh about 75lbs.
In regards to having students typing lecture notes.. two words.. Voice Recognition (i also use a USB camera to take pictures of the white board)
If we can just search for the answers on the Internet, are actually going to learn anything? I know, generally, you have to know something about the subject matter to be able to search. I've had some open-book exams that you would fail if you didn't know the subject matter forward and backward. It guess it all depends on how the instructor implements it. I can see some Wild E. Teacher just thinking it would be cool, and make an exam that a 5 year old could pass, using the Internet. I'd imagine, to avoid making the test too easy (or too hard?), would have to try searching the Internet for the answers while making out the test.
Do Windows users get handicap points (BSOD)?
Recharge that battery,
Anonymous Coward
The problem in exams is always the lack of time. We've had open book exams, but are they any easier than normal ones? If you don't know your stuff there is no way you can learn it during an exam. Are you planning to start surfing the net to find answers when you have just a couple of hours to anwer a large number of involved questions?
as a tarheel at unc, i resent every student having to get a thinkpad with windows installed. it makes us rebellious macintoshers feel lonely :(. big change. i'm sorry, but if you own a mac you are cooler than anybody except the people of the Linus.its okay though, the teeny bopper thinkpadders have discovered they are pieces of crap, as they break down so often the university shop is flooded 24/7. ah, crash-resistent mac...
and the corporeal word is different, how?
Does this lead to Distributed Consciousness?
Does Kibo still perform his sacred grepping of his holy news feed?
If not, why did he stop?
Either way, where may he be found?
You may use any means at your disposal to answer these questions. The right answer is all that counts.
I've learned more from books and on the job experience than I've EVER gained from college. I would have to ssa that my experience is exactly the oppposite of this. My University experience was incredibly challenging, so much so that every single semester I was sweating bullets near the end. I managed to get out with a 2.9 and a Degree in Computer Science and Engineering. After three years in the "real world" I can without hesitation that work outside of school is a JOKE. I work for Lucent Technologies as a Senior Network Engineer and nothing has even come close to the difficulty level of upper division CSE classes that me and my classmates went through, and without exemption, everyone one of the people I graduated with feels exactly the same way. And yes, this is a "State University", UConn to be exact. The CSE department has a reputation for toughness. In fact, out of a graduating class of some 3000 in '97, only 39 of us achieved a degree in CSE.
Along the same lines, nothing prevents the students from using IRC or some other "chat" type forum, discussing the answers, voting/agreeing on them, etc. They could even POST the answers to a predetermined web site. Not much of a test of individual capabilities.
God damnit, i'm tired of all this gee-whiz bullshit. Big fucking deal you had an "Open Laptop" exam. How the fuck is this uniquely different from having an open book exam? Get over yourself.
Last I heard, Carnegie-Mellon University has one such world-largest wireless network over the complete campus that makes this story's question feasible. Having a laptop just doesn't cut it anymore; having every one to plug in to the wall just doesn't seem right; and making the students pay wads of money, and forcing them to have the equipment is no statement about the quality of the education at all.
I go to a high school that started a laptop program last year and have had considerable experience with writing essays in class and taking tests on laptops. IMO it's the way to go with tests. You have no idea how much easier it is to type a good essay in 45 minutes than to hand write one and having access to the net during tests helps a lot (although it opens up a lot of opportunities for cheating). Now that I've been going to this school for 1.5 years I couldn't imagine not using my laptop every day. Pretty sad isn't it? For those wondering we are currently using Compaqs (that suck IMO) and may switch to another brand next year (I forget which one. Some Japanese one as I recall). You don't have to buy the school's laptop though (you can get your own) and we have a pretty tight dual T-1 wireless network (Breezecom PCMCIA cards). However, as an afterthought, theft and damage has been a considerable issue at school so the program still has a few flaws to be worked out. Laptop schools rule!
If the exam is open web, the issue is whether the students can find and answer questions accurately (and perhaps coherently).
The test conditions are "open web" and there are many things on the web. In addition to reference pages already online, an enterprising student could create a cheat sheet page on geocities with formulae relevant to the course. A student could also look in a chat room, one could find or make a technical forum.
There are different ways of getting an answer, in the end it is results that matter in the real world. For an "open" exam, this includes activites that would be termed cheating in a traditional exam.
Um, since when is college only preparation for the real world? I thought going to college solely for the real-world preparation bits was missing the point.....
Here at Dunwoody Institute in Minneapolis, MN, We are each issued a laptop that we cary around with us every where so we can work on our CAD drawings and such while in class and at home. A very nice program I hope more schools adopt this ideal
I'm sure. So many of my professors are incapable of getting the projection screen to work... and there is a small LCD screen with a GUI to make it work!
What about the fact that 99% of people out there can't afford laptops, or who could only afford a much less reliable laptop than others?
Moderators you must be nuts. This arguement is a standard b*tch about whether it is fair or right to require a student to purchase a laptop (or a home computer (or a matrix / graphing calculator (or a standard calculator))))
This is a "strawman" arguement, particularly in the context of a university education. Today's laptops cost less than the desktop computers that many universities started requiring their engineering and computer science majors to purchase 5+ years ago. Schools are starting to require their liberal arts majors.
Actually I agree. However, there are a few things that lead me to believe that most people are reacting to this in a knee jerk fashion. In the real world you don't memorize stuff you only use occasionally, you look it up. If I go to work at a new company with a network OS that I haven't used before and the boss says update the security on our email server I LOOK IT UP. I didn't memorize all the security bulletins on that software on the off chance that I might need it some day. I need to know the general procedure for looking for holes and repairing them but for specifics I LOOK IT UP. If I didn't know general principles on OS's and Email I would lose my job by the time I figured it out, BUT YOU DON'T MEMORIZE SPECIFIC'S THAT YOU DON'T USE ALL THE TIME. That is a stupid waste of your time and resources whether it be in school or the real world.
At the university I'm currently attending we aren't required to have a laptop and we still get web based exams. The exams are held in computer labs on campus. I heard though that they might implement a policy for all engineers to purchase laptops.
I don't know how useful it would be... it may be good to have a laptop in class to try out things that are talked about during the lecture, but having lectures in a computer lab might serve the same purpose with less direct expense to the students.
that's my $0.02 canadian... not worth very much I guess
i had a comp. sci exam a few weeks ago, open books, open laptops. it's not fair to the people like me that don't have a laptop to test my answers, get on the web and search for answers etc. i think i would rather stick to the old closed notes exams.
RPI Rules. It's a great school, but the laptop program has caught a lot of heat. I think people were afraid it would turn into this. What's going to happen to our society if we all forget how to think, and can only access onld information, but not reformulate it? Wasn't that on Star Trek!? -Dosman!
I started there in 1994. My freshman year, in my Honors Calculus III, IV, and V classes, we were free to bring in laptops and use Mathematica on our exams. My professor would even let us run the front end on our laptops, and use the kernel on his honkin' big Sun server (Mathematica is client-server, and you can run the kernel which does the actual calculations on a different box than you run the front end on).
If you didn't have a laptop, or had one but didn't want to deal with it, or whatever, you were free to answer the questions the old-fashioned way (actually writing the integrals or whatever out on paper). Or, you could just write down the Mathematica syntax you'd use to solve the problems if you were at a computer.
The use of notebooks may be new, but the idea of taking exams on networked computers is not new..
For example, I was had a class 5-6 years ago in which the professor often had us grab a list of quiz questions off his ftp server, type up responses to his questions, and then email him our work.. I should mention that this was a technical communications class which focussed on propaganda/rhetoric, and the network was used as a tool that minimized the professor's work load.. He spent one day making sure everyone knew the ins and outs of ftp and mailing (using pine or bin/mail) and then he never had to bother photocopying or collecting assignments..
I should probably mention that I do not agree with the use of computers in MOST engineering classes.. Engineers need training in physics, chemistry, biology, and especially mathematics, NOT hunting for solutions using their favorite search engine. Students need to be tested on their ability to set-up and solve some fundamental problems related to their chosen field. Note: there's a reason students are asked to solve the same problems year after year. The professors have a solution to the problem and are therefore able to evaluate students on their ability to tackle that problem rather than worrying about the existance of a solution
Allowing students to merely look up the solutions to fundamental problems will force the professors to assign open-ended problems making it much more difficult to evaluate the capabilities of the students. In addition to trying to determine the students thought process when trying to solve the problem, the professor will have to assess whether the students work leads to an effective solution to the problem..
If you didn't know what you were doing, you were sunk. Extra resources weren't going to help u. Even if the "extra resources" conisted of a panel of already qualified and experienced people who you could get, via email, to solve all problems for you?
What's wrong with you people? I dropped out of college and have a career as a sysadmin which will allow me to retire in the next five to six years (by the time I'm 27.) If I can do it, you probably can, too. Drop out of school, get a job, get a life!
maybe that's what wrong with today's tests
They don't check how fast you can retrieve information, but rather how much you know already.
Everyone knows that in the real world, knowledge is less important then how fast you can look something up.
Like someone else here said, if you're going to be paying $22k/year for tuition, a laptop is a pittance of an expense compared to that. If you can't afford it then fine.. do what the rest of us did and go find a state school that charges $3k/year and deal with it. Hell, I'm still in a university after 6 years and have dropped back to a few classes a semester. It's more like a night-time hobby than anything else at this point since I already have a full time job that pays far more than I would have expected to be making as a graduate of the university. That just brings us back to the old point.. it is just a piece of paper, and in today's tech society, it's getting to be worthless. Experience is far far more valuable computer tech taught by some professor who hasn't worked in the "real world" for 20 years. Java? Bah, a passing fad. You need to learn the old staples like Fortran and Cobol.. that's where you REALLY learn to program (and the only thing the professors know anymore). Fuck them all. I've learned more from books and on the job experience than I've EVER gained from college. And no, a college graduate isn't going to get a better position than I will simply because I've also learned social networking. When you get along with high profile and powerful people you will succeed much more than if you just had that piece of paper.
I'm a senior in Computer Science Engineering at University of Connecticut and I'd really like to rant a little about misapplication of technology in my school and how it relates to this thread.
Don't get me wrong, I, like most of yourselves, am a technophile. Technology is cool, but it should have its place, and merely because a technology exists is not necessarily a good enough reason to change our way of doing things just to use that technology. Let me say it again clearer, I think that we should only use technology if it makes our live easier.
For a long time, chalkboards have been used in schools. They provide an excellent, economic visual aid. Now they are being replaced by digital cameras which feed a signal to a $40,000 video projector. The result? Sure you can throw an LCD monitor under there and play nethack on a really big screen, but I've only seen them used for writing lecture notes, and usually the intructors' energy level when staying in one spot and writing on a piece of paper is a lot lower than in the primitive days when they used to move around writing on the chalkboard causing students (whose energy level also drops) to go to sleep. I'm sure we can all come up with countless examples of this type of bullshit; I don't need to learn how to program a robotic hand to wipe my own ass.
As for computers in classrooms, we have that kind of thing already, it's called a computer lab . They've been around most universities for quite sometime. Some of them have networks, some don't, and quite possibly a professor can have them configured with whatever security standards necessary (network wires disconnected) whatever. I've never taken a test like that, but I could see the value of a tesh where you write some code or something and hand a professor a disk instead of a piece of paper or whatever. One could conceivably implement a very restrictive firewall and very simple (not java enabled browsers) let students browse the web without being able to do any sneaky cheating stuff. Merely because laptop technology exists should not require it to be used by all students. This is stupid and pointless, gives richer students a distinct advantage, and also creates problems if there is some type of failure with the laptop.
If this is what the future holds, then maybe I should join up with the Amish people or something because it looks like we are getting stupid with our tech now. I cannot deny that it would be very cool to be able to plug into campus ethernet, but on my budget a desktop does me fine, and I think, for classroom and examination purposes, this is a wholly unnecessary and stupid application of technology.
welp there's my 3 cents that felt good
Rohit
As long as this is a school where all the students have equal access to laptops and internet, and the exams are properly designed with all this taken into consideration, then I'm all for it. If there is an issue of laptop access equality, then the exam could be given in a room with computer and network facilities. Since some schools do have a student laptop program, this would work well for them. Others would have to find a way around that.
As for the fairness issue in situations where some students have, and some don't, the answer to that is that those who have prepared themselves with computers and internet while in school will have an (unfair? ... no) advantage over other out in the job market. When they get their first job, and nearly all that require a college education do involve use of a computer, and nearly all require that use to be extensive, how well they are prepared to handle their field of study and work with the tools of the information age, will define how well they do in work, and in life. That may not be equal, but it is fair, because that is life.
One of the issues I do think needs to be considered is what kinds of tools are on this computer. Surely students get to choose what web sites they get information from during the exam. They should be allowed to choose the software tools they get to use as well, within reason. In real life jobs, they may not get to choose all those tools, but more and more there is some choice even in the workplace. Further, when you consider the high tech jobs that many college science and engineering students go into, systems like those from Microsoft no longer prevail. And the BSD/Linux movement is even making inroads into the high tech workplace. Unless the coursework specifically involves a specific software tool, classes and exams should be computer system neutral at least to the extent that the students themselves are capable and willing to exercise a choice in the matter.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Now, accessing the internet while taking exams is a decision the professor has to make. I wouldn't want my students looking up the answers (defeats the point of an exam which is usually to determine whether the student can *synthesize new work from given (or absorbed-in-class) data*. If they can find answers on the net, then they're not gettnig the point. Serious students will do the work because they know that doing the work makes them stronger in the topic area. (I'm going to ignore makework and such things; I don't usually find such stuff on tests.)
At any rate, you can sidestep the internet issue by simply firewalling the IPs you issue your students for the duration of the test. We use DHCP here, and it would (as I understand it) be trivial to give testtaking students a thus-restricted IP. Say only to the instructor's lecture note server and a couple satistics (or whatever) websites. This, in my experience, would have been immensely cool.
It does favor the computer literate, no question, but most things do nowadays. I would imagine that this will eventually become a departmenntal policy: either you can have laptop tests in the Math Dept or you can't. Just like calculators, some are legal, some aren't, and some can't be used on certain sections of the test. As for financial discrimination, that's an issue that individual colleges will have to address. I maintain that a strong clear mind with a reasonable tool (depends on the job) will handily defeat a moron with 100 times the resources.
And, a final point: There are many questions a computer just won't help you with. Mathematica or MathCAD might integrate for you, but if you don't know what interal to give it, you can't solve your physics problem. If you can't code, the machine won't do it for you (well, there *IS* VB, but....) and the tool will certainly not enable cheating for courses like Foundations of Computing Theory ("This problem be solved on a TM. Prove or disprove this statement.") or advanced philosophy ("What do you remember about the St. Augustine Lecture? Compare and contrast with our guest speaker from Thursday...")
IR / radio cheating is a tricky point, but I suspect that it could by defeated by a simple application of duct tape or the like... or simply requiring that laptops to be used don't have an IR port.
This really isn't much different than it ever was - an 'open notes' policy is just another way to slow down the people who really don't know the material, or weeding out the people who don't know how to index their notes (grin).
I would imagine that students with Linux and Lynx would have an advantage over those with Internet Explorer, with graphics and javascript enabled...
On the plus side, I learned a lot of the material simply by indexing notes, textbooks, and whatnot.
Mark Edwards
Proof of Sanity Forged Upon Request
The internet is finite space. Every student is going to draw from the same pool of bits, usually finding the same examples (usually on other universitys' web sites). As far as I'm concerned, this act is counter productive because it teaches the student how best to use some one else's work, not to build on it. Maybe this would be acceptable for engineering students that don't need to think out of the box for every problem, but for sciences, a course like this wouldn't teach much. When we as a society start drawing on our own pool of information for every problem, it leaves the idea of advancement on the shoulders of those who either don't or can't use the pool.
As far as emailing the answers around the room, that isn't too far from using the internet, since everyone is basically going to find the same things. At my university, we have two names for this act: cheating and plagerism. Open notes on exams may be the only way to go, for in the real world, scientists and engineers will always be looking up constants, and maybe a formulae or laws every now again to apply it correctly. This is a building process, unlike using a laptop on the internet, which is a plageristic process. sig(quote+"\n"+sign());
But, in other circumstances it is vital to ensure that a student -KNOWS- relavent facts.
This may or may not relate to the orginal exam the poster spoke about.
Surgeon: I allways get confused which is the liver and which is the kidney. But I allways have Grey's Anatomy to help me look it up!
Assuming these tests are supposed to be some sort of test of your use in the real world. If I had to solve a problem for a company, and then handed in my report and said "well it's done, but I regret to inform you that I had to ask some of the leading experts in the field for their opinions", that's not exactly a negative thing. What's important is how well I actually perform.
Personally, if I'm running some sort of company that makes use in organic chemistry, I'm not going to care about any of my employess organic chemistry skill or knowledge, but rather their organic chemistry problem solving skill or knowledge. If they have to ask someone else for help, who cares, as long as they get good results in the end (and they don't get me into trouble)? Like it or not, if you're in a university class, you're not doing it for acadaemic purposes anymore. Literally you'd find technical schools to be better for acadaemia than universities, so I think all that should matter in university classes is the ability to solve the problems in question, no matter the method of solving them.
High Tech Heretic by one Mr. Clifford Stoll. Have not read it yet, but was watching him talk about this very subject on CSPAN "Book TV". I was crying from laughing so hard (especially when he stands on the table and quotes Hamlet). Lots of good points.
Should have said Dr Clifford Stoll (he's kinda got this thing for astrophysics besides computers :-)
Best Regards,
Shortwave
::shrug::
;) ) - but I think it's sufficient to get my point across. Just being able to regurgitate formulae isn't as important as knowing how to use them. Someone who knows the nuances, and is able to understand the equation at a much higher level, but has to look up the equation because they keep forgetting whether it's mc^2 or mc^3 (but they're smart enough to know they're unsure and look it up) is going to be a heck of a lot more successful than than the guy who knows the formula, but doesn't understand its meaning(s).
I know E=mc^2 - but I certainly don't know every detail about it. Few people do, I'd wager.
Sure I know the literal use as an equation. I can plug in values and derive unknowns. But do I understand its every nuance -- everything it implies? No. Not a chance.
Now this may not be the best example here (in fact, it's probably an incredibly poor example, but it's Sunday, and my brain is in weekend mode
...where we went online at a certain time and had to answer the questions and upload the answers within 2 hours.
Cheating would be virtually impossible because they were essays and who had the time to cheat anyways.
Essays are like written fingerprints in that a Prof familiar with your work can tell if you wrote it.
Laptops can be much more useful than you think. We, (at Rose) use them in lecture usually only in Math where it is nice to have Maple do the algebra of a large DiffyQ system. We also use them in all our physics labs to collect data using exteral sampling devices. Also, for introductory CS classes (especially CS100 which ALL students must take) the students bring their laptops to a lab session where they can code with the assistance of the professors as well as lab assistants. I can tell you now that if we did have this setup, many of the non-CS people would be absolutely lost in that course.
Some (students) think it is a bad idea to let us use our laptops in class (particularly in Math classes) because we won't learn the concepts. But most of the students here are of sufficient caliber that they understand the necessity of learning the concepts and it isn't much of a problem. And those that don't get burned on the tests because they are usually divided into two parts, one by hand and one with a computer.
Once u get to higher levels of education, exams aren't testing your 'knowledge' as much as your ability to solve problems.
I would have thought that the idea is to test *comprehension* in whatever field the exam is for. That seems to fit my comp sci courses, and I can't recall ever seeing a question on an English exam that starts out with "Solve the following:"
Brian
Cliff thinks that coilbooks are obsolete now? Personally, I'll take a clipboard and looseleaf to class any day over my laptop....they certainly aren't obsolete. And hopefully never will be - $2 of paper and pens is far more flexible (durable, reliable, etc) than a $2000 laptop.
Technology for it's own sake is trash. Use it when it provides a better solution.
How do they check, that you don't exchange answers
with someone else in your class?
This is about the main problem that keeps schools here from doing such exams - How can you grade a student, if you can't be 100% certain whether the answers given by the student are truly his or not.
Also, they won't do exams on the school PCs, because it'd be too much work preparing the machines so that they have what you need but nothing, that could aid you more than intended by the teacher.
Requiring students to buy notebooks is great, if everyone even remotely interested in the course had the money to do so.
What about those, who just can't afford a good notebook (note: when I say good notebook, I mean something post 486-notebook, because a much older notebook will be sooo slooooow, that the student will waste a good deal of time waiting for his/her notebook to respond)?
I am currently studying for a CS degree in an evening class. Most students of these classes buy a notebook before the end of their 4-year courses, since they make life in the courses so much easier, but hardly any of the students buy one within the first year (since most start the study course without much CS background, and some simply cannot afford to go to a normal university). The evening classes university requires students to have employment according to their CS skills acquired at school. Working in the CS field then allows students more easily to buy some notebook on their own, since your work pay usually gets better during the course.
America has a huge divide in wealth, and already many poorer people can't go to college because of cost (the uk has just gone down the same road). You already have a level of advantage between people who can afford to just study for 4 years and those who are forced to work their way through, this would surely just increase this gap even further - think how many hours working at Burger King it'd take to buy a new laptop.
Can i phone a friend? :)
I just wish I could remember it long enough to understand it.:)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Haven't been up to the Southern part of Heaven in a while but I understand that The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is requiring this as well, and even specifying the brand and model (I think they get a bulk discount from IBM).
The mental picture I get of 100 students in one of those old lecture halls all typing away at the same time drowning out the professor they're trying to take notes from is either very funny or very frightening, but not as scary as spending 24 hours a day trying to keep that thing from being stolen.:(
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
In my physics lab class I can still get most of the answers with out a calulator
and where can I get a slide ruler these days I want to start using one of those
just to freak out the other students
http://theotherside.com/dvd/
This a fear of mine our education system doesn't make our students think any more.
This is why america is following behind in educating thier children
http://theotherside.com/dvd/
That test can be passed with a 5 without the use of a Calculator I have done it.
I am concerned that in the "New World" that we will be using or minds less
and allowing computers to do our thinking for us instead of use them as tools
to help assist our thinking.
http://theotherside.com/dvd/
What the poster probably left out (I hope) is that the school was one that either requires each student to buy a subsidized laptop or to already own one meeting minimum specs. I don't see how a professor could possibly expect you to bring a laptop to an exam, or give those that have them that advantage, unless _everyone_ was known to have one.
A computer without Microsoft is like ice cream without ketchup.
It would be so easy for the teacher to check this... any IR
sensor would help see who is cheating.
Personally, I despise any programs requiring incoming students to buy a computer, but for different reasons than most of the people who've already expressed theirs. I'm familiar with a couple schools that require desktops, and/or laptops. Every single one of these schools has a standard computer that they're trying to push their students to buy, and one of them sounds like they're going to do their damndest to make everyone have that specific computer. What if I want to get a better one? I have to buy both?
Personally, I hate laptops. The screens are small (not too much anymore, but they were), smaller resolution, sound sucks, gaming sucks, that little joke of a pencil eraser they call a pointer, they overheat, wear out faster than desktops, blah blah blah. I would seriously consider going to a different school if I was required to purchase and use a laptop cuz I dislike 'em that much. I think the concept is really kewl, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. I don't like to use a stripped down computer (palmtops are not part of my argument). If it can't do everything that my computer can do now, I don't want it. Besides that, laptops cost a lot more, and are not easily upgradable. So what are the schools going to do when all their students new computers are outdated & slow when they become Juniors & Seniors? Suggest that they trade-up & get a new one? BS.
A few of my high level ACS classes have a much better solution. With Web-CT and Mallard, teachers can make online tests that you take from your most easily accessible lab or dorm room. They can be timed or open ended within a certain timeframe, we have any resource we can think of open to us (just like the real world), and best of all, no worries about getting a laptop to a test & having it not boot. I've had a couple classes where the teacher allowed us to use any resource we can bring in (open notes, book, laptop...), and I don't like them as much as online tests. If you're gonna allow people to use the internet to answer questions (IRC anyone?) you might as well let them get out of the classroom & out of that stressfull environment to do it.
I'd agree that most people spend more than $14- a week on their social activity. However, it's certainly true that not everyone can afford $14- a week on top of what they're already spending ( especially if it's an up-front cost )
Oddly enough, the people who "understand" usually "know" as well. Knowing is necessary, but insufficient.
Knowing stuff is just regurgitating facts,
Not always. I "know" my physics formulae years after I've taken physics, because I understand the concepts. It can be "regurgitating the facts". It can also be a by-product of comprehension ( not to mention doing ones homework ). In math ( where I work ), the students who do a lot of problems will not only obtain the "knowledge", but they'll also obtain comprehension and application skills. Exams should not be just about what you know -- they should test comprehension and application. And a well written exam will do this.
The way you talk, you make it sound as though there exist students that "understand the concepts" but somehow don't know anything. During my years as a TA, I've found this to be false. It's simply impossible to understand a topic if you don't know the fundamentals.
The Web would be used, in this case, for gathering facts, not gathering opinions.
The idea of pursuing research in an exam setting is just absurd. No-one conducts any meaningful research in such a setting. This kind of exam is just as easy to cheat on as a homework assignment, but fails to offer the educational benefits of an in-depth project.
hey are there to teach things like critical thinking, research and writing skills,
You will never be able to teach research or deep problem solving skills in an exam. Exams are primarily to test basic competency, comprehension, and application of the knowledge as taught in class.
For some courses, this is sufficient, because the courses are designed to simply provide the student with basic competency in the subject matter ( for example, college algebra ). In other courses, especially higher level courses, this is certainly not sufficient, and a greater emphasis on alternative methods of assesment ( oral exams, group work, written assignments, take home exams ) are more appropriate.
You say that emphasis should be placed on research -- and I agree with you. Indeed, upper level courses typically do place more emphasis on this. But exams are not the place to do research.
BTW, a desktop is a much smarter investment for a poor student. For less than $500- you can get a decent PC. Laptops are somewhat more costly.
At the very least, you can close loopholes that make cheating in exams possible ( or easy ). One of the advantages of open-book, is at least the prof knows what sources the students have available to them.
As for converting binaries by hand, etc, what is wrong with basic numeracy ? Seriously, the people that can't add two and two without a calculator shouldn't be in a university to begin with.
A lot of Universities ( and even some high schools ) allow you to take small "cheat-sheets" into class to de-emphasise the memory work. You're probably going to see more of this type of thing when you go to university.
However there is a case to be made for actually knowing enough to be able to answer questions without looking at your notes every two seconds. You'll find that if you use your books/notes as a crutch during an open book/open note exam, you will choke. Exams are not about "finding" infrmation "you're looking for". You should already basically know it, and use your references as a memory jolt. "Finding" information is a lengthy process that is better tested by a research project/assignment as opposed to an exam.
As for calculating it, I'd say it's pointless to compute a complex example by hand. A data set with 2-4 points, all integers, where the mean is also an integer seems more like fair game.
BTW, I have not taken any stats course since 1992. I can't remember anything from back then, I can only derive.
Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong ...
You are also required to be able to apply understand and your knowledge. I teach at a university, and even at the college algebra level, students are expected to understand how to apply their formulae to the dreaded "word problems". They need to know how a formula applies, and how to solve the equations in question.
What if, instead of being tested on how much the brain can retain, we are tested on how fast the brain can use all of it's available resources to find the information it needs to complete a given problem. That tests creativity, adaptability and resourcefulness rather than just memorization
Great ! Now tell us how to test these things within the constraints of a two hour exam. Forcing the students to learn to use excite doesn't cut it.
Now that we are entering the information age
It's buzzword time ...
the information itself becomes less important than its meaning with respect to the information associated with it.
The internet is no substitute for basic competency. Suppose my supervisor asks me what the monotone convergence theorem is. It's graduate school material, and it would take at least an hour to answer it using the internet, 5 minutes to find it in a book, and 10 seconds to recall it from my basic understanding of what it says. What it cmoes down to is this -- you don't want your physicists having to open up a web browser to look up "F = ma".
On exams, it's pretty hard to cheat and actually benefit from cheating. I've rarely seen students who cheated and did well as a result of cheating.
people used to make the same arguments about what calculator use would do to math exams.
They're not a problem -- sometimes it is appropriate to allow calculators, sometimes it isn't. I've observed that a lot of people use calculators to perform very simple calculations though. They are too often used as a crutch. Curiously enough, the people that use calculators to evaluate 2+2 rarely display superior problem solving skills.
in a couple of years, i think it will be impossible to prevent people from bring a computer to exams anyway.
You could make the same argument about calculators today. But you can simply ask that noone brings calculators, internet appliances, superpowered cellphones, or whatever into the exam.
http://www.unc.edu/cci/ explains the whole thing. incoming freshmen are required to buy laptops. unc negotiated a very good deal with ibm which includes on-campus replacement parts and loaners and other nice support goodies. scholarship money and student loans can be used to pay for the computers.
Certified Black Helicopter Pilot *** Unwitting Dupe of One World Gov'ment
Many people have raised the issue that requiring laptops is prejudicial to people with lower incomes. I was speaking with an MIS professor last year and his response was that financial aid could help pay for it. If a university requires a laptop for all students it is a mandatory cost like books and housing and will be added to the total estimated costs of attending college. This will then raise the amount of financial aid a student is able to receive. Whether it be a loan or grant the ability exists for every student to own a laptop.
Glad to see your professor is making sure the rich people in class have a better chance. What's this about wireless modems?!?! WTF is that?
This has got to be the single most unfair idea I have ever heard of. Your professor should be disciplined by his department!
I propose an Open Jet test. At any point in the test, you can hop in your private jet and fly around looking for information. It's about as fair.
- Paradox
Man of the C!!!
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
At RPI, where all the freshmen are required to have laptops, most people get the standard IBM 600E. If you need, you can get financial aid to support getting the laptop.
Use dialpad, see what your professor says!
We had a similar policy going on. We were all free to bring in our personal laptops. There were quite a few ethernet drops in the room, so I always got there early on test days and gobbled up a e-net port. Only about 15% of the students actually had a laptop, and most didn't have ethernet. Most brought there laptops loaded with their summaries that we had to type on Telecomm Acts and pdf's downloaded from the Library of Congress with the actual laws themselves. Very helpful to have 500 pages of law and executive orders and do a search on them via Acrobat instead of leafing through 500 printed pages of material. Pretty neat. Truth is - I am looked at like I am a freak when I use my laptop in pretty much every other class I've ever had. Large, public university, and most of the non-CSE people are quite computer-phobic. I should know, I am not a CSE major and deal with em.
www.jackasscritics.com
If the professors themselves forget to think, and don't make exams for laptop wielding students that work to require them to think in addition to knowledge, then, sure, this can be a problem. However, real life will require use to think, and think in a certain way that is based on access to vast information, both at our jobs and at work. The quality of the exam is important as it has to make people think about how to use the information they can get.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Then get together with a bunch of other students in the class and, as part of the whole studying process, build your own web site that is the gathering point for all the information you find. Now you have instant links to the vast web of knowledge and even all your class notes.
If you have all this trouble yourself with using the web, and you let it get to you like that, then you're probably not worth hiring for a high tech job.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
In the days before personal computers (like when I went to school in the days of mainframes) open book exams did mean leafing through tons of useless material. But then, life meant leafing through tons of useless material, too, so part of the skill of the course was to learn how to find signal out of noise. Today, there is not only more signal, but also more noise. The sifting tools are more powerful to match, and we have to know how to use them.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Now days if it's a take home, it would end up being:
"Classify all simple rings of size less than or equal to order 60 up to isomorphism. Build web page."
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
...as long as you can get away with it. Looking up information hasn't been a form of cheating for ages.
:-)
I remember a physics lab exercise I did in 1975. We got the description of the lab we were supposed to do a week in advance in the previous lab. This one required setting up a table with various different weights pulling via strings in different directions on a small ring in the center around a little post. We had to adjust the weights until the ring did not contact the post. Considering how long it took the others, this wasn't all that easy to do.
I, however, had access to the mainframe, and whipped up a little program in Fortran that simulated the setup for various vectors and weights, and found a combination of six vectors that all cancelled out. I memorized those numbers and when time came to do the lab, I simply set up my arbitrary vector angles and weight distributions as I had gotten them from my program, and there was the post dead center in the middle of the ring.
The prof was running the lab and noticed I was done in 5 minutes and came over to check. When he asked how I did that, I told him I had run the simulation in advance. He asked what program I had used and I told him I wrote my own. He wanted to see it so I gave it to him. I got an A for the day and 2 hours 50 minutes of spare time to goof off
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This school can't even afford intelligent teachers..What makes you think they can afford IR detectors? :)
Mirthfully yours,
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://propaganda.themes.org)
Bowie J. Poag
I really couldn't agree more. I've been to a number of open exams (though not net-open - I would've had the chance to take those, too), and they are really not fundamentally different from normal exams. You still have to be able to apply the knowledge you find. If you don't know your stuff, you won't survive the exam. Really.
As for the ability to search for information quickly..there was this crap TV show in Finland (I'm sure the idea of it was leeched from somewhere else, as usual) where the contestants search for stuff from the web. One time, when I was sick and thus didn't really have anything else to do but watch tv, one pair of contestants in the show was an overweight net freak and a medical student. The former admitted that he was addicted to the net, the latter was not.
I'm sure you may be able to guess the result. The net freak had no chance at all, and this does show something.. It doesn't really help even if you spend all your days at net, it doesn't help you with applying your knowledge. This is what college (and university) is (or should be). You learn to learn. You learn to apply your knowledge. Regardless of the type of exam, good students will always best the bad ones.
Last year, all maths exams were created following (?) the assumption that every student had this sort of calculator. The effect of this was that the exams were subsequently a fair bit harder, and focused on those areas where a graping calculator did not help.
(BTW: A fair number of students at my school found that no amount of expensive technology can help you when you didn't know the basics of the topic.)
The gap between the haves and the have nots is not so great here, especially because the school could afford to have a bunch of calculators that could be borrowed out to those without them (while this solution is technically possible with laptops, it is much more expensive and less maintainable).
As a side note, in all Science-ish exams, students are permitted two or four A4 sheets of paper, covered with whatever they want (formulae and examples, normally, but UserFriendly if you prefer).
David Jackson
Imagine the possibilities, go to an IRC channel, and the entire class can collaborate on the test... Have your buddy at home who took the class last semester feed you the answers...
It seems to me that allowing students to use wireless devices during tests kinda defeats the purpose of testing. You're just going to find who is the most proficient at cheating, and that is probably not the student who deserves the best grades.
Hell... I have the internet on my cell phone now, If I was still in college I could just create myself a little page using WAP/WML to help me remember all those pesky history dates. Or been able to search the text of Beowulf.
Well I suppose its job security for those of us who actually remember learning things... It's much more difficult to fake knowledge in the real world than it is in the classroom...
Meet on a chat channel somewhere with all of your classmates.
...
Astudent> What did everyone get for #3?
...
It still comes down to what are the traits you are attempting to evaluate. The concept of rote learning is simply impossible with today's explosion of information. Traditional time-limited exams were designed to evaluate a student's ability under stress and breadth of competency in a core curriculum in a reasonably standardised framework (same resources of time/materials available to everyone). If you make the step that competency includes the ability to investigate, integrate and index new information, then making a notebook available is not such a huge conceptual leap (think of it as unlimited openbook). There are a couple of drawbacks that I can see, one is that the best prepared students will win out (ie a blackmarket for bookmarks and prepared solutions engines) and secondly, educators will have to redesign their exams to be more problem oriented without compromising what they want to test for (e.g. issue of how do you control excessive collaboration when you're trying to evaluate individual mastery). The supply of laptops is a short-term issue, much like the provision of standardised calculators at high-school. People will come up with a solution such that portable Crays don't give too much of an advantage (it's not the size that counts but how you use it :-) ). Perhaps a basic CD so that everyone has the same basic data will also solve data access problems.
The rather more interesting follow-on is what does this imply for educational entrance barriers? I can forsee a day when to enter into a top-notch Linux training college, you have to prove you can hack your way past the network security protocols with each level of access revealing enough basic information to crack the next layer. Taken to its extreme, you might even say that the test becomes the teacher, and almost game-like in its challenge.
Unforunately much of education has still yet to evolve out of medieval ritual of perch on lecturn and dictate to the masses. Admittedly it costs a small fortune to design courses using modern instructional technology with a corresponding short life-span, yet if movie production studios can make a living, then there is no reason why education can't adopt some of the practices.
Life will certainly be interesting as the explosion of home-learning material and instructional multi-media is showing.
LL
Microsoft and Apple brought computing to the average individual.
Computing was brought to the average individual by the hardware innovations coming out of Shugart, Intel and so forth.
Who would have thought that the spiral notebook would ever become obsolete when it came to schooling?
Alan Kay for one. He described exactly this in his Master's Thesis written in the '60s.
People have to realize that in terms of conceptual evolution, there has been very little new thought up since the early seventies in CompSci. All we have been doing has been implementing the ideas of people like Alan Kay and Doug Engelbart. What is Linux but a clone of a 30 year old OS? What has Microsoft or Apple done new that wasn't done first and Xerox PARC and SRI?
Nothing.
Interesting - I attend the University of Calgary and very frequently we are not allowed any calculator whatsoever during quizzes and exams in math courses, especially first and second year ones. If you don't know how to integrate without your trusty TI or HP, you have no hope of passing first year calculus. Those courses which do allow calculators almost always stipulate they must be non-graphing and non-programmable.
Quite frankly , I feel this is probably better. I actually know how to integrate and know how to find expected values of multivariate probability distributions without electronic means. This ultimately means that I know what these things are, how they work, and what to do when I encounter them in a novel setting.
Kind of the point of education, isn't it?
-- Jeremiah
I currently go to Caltech. I don't think that requring students to purchase a laptop is a good idea because it does weed out the poor..Now if the school gave away Laptops to its students, that would be a different story (I think Grove City College in PA does this..). At Caltech since we are bound by the Honor Code, most exams are take home. This term I just recently had a final exam for my Computer Science class where I could use any reference I could get my hands on including any internet references.. Now this doesn't pose a problem for people taking the exam because they could always go to a computer lab and take it. However, the test couldn't be turned in by email (you still had to write out the answers.)
For people who can Laptops and cellular modems
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I should really read what I write more carefully
:(
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Yeah. What is this world comming to? Next thing you know students will be required to buy books and pay tution. Oh wait..
-- Virtual Windows Project
Could we please stop complaining about requiring a laptop limiting the poor? If a school requires a laptop, it should be considered part of the tuition, pure and simple.
Besides, when I got into Rose-Hulman, tuition was somewhere around 22k a year (one of the prime reasons why I'm not there right now). A one time expense of 2000 bucks for a laptop is not that much more.
These aren't state universities. Private schools can charge as much as they want. I'm not complaining because MIT costs more than the state funded uni I'm going to now.
CoughCough Had you bothered to check out the costs associated with attending Rose-Hulman, you'd have seen this:
Even a $5000 laptop would only amount to 4.3% of a four year stay at that fine institution...where, exactly, did you get your education?James
There are some schools these days (I believe Villanova may be one of them) that require their undergrads to purchase laptops from the 'school source'. I'm not sure if anything but these laptops is allowed onto the school network, either.
Sad but true.
I actually had a class where all of the tests were given in this fashion. We would come in to class and the teacher would let us use online help docs, anything we could find on the net, irc, etc. The only thing that we couldn't do was talk to each other. I learned alot more in that class than I did in just about any other programming class I took. Our final exam went something like this: There is an SQL server on the network with an address of foo. Login to this server and create a table with your name. The table should have x amount of fields. Write a client side application that will allow multiple users to connect to the server and browse and update the database. You may use any matierials execpt for each other. You have 3 hours. I enjoyed these tests much more than the ones that made me memorize a bunch of stuff that could easily be looked up.
Computerized teaching systems have a long, long way to come before they are anywhere near as useful as a live teacher. The problems with computerized teaching systems are many:
First they are incredibly expensive to produce & maintain: very low end (power-point style presentation with multiple choice questions) require approximately 80-150 hours of production time per hour of instruction; mid-range (one with relevant animation, fill-in questions with a minimum of 'intelligent' processing, pre- and post-tests) run at 200-350 hours of production time per hour of instruction; and very, very good programs (pre-recorded video, multiple instruction paths, a live 'tutor' who responds to email questons) require 500+ hours of production time per hour of instruction.
The whole idea of "individualized" instruction by computer is a joke until some major advances in AI are made. The very, very best computer-based-training programs currently might have a pre-test that allows you to skip over material you already know; and 2 or 3 different instruction paths (which is fine if you happen to fit one of those 2 or 3 categories). Every program I have ever seen handles wrong answers by suggesting you review the material in the previous module. That is to say, the only option if you don't understand something is to read it again.
And finally, people have different, individual "learning styles". Some peple learn better by reading, others by listening, others by interaction or group work. Traditional classroom-based teaching with a live instructor provides multiple channels for different learning styles; the teacher speaks, writes on the board (or shows slides), draws diagrams, answers questions, sets individual and group exercises, and (in the case of good teachers) is willing to entertain conjecture or go off on the occasional (relevant) tangent. Computer-based systems are restricted to one channel - reading what's on the screen; with occasional diagrams, pictures & animation (yes many have the option of a pre-recorded voice talking the text at you - have you ever tried to listen to a pre-recorded voice for 8 hours?)
I worked in coprporate training for a major multinational for 5 years, and spent half a million dollars a year on computer-based training programs. They are useful for learning the syntax of a new computer language, or for learning the basics of a protocol - oh and they're not bad for getting the absolute basics of a human language either. Anyone who would choose to learn from an O'Reilly book (learning styles, remember) will certainly learn something from a computer-based instructional program - O'Reilly books are cheaper and better written. Apart from that; keep the teachers in the classrooms...
--
"I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent"
Besides, colleges aren't there to teach facts and data, they are there to teach things like critical thinking, research and writing skills
And yet you're tested on facts and data and your grades are based on the tests.. and if that's what college is for, what were the other 12 years of school for, the crappy lunches? By the time you get to college you should already know how to write and think, and these days you'll probably know 60% of whatever you're majoring in as well. I certainly never would have passed my computer tech classes if i didn't know the info already, those profs didn't even bother teaching the data, just gave out homework and told us what we'd be tested on.
Dreamweaver
"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
I regularly give exams in a computer classroom.
After some thinking about it, I concluded that
cheating is probably not a serious concern.
If there is some randomization of the questions
and enough work in the test to be challenging,
the limiting factor will be that they don't have
enough time to cheat effectively.
I'm a Chemical Engineering major at Rose-Hulman and I'd like to say that I agree wholeheartedly with the policy of requiring laptops of all entering freshman. As all freshmen in a class purchase the same model of laptop, have versus have-not does not really come into play. Financial aid is always available for those that qualify.
For example, in one recent class of Organic Chemistry we created molecular models of aromatic compounds. From those models we could see, in full 3-D, the higher areas of electron density that determined the reactivity of a certain species. We use our computers in Kinetics to determine rate laws of reactions by plotting relationships of data. In Material Balances exams we have been required to solve 15 equations for 15 unknowns around a certain chemical process.
For me, it is not a matter of making work easier as it is one of making news ways of learning possible.
What is so great about this? What was the course for? How did having laptops in the exam help you learn any better? How did performing searches and using email educate you?
Technology itself is not necessarily an educational tool. Too many people, especially President Clinton, act as if having the 'net in every classroom suddenly improves the quality of learning. WRONG...these new tools have to be used in a proper, intelligent way...they're mere existence improves nothing at all!
I couldn't help notice that this article is about LAPTOPS DURING EXAMS! not about college drop-outs or in how many years you're going to retire.
So good for you that you dropped out of college.. but maybe you should go back to school and learn to read!
- Sabrina
Sure, it's convienient to use your laptop.... especially if you type faster than you hand-write. However, I do think this gives students a huge opportunity to cheat.
Students are expected to use their laptops for exams (like programming, database, etc...) but cannot use their notes or look at previous assignments. Okay, lets get real people! There's a teacher sitting at the front of the room, and you're way at the back... hhhmm.. what would you do if you suddenly forgot the code for file I/O in perl?
I think the use of on-line exams are just giving more students the opportunity to cheat on exams... if we're not allowed to use our notes (or even our compilers in some cases), why not just write it down on paper... that way if you don't know your stuff, that's just too bloody bad.
- Sabrina
This school requires every incoming freshman to purchase a laptop. I think that this is a great policy.
...especially engineers need to have as much information available to them.
Who wouldn't think it is a great policy, other than a Luddite? However, I think it is unfair to give this policy accolades without considering what kind of barrier to education it presents.
We are turning into an information society...
If we are indeed becoming an information society, and I agree with this, then it become even more important to ask the question, "how do make sure those who have been unfairly left behind before don't get left behind this time?" The 'information society' offers a radically alternative way of understanding and distributing resources; if this opportunity is missed because we're too busy being impressed with ourselves, playing Quake and watching the latest IPO, then our entire project of pushing technology forward to share information in an open and free way is bankrupt.
as much as what? I can't think of any comparison that would convince me engineers have any special requirement for more information than anyone else.
Take, for example, the biomedical sciences. Ten years ago, maybe it still made sense to have people memorize everything. Things were still manageable then. But now--particularly with the near completion of the sequencing of the human genome, and the unimaginable amount of information we'll cull from this--there's simply too much to memorize. Having the [insert your field's arcane facts here] available won't make things easier; what it will do is require a deeper level of understanding from students.
Wouldn't this just tempt people to "cheat" and work together by sending email back and forth with others in the class during the exam?
I would love if my teachers did that, or at least for math. But of course, I'm the exception, most of the students (even in advanced classes) wouldn't understand, and would whine about it. But I like to discover some of these things on my own, I feel as if I really learned something important by doing that. And frankly, half the stuff we learn in math you could figure out on your own given enough time.
And I also HATE it when teachers just "teach the test". Standarized testing is a very evil thing, at least for me. Instead of learning something new, I have to waste time going over fractions to make sure we don't fail. But I do understand why the state has them, I just wish I was exempted from taking them : )
That is so cool, it challenges our entire view of
- why do people go to college
- what should they do when they are there
- how do we measure if they're doing it right
I've been saving for years to finance my kids college fees, it's starting to look as though they can stay home and use their net connection instead. (I shall blow their college money on a sports car with a long red bonnet/hood.)
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
I had something exactly the same as this, wireless network and all. I feel it was kind of wasteful since I was sitting right next to a computer on a 100mbit LAN that was even faster and had a better screen. The laptops are pretty expensive, but I guess you could say that they are a good way to distribute resources since not every classroom needs 15 computers at every moment.
I am working as a C/Java/Perl/Linux teacher in a french computer science school (ESI-Supinfo) and I've always done exams with computers. Everyone has an internet access in order to search docs, read newsgroups or whatever he needs, and students send me their exercises thru e-mail. Books, personal laptops, notes and almost everything (but cheating) is allowed. Today, I can't imagine developing something on a computer without internet and books. In real life, for fun or for a company, you have these resources. Doing without them at school is stupid. Programming on a sheet of paper is the more useless thing to do. You learn coding by trying yourself lotsa things and fighting against these f*cking compiler errors. By doing exams on paper, teachers are just judging algorithms. Learning how to compute factorials with recursivity is totally useless. Teachers that are still doing that are thinking that programming is like theory. But just ask them to do let's say... a Tetris, and they won't be able to do it. Neither do their students. I think that nobody learned to code by watching curses at school. Every coder has learned by himself, and by asking friends. Curses are just here to justify a diploma. Nothing else. If I only could tell my students "get a drink, take your keyboard, listen to good house music and sit down on a sofa" before begining an exam or a lesson, I would do. This is the right way to do something with computers. Watching a black board and writing old algorithms on a sheet of paper is a pure waste of time. My goal is to give people the geek feeling. I am a demo maker, a DJ, a GNU/Linux lover, a daily Slashdot/Freshmeat reader, an open source contributor, and I would love to see more geeky curses in schools. But there are lousy people that prefer traditional ways and tell their parents about my point of view on teaching. And these parents yell, and the boss tells me to learn 'puts("hello world")' and traditional stupid theorical algorithms instead... Best regards, -Jedi.
{{.sig}}
If you can figure out how to do this, let university professors know. Many really don't like testing students in time-pressured exams. But what's the alternative for grading a class of a couple hundred? Or a couple dozen? Or even five or six? How do you keep such a system from becomming completely subjective?
Personally, I prefer just taking a test and getting a class over for better or for worse. But that's just me.
What do you use the laptops for (school-related, that is)? I ask because I've never seen much use for laptops. Sure, storage is a lot easier, and I guess they could be useful in labs not equipped with computers. But it's not like computers are good for notetaking--especially for engineers, considering that I know of no software ideally suited to jotting down mathematical equations. For that matter, I can't think of any exam I've taken in which access to the internet would have been useful.
In two quarters of school, I've only actually needed a laptop once, for a presentation. A friend who bought a laptop at the beginning of the year claims never to have used it except at his desk. I got a desktop (19" monitor, 256 MB RAM, nice standard components) for the same price he paid, a bit over 2 grand.
As I see it, there are two issues (apart from financial) regarding requiring students to buy laptops. First, a small private school should be able to afford adequate computer labs for all students. A policy of requiring students to buy their own computers makes more sense for a larger university where this is less practical...but why laptops? If they aren't made use of in some fashion specific to the classroom or lab, why not let students buy a cheaper and more powerful desktop?
The mandatory purchase of laptops sounds like a gimmick to me: "Look at us! We're a forward-looking institution!"
Exactly.
I can't count the pointless tests and exams that required the students to memorize obscure numbers/events/dates/properties rather than actually understand the problem, and actually THINK about an answer.
I had a paper based Computer Education test in high school that asked "Which of the following key sequesnces does a compile?" (we were at desks, and not allowed to use the computers for the test)
A) ALT - R - C - ENTER - ENTER
B) ALT - R - F9 - ENTER
C) CTRL - V - M - ENTER
D) ALT - R - C - C - ENTER
I was extremely put off at this, being at the top of my class, yet not knowing the answer to this question. Of coutse I knew how to compile, and I usually used a CTRL-F9 (or something like that) key sequence. I don't memorize the menus in every software product I use. And if for some reason, I DID need to know what the third item on the RUN menu is, I could simply _click_ the run menu and find out..
The teacher for that class didn't really have much of a clue, but this is just one example of my miseducation.
Essay exams really only test your ability to write. If you're particularily talented in that area, with a sprinkling of knowledge in the subject matter, you could bullshit your way through the test.
If you're not a very talented author, but know the subject matter, you're still not going to get a very good mark.
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland
Examples please?
Of course, if you plan on pestering your friends for answers all of the time, you'll probably loose those friends in short order.
It's hard enough to get them together in the same place to drink beer, let alone answer useless college questions.
Later
Erik Z
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
However, mine was rather different.
It was supposed to be an "open book" exam. (ie Paper books) In the past, my teachers have been very sceptical of my use of a laptop, and I figured university wasn't going to be that much different in that respect. I was fully expecting to be asked to print out my notes and use only paper for the exam.
I was quite pleasantly surprised to hear back from the prof saying that I was welcome to use my machine as long as I wasn't using it to communicate with anyone. (Easy: disable the IR port and leave my modem/network card at home.)
I'm not a big fan of asking everyone to buy a laptop -- I chose to get mine for reasons that simply don't apply to most people -- but it's nice to know that not all profs are threatened by the presence of such a machine, and that some are willing to see it as a natural extension of regular school tools. And, conversely, it's nice to know that some profs see it only as a different tool and not the only way to do things.
With such an open policy wouldn't it be terribly easy for students to cheat via email or irc? This is a neat idea, but really doesn't seem very practical to me. On the bright side though, it may save paper!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's unfair, but at the same time, why is it important to know how to do everything by hand if you know how to make a machine do it for you?
How do you know the machine's doing it right? How do you know you plugged it into the machine correctly to get the right answer? If you have no concept of what the answer should look like, you don't.
Furthermore, I've found it faster sometimes to do a seemingly hard problem by hand than to try plugging it into Mathematica and debugging it. If you do these things over and over, you eventually get good at it, which is kind of the point. As a scientist, I don't like trusting some black box to give me the correct answer unless I have to.
Plus there are the problem-solving skills, yadda yadda yadda.
Some people will say this is cheating, but I disagree. A fellow before me pointed out that universities to not teach people to memorize information so much as they teach people how to use it.
However, I am a bit worried about fairness. There are two problems: connection speed and notebook availability. I can't afford a notebook, so I am at an EXTREME disadvantage. Someone with a notebook and proper preparation can have pretty much all of humanity's knowledge(applicable to the particular course) within two or three mouse click. Where as I, a starving student, would have to memorize the equivalent to be able to use it.
Secondly, if notebooks were given away, the network speed could be a factor, if only a minor one.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
In my MBA program (Queen's MBA for Science & Technology) which is Canadian, eh, this is relatively common. Most of our exams are "open laptop" which means you can utilize the laptop for problem solving. Of those exams, most of the 'case' exams are "open Internet". (We are allowed to plug in the Ethernet cables) The deliverables are usually transferred to the professor by email, or simply printed and handed in.
This has worked great so far. Laptops are mandatory anyway (will be included in tuition starting next year, I believe), but I realize there is a significant difference between an MBA and an undergraduate degree. My point is, when all students are on a roughly equal technological platform, both in terms of possessing the same technology, and being able to use it, I believe computer based exams are fair, powerful and closer to a "real life" situation. We are testing the ability to utilize resources (similar to what is available in real life) and analyze a problem, then suggest recommendations within the time constraints.
One problem that was brought up was the possibility for cheating. On 'case analysis' type exams, cheating is relatively hard to do. Besides, in a small group the honour system does work fairly well. I have never heard of anybody cheating on an exam, or even planning to do so.
On many exams, however, a laptop is simply not a meaningful way of testing knowledge/learning. And that's why my good ol' pencil still has chew marks on it.
-- Fortes Fortuna Adjuvat --
The answer is, most likely, to give some (not all...) HARD questions that demand deep understanding of the concepts, and that will basically drain away all your time if you're busy searching for bits and pieces. This is, admittedly, demanding on the graders since this points to essay formats -- rather unusual in mathematics, I'd think. In addition, you have to create entirely new tests each time...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
He should have made you DERIVE the formulae by hand, from its verbal definition and that of the mean. If you can reliably find it from first principles, then you probably understand what's going on...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Yes. In the real world, time being crucial and all...
You can't achieve deep understanding in a period of minutes. If you want to have a decent GUI utility in an afternoon, will you go to
* a person who has rudimentary C knowledge, and
has never used any GUI toolkit -- but has their
APIs on paper
or
* a person who has used XForms occasionally, but
still stumbles frequently
or
* a person who has designed and implemented
similar interfaces in several different
languages with many different toolkits, and will
mentally complete a correct system design
within ten seconds?
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
you forget that college students generally don't have the money lying around to by a laptop, yeah its a small percentage of the cost of tuition but many people are barely making tution with loans and grants. take my roommate, he can only afford to be here b/c of grants, loans and scholorships, none of these appy to buying a computer.
the school provides labs, he uses one of my computers, so he doesn't have a problem, if schools want to have open computer tests then level the playing field, use a lab, don't require the people to bring their own
btw what student can afford wireless net access, hell i have 3 computers (including a laptop) and i don't have a wireless modem, let alone service for it
I rather disagree. I've known several, and have been myself, a student who had to work to support his studies, and spending an additional $2000 would have been, at the least, a major extra burden. Unless universities knowingly build some system that allows poorer students get more aid to offset the bulk of the laptop costs, I think requiring one takes the educational system in the wrong direction. On the up side, it's a nice tool. On the downside, it's way too expensive compared to the benefits, makes it even harder than it already is for poor people to get an education, and leads to a whole lot of administrative, legal and other problems. Not worth it, I say.
Another interesting point is to ask whether laptops will survive through college. What happens if you're walking down the road and it starts raining? Someone hits you with a golf cart? You slip and fall? I'm not sure if I would have ever managed to get the $2000 for a laptop, but I'm quite sure I couldn't have done it twice. Do you insure it? How much would you pay in premiums, and how much would you get for a two year old, used laptop? Enough to buy another one?
Another problem is the lack of technical skills. I've known several competent students of theoretical physics who really couldn't care less about learning the intricacies of WinXX or Linux or a laptop. Such people would be badly disadvantaged in an exam when a driver fails to load or something similar happens, even if they know their subject much better than most other people in the class.
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
...in the long run. Especially in any kind of CS or high math classes. If you don't know the stuff then you're only going to be hurting yourself in the end. I've seen it happen and it isn't pretty. By the end of the semester you can tell who's been doing the work and those who have just been coasting by on other people's work.
It's great to see this in presentations of group CS projects. StudentA gets up and explains some part of the project without a hitch. StudentB gets up and doesn't know what he's been "working" on for the last 5 weeks and in times like this there ARE NO EXCUSES.
-dark
another reason to keep your browser patched upto par - send the prof an email tjojan to upload copies of the borwser cache to you.....
One thing worth mentioning is that the school provided laptops for everyone in the class as part of another study. I am happy =) -Sergei
I think having every resource at your finger tips during a test is a great idea. I also think the tests' quality should reflect your newfound power. The tests given in high schools, and even in many colleges, wouldn't work well with having the Internet and all it's resources available during the test.
Many tests are written specifically for one answer. Ex: "Who was the first president of the U.S.?" This is the type of question that will be quite easy to find the answer to. But asking multi-layed questions like "Who was the first president of the U.S., and how did he come about winning the presidency?"-- Not exactly genius level, but more suited to having a laptop at your desk.
__
__ While you sleep, I creep... gaining ground by the week.
In Finland, the newspapers recently reported about a site that posts example essays to aid students in ground school and lyceum. The papers' claim was that students just copy the essays - Bad, Bad Internet again!
But truth is, Internet is here and what can you do about it. Either raise those kids to be reasonable, honest and creative, or let them act like grown adults, ie. steal other people's work or sell their work to be used by others.
We at the infamous Linu(x/s) University can only dream of extensive use of laptops. No connecting one's own computers to university network, in certain exams even calculators are prohibited (because students gotta learn convert binaries by hand) and so on.
NOSPAM@REMOVETHIS.NO.SPAM - you'll find the real address somewhere
Yeah, IF the prof has all the books checked so
that there be nothing extra written on the marigins and so on. Imagine giving your book to be checked for a couple of days before an exam... not good.
Seriously, the people that can't add two and two without a calculator shouldn't be in a university to begin with.
That's a point. But things like this should be checked before one gets in the university.
NOSPAM@REMOVETHIS.NO.SPAM - you'll find the real address somewhere
I go to a university that requires students in the aviation department to lease a laptop as part of their tuition (an extra 550 or so $ a semester) so that they can access classroom powerpoint presentations etc. from class with a wireless LAN. Some of my classes have open book/anything you want tests, so I suppose you could use a notebook but I've never seen anyone do it. The laptops tend to be more of a hassle in this setting since no one is class really knows the systems. Maybe in a CS class it would work better.
Ahh, but this isn't always the case. There is a university here in Nova Scotia called Acadia. As part of your tuition you get a laptop, and all of the dorm rooms are outfitted for highspeed access.
You are allowed to send in assignments and even attend some classes via your laptop. As for getting to do some exams on, or with your laptop, I haven't heard anything about them allowing this, but I know they are making extensive use of the laptops they provide students.
They were ahead of their time a few years ago when they started doing this, and yes the tuition went up a bit, but I think it is a valuable addition to the Students.
Based on my experience, they aren't worried about that type of cheating. The U of Michigan engineering school requires that all professors and teaching assistants leave the room during an exam, and we are on the honor system. The theory behind that is the teachers add too much pressure by wandering around the room as we take a test.
Besides laptop IR ports, there was once a case in the second electrical engineering class I took where someone used the lab experience of creating an AM mod/demod, connected it up to an IR LED, and attemted to cheat with another student. They were caught because we noticed that they each had small in-ear headphones on, and the two kept on saying things under coughs. Good idea, but stupid people.
The higher, the fewer.
During one of my exams for a class in developmental disabilities, I developed a great pain in my right arm after writing vigorously for three straight hours. It persisted for several weeks, so I went to a doctor and was diagnosed with a nasty case of tendonitis of the elbow. It was recommended that I keep handwriting to a minimum, if possible (advice I keep to this day). I brought this up with my instructor, and he allowed me to use a laptop to type the answers to all the questions on subsequent exams (including the final!)
While I had no internet connection, I thought it cool that he allowed this (this was back in 1996). It was a small step toward using technology to close the gap in education.
I hope this trend toward creative uses of computers in education continues.
-drstatgeek (close enough, at least
(Am I the only one that sees the irony in the need to use a distrubeted world wide network to aquire even the most basic tools around?) :)
_________________________
Taking the perspective of your boss for a moment, I'm paying *you* good money to be "clued in". If you're constantly asking script kiddies you meet at random how to do you're job, I'll search the IRC logs and hire the script kidie at 1/2 your salary and ask you to try on the hat you'll be wearing at the local BK drive-thru.
_________________________
...or at least whoever is making up the test. I, for one, like it! A good college education should not be about memorizing information or being able to retrieve it. It should be about analyzing information and synthesizing new ideas.
Just about every exam I've taken in college was take-home. Some were open-book, others weren't. Heck, there were even a few infinite-time finals. But, a good number of these tests held information not in your standard textbook. Normally we had to come up with a new application of a theorem or a new proof. Or, here, let's change a few of the universal physical constants around. OK, go derive Maxwell's equations again. If you knew your stuff back and forth, you could do it. If you didn't know what was going on, consultation with a machine wouldn't help.
I keep hearing these instances of people memorizing where information is or bookmarking key sections. If your college class is based on the students learning where the information is now, that college is doing a disservice to its students. Think about it this way: I'll even use some Linux, since this is slashdot and all. Would you rather take a class that taught you Linux syntax and what all the commands meant, and the exam for the class was some rudimentary sysadmin stuff; or would you rather have a more generalized class which didn't use any specific OS, but taught you not only how to do things, but also how the computer functions worked and why they did that way. Then your exam would be something more along the lines of, ok, right me a new command for the pseudo-OS that did THIS. In one case, yes, you're quite prepared for NOW (or the near-future anyway), in the other, you're quite prepared for now and then and even what's to come.
Open book exams place the onus on the professor. They must now come up with exams that test not only what a students knows now, but how well that student is able to come up with new ideas, or at least analyze and criticize the ideas that are presented to him (or her).
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
When I was at Rose-Hulman they had crappy AMS laptops. It was the second year they had laptops there and it was interesting to see how pissed the previous years laptop owners were when they saw how much better ours were. In any case, they still sucked, hard drives falling out of them (friends of mine actually duct taped the hdd compartment shut), overheating, etc.
The laptop was $5400 I believe, and because I left after 1 year, I still owed ~ $3500 on it which they wanted me to pay for it. I ended up selling it to a transfer student into Rose who didn't want to pay for one of the new machines.
All in all, they were nice to have, not terribly useful (still had my desktop machine), but it was nice to be able to ignore the professors in class by irc'ing, sending email, or doing whatever else. Without the laptop I now just fall asleep in some of my classes.
-- I'm not creative enough to create a sig, so I stole this one. --
I am a senior at The Hill School and we are requiring laptops for all incoming students. This is a private high school. I am one of the "techies" in the school, and am not quite sure what to make of it. A lot of students spend all night on AIM and ICQ chatting, and only do homework when the network shuts off at midnight. Teachers are NOT using computers at all in the classrooms, and rarely for homework. We have an opional laptop program now, and the students who have bought them use them as desktops. I have never seen one in a class. I am glad that I am leaving before I would be forced to buy one. I realize that it will take time to use them fully, but to REQUIRE them when teachers won't use them, and say that they have no need for them? WHY?!?!
I still think that it is not a lot of extra money to pay for a useful tool. Over a 4 year period it averages to 2 dollars and 78 cents/day if one uses it 180 days/year. I guess quite a few college students(even the poor ones) spend more on beer.. Maybe mandating laptops would be a way to solve the campus drinking problems (no offense ment to those of you who don't drink).
I think the the students have to buy the laptops themselves..
Okay think US universities.. think semester fees, think about how much it costs to have a student in a university in the states. Now think how much a 4 year investment on a laptop is compared to all the other fees involved.. not much!
If a university requires the purchase of a laptop then so it is. Maybe it should be taken into account with grants or maybe people who can't afford the university and the laptop should choose a different university.
Suppose you pay abt. 12k$/year(a very conservative estimate) and stay for 4 years. That's almost 50 thousand dollars.
A laptop costs roughly 2000$ (like a student would need a four thousand dollar high end model). 2/50 gives 4% of total cost of attendance for a useful tool.
You can't seriously be saying that having a computer when attending a school is not beneficial. Maybe 10 years ago it wasn't, but times change. And those few places that require a laptop.. I'm sure they do it just for the technology's sake.
In the end you probably end up spending more on books and other accessories during that 4 years(of course these are not exclusive, but to put things into perspective).
Go out with your friends once a week on an average and you're sure to spend more than this.. I have a hard time spending less than 30$ if I go out(maybe I have a distorted view if this is not normal).
However, others might have similar thoughts and my be working towards building the schools of tomorrow!
I see your point, especially for some subjects. But for others, it can be a valuable skill to quickly search the internet and find data to help you answer a probelm-solving question.
Let's say the question was: "examine the health effects of second hand smoke". You would have to consider: The possibility that the site contained wrong, or misleading information, the time it would take to search various sites, and other information you have gathered throughout the class.
I actually think its a great idea.
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
Cost for college: [...] SDSU for example has a yearly tution of a whopping $5000, and that's for an engineering student who pays more per credit than other majors.
Still you pay a lotof money - in other countries education is free (or almost so, we're talking about $200) - I did not say that paying for college is good or bad, I was merely stating the fact that there are many schools who have such high tuition that the "few" bucks for a laptop don't way much.
If a teacher is writing tests in such a way that all one needs to do is rephrase a quote from the internet, he is cheating the students.
I wholeheartedly agree - that is not the object of any class, i assume. The teacher merely allows the students to use the information that's available to their advantage. Nobody said that just quoting some web-site earns the students an A.
-- "Tradition is the illusion of permanence."
Yeah, that's absolutely the way it should be. In my school freshmen are also required to get a laptop and apparently people are using them now. I just had a take-home midterm in Quantum Physics and I know that without the web I would not have been able to do more than ONE problem.
It's not about just searching the web for a duplicate of the problem with a solution, but about to use the information sources that are available in an efficient way.
I find classes and exams where you are required to to memorize things (ie closed book/ closed notes) stupid and useless - in the *real* world you will always have the possibility to look things up in a book oron the web. By researching information one learns more than by just memorizing!
-- "Tradition is the illusion of permanence."
What about the fact that 99% of people out there can't afford laptops, or who could only afford a much less reliable laptop than others?
Well, this goes into a completely different direction. In the US people pay incredible amounts of money for college-education, and in relation to these amounts, the money spent on a laptop is nothing. That's why many schools assume (or requrie) that every student has a computer/laptop anyway. Now whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, is a completely different discussion, but in a class where everybody has the possibility to access the information on the web it would be wrong not to let students make use of these sources.
-- "Tradition is the illusion of permanence."
I had a similar argument with a writing professor (for whom I had great respect) who said video would replace print as the media from which we learn. He believed that video and audio brought all the same benefits to the classroom that print could. I contend that the written word allows one to interpret the meaning of words and phrases more closely and distinguish among subtle shades of meaning to a greater extent than do the passive acts of watching and listening.
In both cases, the point is the same - the more someone is required to immerse themselves in the material the more they will get out of the experience.
I guess some time in the future they will allow you to phone a friend if you don't know the answer. Open book tests are one thing but being able to bring a laptop is another.
A knowledgable individual could bring in the entire course notes, textbook and other useful software tools. With this arsenal, you should be failed if you get less than 95% on a test. What is the point of testing if there is no way to test knowledge.
This is totally absurd. We should encourage the retention and understanding of knowledge rather than the ability to search for it.
This is one of the best things I've seen in a long time. The current exams test nothing more than the ability to collect and memorize raw information. I know, I've used the method on several more or less useless exams where the testing has nothing to do with content.
I know that many of you are going to whine and moan about this being unfair and that the exams won't test anything useful. Allow me to put it simply: This kind of testing does not measure the knowledge or memory as we're used to. It concentrates the tests to measure the ability to find content. The tests are not meant to rate how good a memory you have. They are testing how well you understand the consept and subject you're given. And then it naturally measures how well you manage to put that in simple, readable form. It's like doing a summary for your boss in real life work.
I envy these students. I really do.
There is no such thing as good luck. There is only misfortune and its occasional absence.
I personally wouldn't want to be without a laptop for the course. I can do my work anywhere and ALL my software is there, and configured the way I want it.
We use them for tests, but we aren't connected to the network when we right them. Tests are submitted on floppies.
The thing is, if you really have to look up information during a test to pass, your screwed anyways. Being able to search help files, or online, really only helps if you need a reminder of syntax or something like that (ie. is it: if (a == b) or if a or b then) etc.
DOS is dead, and no one cares...
If there's a Bourne Shell, I'll see you there
We've been having open laptop, open internet exams for a few semesters now at the University of Oregon's Knight Law School. (Named after the illustrious Phil Knight.)
We have one of the most wired Law Schools in the world, with a 100 megabit backbone (to be upgraded to gigabit as soon as we can afford it and get around to it), with a fibre connection to the University's DS3. Each desk in most classrooms has two ethernet ports, one for each student. And every student is required to own a laptop.
Several professors have these open laptop, open internet exams, with the knowledge that some students might find a way to use internet sources while the proctor isn't looking. These exams, however, aren't e-mailed in. They are printed over the network at the end of the exams to one of our printers. (This is a lot of fun for we tech support folks.) So there is a time limit, and there is someone looking over the students' shouders.
Just thought I'd post this to let you know that it's happening all over the world.
Tell me what you think.
Who cares? I mean, really?
Schools are not supposed to make you educated. They are supposed to make you intelligent. Many great minds have said 'Don't teach me how to plug numbers into a formula, teach me how to think.'
Think of it this way: can you really give a good example of needing, say, all your computer science knowledge but not having any reference material? I can't. It's better to know the basic ideas behind, for example, microprocessor architecture, than it is to know a map of the 10 most commonly used chips. If you can look it up, you don't need to learn it.
The first time this happened to me was in math class: I realized that if I could do it with a calculator, than I might as well not bother. The only problems that really mattered were the ones that I didn't know what to do with. Most of the other kids in my classes didn't understand why a given formula worked, they just took it for granted that it worked and gave you a number/s that the teacher would say is right.
In my algebra class they just told us the quadratic formula. In my mind, it would have been better to have the class figure out the quadratic formula, instead. Understanding how ax^2+bx+c=0 translates onto a coordinate system is infinitely more useful than knowing the formula itself. Of course, most people will end up knowing it anyway. But if all else fails and you forget it, you can always discover it again.
If we assume that by the time most students get out of college or high school, small computers will be everpresent, then we can dispense with number-plugging, and for that matter all fact-memorizing. Given that the internet is the world's biggest reference point (and will only become larger), it is useless to test anyone's knowledge of information that is easily available there. Who, What, Where, When, and How are not important. The only important one is Why.
Then again, I could be wrong.
notebooks aren't obsolete quite yet. they've just stopped being *spiral* notebooks. now they're *electronic* notebooks.
mummy, ah ah.
jon
-- http://www.cerastes.org
You might have mentioned that at $2500, the price for our Thinkpad 600E's was something like $1k less (at the time) than what we would have paid had we purchased from some other laptop retailer. And then there's all the extra software they included, such as MSVC++, Maple & LabView.. I was awarded a lease on this laptop, including replacement with a new machine after two years.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
But the problem with this is that you can bring tutorials with you where you could find out how to solve the exact problem you're being asked to solve without having a clue about how to go about it. For instance, we have reference tables in AP physics class in high school, those tables contain all the formulas and constants we need to know, but everybody would be getting 100's on the tests if they could use the textbook and find solutions to similar problems. This would defeat the purpose of it.
Why does the IR port matter, when one could easily connect to IRC over wireless ethernet? In fact, everyone taking the test could join a server and discuss the problems. I don't think it'd help much though. Methods of obtaining outside help aside, if you don't know what you're doing on the test, you're not going to do well, period. In the workplace, one has access to other engineers and the Internet, but one still has to possess a strong knowledge of the field at hand to get anything done. By the way, an old but decent laptop can be had for $1000 these days...
I remember doing this myself, we were allowed 1 page, 8.5*11 with anything written on it, both sides. I filled it up with equations written very small, and when the exam came I looked at it mabey 2 or 3 times having memorized all those equations in the process of rewriting that page several times. In fact I think I still have that page in a box of notes in my basement. The funnyest thing was a student who filed the page with sample problems and solutions to the problems, man that poor guy was really lost.
no sig.
Maybe I'm cynical, but this could open a whole new market for collaboration sites. The entire class gets could log into a site, and get the answers. If some enterprising person who knows the material well could pull it off, he(or she) could charge people to log into his site and get all the answers he had. There are, of course the normal ethical issues and the problem with people feeding the wrong answers. I love that :) But it does raise some questions.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Because sometimes the machine answer will be wrong. If you have no ability to do at least an approximation by hand, you have no way of checking the machine answer.
Take FEA as an example- It's easy to put in a wrong boundery condition and get a wrong answer. If you don't have a hand calculated approximation, there may be no red flag to alert you of your error.
Your wallet stays open. Our source remains closed. We are MSFT
If this were not the case, I think the professor would be remiss in giving an exam on laptops, since he couldn't guarantee that everyone would have one, or that they would all be up to spec for his exam.
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl
They were aloud wireless modems, why use IR when they could just e-mail, or hell, ICQ, the answers back and forth.
I'm sure the tests will not be written the same. I've taken open book tests that were damn hard. Sure we had all the information available to us. Right there in the book. If you didn't know it before hand, you could not do well.
Basically the time limit is what makes the difference. Everyone could do well in an open book, open-internet style of exam with unlimited time. When time is limited, you don't have time to look up more than a couple details.
Here at LA Tech we had a course in software engineering a few years ago where we could use any material found on the web during the final exam. We each had an SGI Indy in the classroom, and the prof's thoughts were, that anything that we didn't know, we wouldn't have time to search for it on the net. I don't think I used it personally (trying to remember), but the exam was extremely long and was barely finishable during the time alotted.
.
I do think this is a great idea though, because when we're out in industry, 9 times out of 10 we will have the benefit of other references (esp. the net) to guide our search, so why not be able to use them now?
Just my 3.141592653585 cents . .
--josh
what class was this?
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Now the class nerd/know-it-all will no longer receive wedgies and get pushed around at recess, but instead will get pingflooded and e-mail bombed.
And ironicaly, in a way, the class would become a beowulf cluster, as students email eachother parts of answers to the test.
Is distributed test taking the future of educational institutions?
NH
Maybe we can someday replace students with perl scripts....
Forget email - What about students just creating an IRC chat room and discussing the test right there, basically as if talking right in front of the teacher?
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Yep, I can agree with this one. When I first arrived at school last fall, I just about went out and bought myself a graphing calculator. Then I found out from my physics prof. that we wouldn't be allowed to use them in that class. Instead I just stuck with the handy dandy TI-36x. At the end of the semester I had passed my calculus and physics class with an A.(My other classes were all A's too.) Many of my fellow students asked me how I did so well with only a TI-36. They were barely getting it with their 89's that could do everything but write their names on the test. These were the same students who had taken calculus in high school as well. They had twice as much experience with the subject matter, but I still managed to do at least as well in the course.
Just to let everyone know, there still are professors out there who don't allow the use of laptops, just because everyone doesn't have one. This is true in my C programming class. My calculus professor said he would look into it, but doubted that he would allow laptops, simply because not everyone has one. This from the same guy that encourages and recommends using Maple.
I think there are some cases where laptops are okay to use. Certain subjects lend themselves to this approach more readily than others. I think in the future we will see a movement toward this trend in some courses, while others stick with more traditional methods.
Wigs
--Universities are full of knowledge. Incoming freshman bring a little in, and departing seniors don't take any away.
dean williams probably knows the answer.
If this is true (I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be) then it's very cute. I can't say it is new (after all, there are take-home exams), it's just that the scenario is slightly different.
What it is even more interesting is that in this way foreign or disabled students are allowed access to information in their native language or something that would compensate their disabilities.
Doesn't this make much more sense than the LEGO based test presented on this site a couple of months ago ? (sorry I don't have a link to that article).
Besisdes, if we can afford to give every student a laptop imagine how much less paper will be consumed. Respecting the environment is one of our priorities right now (or at least should be) and this may be a first step. The next one is to convince enterprises to give up un printing that much.
In a way you're right. However, in life it's not always necessary to know everything, but to know where to efficiently search for your information.
I agree, there should be some tests where the students are not allowed to have access to the internet (yes, general history is a good example), but there also should be just as many where they are allowed to do it.
perhaps they should scrap this in favour of take-home Yeah this will surely solve those last two problems you noted. Once I can take an exam home there is no way the instructor can stop me from cheating. And surely this also gives me a greater opportunity to learn the material during the exam.
Throughout college about 30% of my tests were take home tests and most of those we had about a week to do. Most of these tests were in mathematics with a few in cs. The reason such leniency was given on the tests is that the questions were proofs of some sort. Time-boxing this in a two hour exam would pretty much make it impossible to have any more tha one question. And if any student thought they could learn the material in a week, then they deserved the test score they got. As for cheating, there's the honor code, and the fact that the instructors trusted us not to cheat, and then there is the fact that if we did cheat it would probably be very easy to tell. (It's pretty easy to notice similar nuances between two coorecrt or incorrect proofs.)
This wouldn't need to weed out the poor. Seems like if we had a better college system to begin with, we wouldn't worry about money, but since everyone HAS to go to college, some people who are more worthy and less rich get knocked out of the running. What's wrong here?
~i = an imaginary being~
after a decade of this everyone would wonder why the average SAT/GRE scores of US students are lower wrt to students from less affluent regions (no lap tops).
i would LOVE laptop exams, just fire up your irc client and ask away :)
"If I need to check my syntax, I have reference books within easy reach. If I need help paring down the code or figuring out an algorithm, there are people I can email, mailing lists and newsgroups, search engines, etc... If I need quick answers, there's always IRC (or ICQ if someone clued-in happens to be on). "
but, who's going to get more work done? you, flipping through stroustrup or knuth every five minutes, or getting distracted on ICQ with your buddy, or someone at the next cubicle who knows the syntax pat, and knows the algorithms and which one to use, and can codes straight through, and concentrate more on the problem at hand.
The prof for my 3rd calculus course had a policy for the final exam that we could bring "anything non-human that you can carry" (the non-human part was so nobody brought "a grad student riding piggyback" along). He figured that if you knew your stuff, having a graphing calculator and/or all of your notes wouldn't make a difference, and on the other hand, if you didn't know you're stuff then nothing was going to help anyways. Unfortunately, some people brought laptops with programs that do integrals alphanumerically, solve summations, etc. These people had a definite advantage, and didn't need to know what they were doing. The prof has since changed his policy, so now students can bring in all of their notes and any calculator, but no computers. Am I bitter? Yes. I got a 6 (of 9), and worked my butt of to get it. Another student (with a laptop) got a 9, but probably couldn't tell you how to solve the geometric series.
So what's my point? Simply that whether or not to allow laptops (or any materials) in an exam situation depends largely on what the purpose of the course is. If, like calculus, we're supposed to learn the fundamental mathematical theories that we may or may not (another discussion) use in our careers, then we probably should be on our own. But if the course is, say, exploring ways to use technology in the classroom then certainly using the internet (web, mail, news, whatever) in an exam situation should be considered.
Most cells probably can't support that number of simultaneous connections. I've been to tech conferences before, where the cells got jammed just because there were so many people on their cell phones, all in one location. Not to mention that one cell phone gives you enough cancer, what's going to happen when you're sitting in an auditorium with 500. Nah, if you're gonna allow net access, do it in a computer lab, or better yet, just make it a take home exam.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
I'm more excited unfortunately about the fact that i can now tell my daughter that i walked to college for ten miles in a blizzard everyday and then when i got there i took my computer science classes with a notebook computer. Top that dad. ;).
I don't see this as a problem. In my Physics classes at school we had open everything except the person next to you. This was because if you didn't know the material, then looking it up would waste valuable time and you wouldn't finish the test. Getting a bad score.
Granted in some classes this could cause a problem, but I think that most teachers understand that and have created their tests in ways that if using these open methods they will not help you get a good score on the test. I remember not finishing a test due to this issue but I spent a few to many minutes in the book looking for help on the last question, but was unable to find everything that I needed to finish it in the given time.
Just thinking that these things actually help without looking at how the tests are administered doesn't give you enough info on how it will affect a person taking the test.
just my two cents worth.
MIT also gives a shitload in financial aid. Two days ago, I got $17,000 in aid from them. That brings MIT's $36,000 all the way down to 19 grand. That's still expensive, but it's much more reasonable. The point is, you can't judge a college's price based on the assumption that you'll have to pay the whole thing. MIT, here I come!
--ikedidawg, proffesional eater of cheese
Here in Switzerland you must have a TI 82 but nothing else. So everybody has the same hardware but some people are able to write programs to solve their problems. Or you could just store all the formulas you need to solve them into a program. I never memorized formulas in chemistry because we were allowed to use our calculators where I could store them. You can buy a cable which enables you to type on your pc and transmit the programs to the TI-82, so you don't have to spend a lot of time typing in all the theory.
The part about requiring a laptop and wireless access is kind of stupid if you ask me. Why laptops? What's wrong with using the lab computers? Making each student procure a laptop is a little silly and tends to weed out the poor from the rich kids.
Why laptops you ask? It provides the students with access to the latest technology instead of outdated labs of 486's and pentiums of which there are many in schools all over. The cost to the school of continuously upgradingthese labs t allow their students to be competitive in the job market can be so prohibitive that it would raise tuition almost as much as requiring students to purchase a laptop.
The school I attend requires all students in specfic courses (currently manditory in computer technology, computer engineering technology and optional in others like journalism) lease and eventially purchase their computer at or below cost from the school. This ensures all students have the same machine and the same programs available to them both at school and at home. This allows the same oppertunity to the students who may not have acomputer at home and it eases on the demand for the existing labs.
it may add additional expense to education but to the students taking these prohrams where the latest technology is essential the expense is worth it.
Yeah, that's great, but would require a complete different cirriculum optimized for such tasks. Right now if you are in a course called differential equations, you study differential equations (if you're in a good school), not the best ways to find information on them, and in good classes you are not allowed to use laptops nor even calculators. I think that this is the best way to test knowledge. Let's test how fast our brain can find a solution to a problem while confined to itself, not retrieve it from a TI-89 text file, a laptop, or any other source that will probably be replaced by even better ways to retrieve that info (computers wired directly into your brain, ears and eyes...)
Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths
He buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio
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Think of it this way:
:)
The college says that each student must buy a laptop. If I'm not mistaken, they do not say whether or not you need a _new_ laptop. Or even one that is remotely up to date. I suspect that the only requirements are that the said laptop performs a certain set of tasks.
For instance, I could go and buy a high-end 386 or low-end 486 that runs Windows 3.11 just fine, on which I can do word processing for notes and essays, (with Microsoft word no less...) spreadsheets and graphs for science experiments, e-mail, web browsing and god-knows-what-else. With enough hard drive space, I could even run Linux on it if I really wanted to. And how much would this laptop cost? Oh, about $100 Canadian or so. I have textbooks that cost more than that.
The fact of the matter is that you don't _need_ a VIAO for most applications anyway. (Take your favourite word processor... Is there an older version that does 95%+ of the things you want but does it with 30% of the hardware?) Especially for the things I just listed. All the student really needs to use this low-end hardware is slightly more technical savvy than the average windows user. And isn't that the point anyway?
That aside, I think having open communication during an exam is stupid at best. Not to mention with wireless communications. Whoever came up with this idea is clearly brain-damaged. Unless it's a computer science/engineering class, in which case perhaps you get an A for successfully hacking the network.
---
I can't wait for proper speech-recognition.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
A. Keiper
An interesting topic. A close relative of mine is a political science professor, and he's taught in schools that have similar setups, where each student is provided with a laptop and the entire classrooom is 'wired'. It certainly does add a whole new dimension to teaching, being able to have the students analyze historical statistics and the like right in the lecture hall. In addition, no time is wasted for grading; Since it's all electronic, it's quite possible for the students to know their grades before they step out the door. I imagine the sound of all the little PC fans kicking in halfway into class would distract the professor more than the students. ;-)
On the other hand, the downside to this is the downside to any 'open-book/open-notes' exam. There's always the potential that students won't study quite as thoroughly, relying on their ability to 'look it up' during the test, and if their searching skills fail them, they're screwed. (This is from my own standpoint, that of a student, btw.)
So, like everything, there's good points and there's bad points....
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
Are you telling me that a student who can search the internet for Johnny and his five dollars is actually going to have an advantage over someone with a brain instead of a laptop?
In school, we used to have exams where you would not be able to finish the whole exam if you entered all the problems into a calculator. Basically, it would take you longer to type them in than to solve them in your head, if you knew the "tricks" behind them.
Maybe if you could design a Turing laptop with OCR and some natural language processing along with a wireless high speed connection and a robotic arm to control your pencil, my argument might change.
A choice of masters is not freedom
Right now, all my exams are given on-line and students can log in from home or the lab and take them.
I'm a freshmen at the University of Akron. I haven't taken a notebook to school since the second week of class. I telnet in to my puter at home and use pico or vi (which ever I'm in the mood for) take my notes there. I can even print them from school and they are ready when i get home. All of my classes I have a computer in front of me and they all have internet connections. Now al i need is online books for the courses. That would save me about $400 in books a semester.
AK
To give another spin on that, most of these folks who complain about having to memorize "useless stuff" are "geeks." Well suppose some prof comes along and says "You can use the net to for you C++ test." This is going to create a class which is very adept at searching the net for code, but who don't have it memorized. In effect, some very slow coders. There are simply some things which HAVE to be memorized.
Well, in one sense, you are right. But at the same time, the web is such a vast expanse of variably useful information that you would have to know your stuff pretty well just to phrase your query properly. An open book test could be called a test of the student's ability to use the index or the table of contents (just as an open Net test could be construed as a test of the student's skill at using Google). This is just an open note, open book test in the era of the Third Wave.
My law school has been using a program called Examsoft for four years or so. Examsoft locks out your hard drive and limits you to a simple word processing program which saves your answers at the end of the exam period. The idea is that you should not be able to wholesale cut and paste answers from pre-written documents.
You have a choice between using a laptop or writing in bluebooks. Purely a matter of personal preference.
Our registrar told me that when they started using the laptops, there was very little change in the class rankings that was attributable to the use of computers v. bluebooks. How she can determine that, I'm not sure, but that was her opinion.
The point is, at least in this context, the ability to use a laptop is not discriminatory. If you want to use one, you can. If not, no problem. If you are not used to taking notes/writing papers on the smaller keyboard, you are probably better off writing by hand anyway. In fact, last semester, the "new and improved" version of Examsoft caused about 80% of the laptop users in my exam room to lock up midstream, anywhere from 10 minutes to 2.5 hours in to a 3 hour exam. Law students being complete stress monkeys, we all blew a gasket. The professor ended up having to offer a special grading scale because of the problems with the program, as there was an obvious difference in the grades of those who handwrote the whole thing v. those who (tried) to laptop.
The moral of the story? It's just a tool. And you may be better off without it, depending on whose software you are forced to rely on.
What college/school was this at? -Andrew
we are increasingly becoming a connected society - this is both good and bad, but I'm not going to comment upon that (hell, I'm a geek; I carry too much tech-toys around with me!)
Having reference material - whether a calculator, notebook, or wireless notebook - simulates real-world conditions. Most of the time, we have time to stop what we're doing and go look up what we need. This is good - few of us can remember everything we learn (I'm damn jealous of people that remember what they did last week!) but we usually remember that the knowlege exists.
So testing "open-book" makes sense. And is important - it tests the ability to locate information, and use it once located.
At the same time, there are times where we don't have access to references - an ER doc, a surgeon in the middle of surgery, repairing the AE-35 unit on the way to Jupiter, or fixing your motorcycle's carburator on the way through the Sahara.
These are extreme examples, but I'm sure we can all come up with other more realistic day-to-day examples.
So testing without reference tools is good too. Especially of recently-learned topics - before you've had time to forget them again.
I don't remember the title, but I have a memory of a SF story where one person got the job because he didn't have access to all the cutting-edge tools and supplies that another person had - he'd had to build pieces that the (wealthier) person just bought. That ability to create a purse from a sow's ear later saved the mission.
Personally, I'd be dead in the water without my references - I quickly forget things I don't use.
- Al -
Of course, it'd be darn hard to write such a test. This method shouldn't replace traditional testing, and it doesn't address all important skills. But used as part of a comprehensive spectrum of methods, I don't see an intrinsic problem with it.
Let's just hope the people creating the test were aware of the implications that have been raised...
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
You can also learn the equations -- and, not incidentally, the process involved -- by doing boatloads of problems. Solve enough problems and the important ones will stick in your memory, just from repeated exposure and use. The ones that don't are, almost by definition, the unimportant ones.
In the class I teach, students are never asked to simply memorize and repeat. In fact, they are allowed to bring in their notebooks and any handouts to every exam. I test the process of Physics problem solving, not the particulars. Do some memorize anyway? Sure, and that's OK, if that's what helps them. But no one is penalized for simply having a poor memory, and everyone is rewarded for having an orderly mind and an organization to their notes.
I truly believe this is a far superior way of doing things, compared to the "spew 1000 equations" method prevalent when I was in school.
Once more, quoth the poster:
Again, drawn from my eight years pursuing Physics degrees and my four years teaching the subject, I have to say that this contention is false. In general, memorization seems to lead to rote learning, misapplication, and a fundamental inability to combine different processes into one solution. That's simply an anecdotal observation; I haven't done or seen any systematic survey of the matter. But it is an overwhelming trend in the classes I teach.And finally, quoth the poster:
Either we disagree on what is meant by "memorization" or the poster has a much happier experience with it than I. People who memorize almost universally memorize the end result, not the fundamental equation and the process leading to an end result. I agree that those who need to look at an equation sheet to begin a solution are generally beyond salvation. But those who use it to check the exact form of a result or to confirm their memory have usually, in my experience, done better both at problem solving and comprehension of the underlying phenomena.And that's all I rant on for now.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
A simple Darwinian culling will occur for those who cannot effectively utilize the Net ... and isn't testing that skill worthwhile as well?
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
There are other examples. Ever try to numerically find the capacitance per unit length of a coax-type cable where the inner conductor is actually off-center? It can be a real bitch numerically - but applying logic with flow lines and equipotentials can result in a graphical solution that may not be precise to the 19th decimal point, but it's a ballpark figure that's pretty damn easy.
You're at the corner of second avenue and fifteenth street. Assume the street numbers increase as you go south and the avenue numbers increase as you go east. Assuming you cannot move westward or southward, how many different routes are there to get to the corner of 7th avenue and 20th street?
Apply logic and it's dead easy. Trying numerically can be rubber room material.
There may be Universities that teach people how to solve complex differential equations in their heads, but this class focuses on sheer problem solving skills. And that's exactly what engineering is - problem solving.
Whoa! Could you maybe generalize your argument a little more? I mean, three totally BS blanket statements just isn't enough for me. Try for five.
Here's where you're logic fails:
Cost for college: Whadda you go to some totally exclusive school demanding $26k in tuition a year?
I think if you check out www.cheapasslandgrantuniversity.edu, you'll find schools like North Dakota State University or South Dakota State University, or Oklahoma State University are pretty affordable. SDSU for example has a yearly tution of a whopping $5000, and that's for an engineering student who pays more per credit than other majors.
The laptop business:
Since when do schools assume students have a computer? If they did would they blow huge bucks on making public computer labs? It would be cheaper to buy a site license for software and give it out to all the students who, because their parents pull in 6 figure salaries, can get that $3500 thinkpad. I mean after all, a $3500 laptop is really just a drop in the bucket when you pay $5000 in tuition right?
At this university, there's a fair amount of kids who come from Pakistan, India, Malaysia, and Bangladesh. Now, they travel half way around the world just to come here. They work their assess off at 40hr a week jobs to pay the bills. The *last* thing they want to find out is that in order to compete at the same level, they need to get a laptop, wireless modem AND dialup internet?
This open laptop tesing has little to do with academics and everything to do with money.
If a teacher is writing tests in such a way that all one needs to do is rephrase a quote from the internet, he is cheating the students.
An equitable approach would be to allow the use of printouts from the Internet, taped into the class textbook. In this way it wouldn't be a test of "who can use topclick the fastest and construct the best query" It would be a test of comprehension.
No sig is worth reading.
In this country you must have a laptop to work in a factory !
I don't think that the issue of forcing students to buy laptops when they come into the school is a bad thing. People here are arguing that it would weed out people who cannot afford them, this is wrong.
College already weeds out people who can't afford it, except those who are incredibly bright and can obtain a significant scholarship(sp?), and until college is fully funded by the state, it will have to stay that way. I am aware of several schools that require the purchase of a laptop, and at all of those, if someone cannot afford one, they will be assisted in purchasing one. Laptops are also an immense boon to studying, allowing students to use electronic resources anywhere they need to. If a school does not require (with an assistance program) laptops, then there will be people who will miss out on these beneficial tools, and who will not be given an equal chance to learn.
As for using open internet testing, there are many methods for flagrant abuse, so unless network traffic is monitored, it probably isn't a good idea. But I do think that it would be good if each student were given a lab computer with the resources needed on the test, it would be a great idea, since open notes/book tests are very aggravating in that you have to dig through lots of useless material to find what you want. If the resources were provided in electronic, indexed form, you could search them to find what you need immediatly.
Hmmm - at the presentation I went to aboot Caltech they said they let ppl work on tests anywhere like in the dorm or at lunch and they have an honor code which ppl follow. Seems the honor code would help here (if it's followed :))
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%E5%8D%8D&bt
There is a wireless network how-to here that shows you how to modify an off-the-shelf 2.4 GHz card (Symphony) for higher power, and has some notes on wireless network security.
A person who can visualize regions of electron density the way most people can visuzlize legos has achieved mastery. A person who can merely rattle off constants has not.
In order to attain mastery of a subject, one must struggle through lots and lots of details, and undergraduate exams are mostly about testing a student's grasp of these details. But the ultimate goal of advanced education is to produce masters.
I would even go so far as to say that most undergrads needn't worry overly about committing all of these details to memory because they do not yet know which of them they will actually use in their careers (graduate or otherwise). When they start doing real work, they will naturally commit certain oft-used facts to memory. Others, they will just as naturally forget, and never miss them.
What matters in undergraduate education (other than beer ;) is that students gain sufficient background knowledge to be able to understand complex problems, and begin to think about them in relevant ways. From this all things proceed.
--
Socrates was asked where he was from. He replied not "Athens," but "The world."
Hypocrite 1: I'm planning on making my history exams a little more information highway internet society technology IT futurish by letting people have access to the net while taking the test. What do you think?
Hypocrite 2: Well, the idea sucks, and nobody will ever learn anything that way since it will only test how well, not to mention fast, people can spell altavista, but heck, maybe we'd get some more funds and get mentioned on /. for being on the right track, so why noy?
Hypocrite 1: Yeah, that was the plan. Of course, it's a shame noone will ever learn jack shit in any class of any kind ever again if this sort of things get accepted, but that's just something we'll have to take. After all, how could a good education possibly be more valuable than that new coffea machine we could buy with more funds?
Hypocrite 2: Well spoken. Of course, I would prefer a couple of good pornos, but we can skip that discussion for now.
Hypocrite 1: Urhm.. ok. Well, anyway, see you next break, I think I just heard the bell. It's time to go make these little suckers pay for being born in this ridiculously messed up hypocratic age of information hysteria.
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before. - Dwight D. Eisenhower
If someone can afford a couple of textbooks at the ridiculous prices those things go for, they can certainly afford a decent laptop. I'm sitting here surfing the web, reading my e-mail, reading SlashDot, and looking over some Perl code I've been working on, all on a Compaq LTE Elite 486/75 running FreeBSD. It has a beautiful active-matrix color display, a built-in trackball, a PCMCIA ethernet card, and a 33.6K modem. Total cost: about $175, used, from ePay. Some of the functionality is provided by our server, but then if a school is going require laptops, I would imagine they could scrape together a server or six which students could access via their laptops from their dorm rooms. Stick a copy of RedHat and Star Office (or whatever it's being called these days) on a sub-$200 laptop, and you're in business. I think the whole concept is great; I know when I was in school, I kept thinking "Okay - I can think circles around most of these people, but why do I have to _memorize_ all this stuff and regurgitate it on paper during exams?" Unless I'm stuck on Gilligan's Island, I can _probably_ find a reference book or two to look up the information. And _that_ was before the marvelous Internet, which lets you find all kinds of useful (and useless...) information at a few keystrokes. People need exposure to the tools of the trade when they're in school, and those tools are computers for most college graduates today.
"What about that time we caught you naked in the kitchen with a bowl of Jello?!?" "Hey-I was HOT and I was HUNGRY!!!"
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's, eh? :)
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Engineering is not "higher education." It is merely trade-specific training. Just because you learn integrals instead of some sort of manual labor doesn't change that.
With the price of hardware ever plummeting it won't be to long before all educational establishments have the capital to purchase laptops if te students cannot.
The idea behind this and other open-boot tests is that you still have to come prepared, because if you have to look up every answer you won't have time to finish the test.
That's still not a great way of doing things. If you're good, you can still look up most of the answers, finish on time, and get a good grade (trust me, I've done this). People keep talking about tests being only about rote memorization here, and that's not strictly the case. They're also to see how well you prepared for the task, how well you can pick the important stuff out from the chaff, and the like. Believe it or not, these are also important skills.
All told, I wouldn't care if a test was open-laptop or not, seeing as I have no laptop anyway. Unless, of course, they let me bring in my PalmIII.
Finally a college that "gets it".
;'s, etc...)
Learning stuff - especially computer stuff, isn't all about memorization and regurgitation. It's about finding the information you need quickly and efficiently, and knowing how to use that information.
In the "real world" (and I'm NOT talking about the crappy made-for-MTV shows -- blech!) if you are given a problem to solve, you can use every resource at your disposal to solve the problem.
I've taken programming classes where the exams expected you to hand-write a 200+ line C program on the back of the exam sheet. Um...hello? When are you ever going to have to hand-write code? When is hand-written code useful? It can't be executed, debugged, or otherwise used in any useful fashion. (That was actually my answer to that question on the exam - the prof was cool about it and gave me 1/4 credit for pointing out how pointless it was, considering all the coursework was done on comps running a *nice* emacs setup)
In the "real world" if I'm asked to write a program, chances are, I already have some boilerplate code I can throw in to start from, as well as some re-usable code from other projects. I'll probably have at least 1/2 the code for the project done in the first 5-10 minutes - with the other half being the project-specific code.
If I need to check my syntax, I have reference books within easy reach. If I need help paring down the code or figuring out an algorithm, there are people I can email, mailing lists and newsgroups, search engines, etc... If I need quick answers, there's always IRC (or ICQ if someone clued-in happens to be on).
In short, there are TONS of resources available, as long as you know how to use them. It's silly for exams to be given in any other context than a "real world" situation. When you're programming, you will be using an editor of some sort - probably one with syntax highlighting and other features to help eliminate the sillier mistakes (forgetting to close quotes/braces, forgetting
Now, the article doesn't mention whether or not it was a computer course -- but I can imagine many of the same tenets would be applicable to other studies as well. The info is out there. The help is out there. It's rather silly not to use it.
Which uni was this at, btw?
Acadia University, in Nova Scotia, Canada, uses laptops to some degree or another for all of its courses. If you do not have a laptop one will be provided. Every room includeing residence is wired with multiple ethernet jacks. Acadia is an very good small university with an excellent CS program. While the fees are a little high by Canadian standards the cerriculum is cutting edge.
1)cheating
its fairly easy to cheat now without a computer. i mean, realistically, if you want to cheat nowadays, it really isnt that hard. that's why so many schools push the honor code- because they know they cant prevent it from happening. the college i go to, the professor doesnt even stay in the room for most of the exams. a lot of places probably arent that trusting, but schools could do a lot more to try to prevent cheating and most of them dont bother because they know people WILL get around it if they have to. (ie putting formulas and things into their graphing calculators, etc)
2) effect on what exams really test
people used to make the same arguments about what calculator use would do to math exams. while some of it is true, the best thing to do is probably to formulate the exam questions with the use of a laptop in mind. in other words, less memorization/core-dumping of facts and more critical thought, just as calculators encourage more problem-solving and less rote formula crunching. is this really a bad thing?
3) inevitability
in a couple of years, i think it will be impossible to prevent people from bring a computer to exams anyway. with the whole internet appliance thing and the future as envisioned by those wearable computer folks, people are going to be toting computers around with them whereever they go.
unc_
My point exactly ! These "take home exams" perform the same function as homework assignments, they are not really exams in the traditional sense, and shouldn't be used as a direct substitute for traditional exams. Either you do want students to be able to do their own in depth research for the assesment in question, or you don't.
If you do want the student to be able to do some real research and information gathering, then a take home exam gives the students the opportunity to adress more in-depth questions. ( BTW, I'm studying PhD in math. I agree that you can't put hard proofs on exams. Even qualifying exam questions are usually of the "follow-your-nose" variety. ) There is no advantage to having an exam for this kind of thing.
On the other hand, if you don't want in depth research or very tough questions to be a part of the assesment, there is no advantage of offering unrestricted web access.
Once we have real AI, people will ask "why should I need to think" ? The point is that these skills are essential . Integration involves more problem solving than it does memorization. These skills are essential to solve problems you encounter later on, many of which are too general for a calculator to solve.
you don't have to spend hours memorizing regular expression syntax
No, you don't because you can memorize most of what you need in a few minutes ( or after writing one or two programs ).
because you have your "Perl in a Nutshell" book on the desk, and you'll memorize eventually by doing anyway
Just owning the book won't help you memorize. You need to use the book. The students who do their homework will learn the basic syntax as a by product.
I think the ability to find information is going to become much more important than being able to memorize it.
This is important, and you evaluate these skills with research projects and take home exams, you don't evaluate these skills in class.
There's far too much out there to be able to know it all, and the people who will excel are the people who know where to find information they need in short order.
However, the people who lack basic competency and don't do their homework ( which is what the exams test for ) will not excel at anything.
However I think this is an inherent fault of technology and its associated cost;
At least within the US, a used desktop is cheap , or even free.
We have a similar situation in my calculus class. 3 or 4 of us have TI-89s that will integrate or differentiate almost anything, which makes taking tests a matter of button pushing. I personally work everything out on pencil and paper and check myself with the calculator, but some don't.
I can't imagine a consciencious professor who would accept a mathematical or scientific solution in final result form. All professors I've ever had REQUIRED disclosure of complete work. We all know that, in the end, anyone who takes the above sort of 'short-cut' is shooting themselves in the foot.
But the ability to take examinations online with a full lap-top, opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities. In Calculus, what's to prevent someone from installing Mathematica? What's to stop someone from setting up a collaborative software, linked back to a room of better-informed friends?
Then again, most college professors are not stupid. Those that opt for open-media examinations set up the tests in such a way that digging for information is not the skill being tested. Creative writing under timed conditions, on an assigned topic, makes the internet pretty useless - since you haven't much time to search, you can't creatively plagerize - you MUST do your own work.
Ultimately, I think that this sort of testing is the way of the future. Facts and information are becoming trivially easy to locate - why force people to memorize it? Education is becoming more about understanding, and learning to manipulate the concepts, not the facts.
Sure, you need to know the basics, but how many of us in the 'working world' function without relying on reference books, the net and our collegues? Facts are easy to find, but if you don't know what to do with them, you sink.
As for the rich-poor gap... Bah! Computers are becoming dirt cheap, especially compared to the cost of education. The upcoming web-pads (a'la Crusoe) will sell for the cost of a schoolbook in a year or two. For this level of computation, cost is not going to be an issue for long. If you can afford college, you can afford the books, and the laptop (in a year or two mind you).
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Three or four thousand dollars? Where are they making you buy laptops?
...
You can get an operational Pentium III laptop for as little as $999. With an educational discount
The school is already paying for a very high computer-to-student ratio in labs. An excellent argument can be made for making the ratio one-to-one and that computer should then be portable.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
The use of laptops in school is a weird subject to think about, on one hand they're useful and on the other they are a waste of money. As we all know laptops are very expensive and are prone to theft, much more so than my pad of notebook paper and pen (although pens disappear regularly...). I can't really see how any school could require a student to buy a laptop computer upon enrollment, even with assistance, thats an extra 2000$ added to your bills (which at some schools is the price of a semester). Even then there's only a few classes that I could conceive using a laptop in, CS classes would be one and MAYBE math/science classes if you had a really awesome calculator program. An open internet exam doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me in most cases.
I think a better solution to the laptop issue would be for the school to purchase the laptops and then lease or sell them to the students. Included with the laptop would be a wireless networking card that would allow you to access the network from anywhere on campus. Instead of letting you use the whole internet for exams and such, put all the relevant information on the school's intranet (essays, texts, research papers ect.) which the students could access from the classrooms. For students who already own laptops they could merely sell the wireless networking cards. This would allow students not to fully purchase the computer (for a 2k computer it would be about 500$ a year not including interest) and would give them access to all the needed information.
Some schools are the opposite of this wiring idea, they're completely anal about computers in classrooms. My school doesn't allow non-lab computers in the computer labs which means I get yelled at if I take my Powerbook in there. Many teachers are violently opposed to computers in their classrooms, something I can understand well. I would not to be an English teacher in an auditorium that had 150 students typing away on their keyboards. In the Java course I took it sounded like it was raining whenever we all started coding, I couldn't drink a soda before class without paying the consequences. Besides the annoyance factor, laptops are fairly delicate compared to my textbooks and also would cost me a good deal more to be replaced if I threw my bag into the backseat with my laptop in there. On the upside to laptops, it would be nice in alot of classes to have the teacher's notes and slides available on the school's intranet. Not only for use in the classroom but for when I get home and need to go over the notes. Therein lies another problem, some teachers refuse to make electronic copies of their documents. It is alot of work to transfer all of your photographic slides to Powerpoint or turn your handwritten scribbles into nicely formatted notes. Some professors have TAs that can do the dirty work but many do not. Other professors just don't particularly care for computers in general and don't want to use them in class.
All in all sometimes a blackboard, chalk, and some paper have more utility than a computer lab.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
If they all have network connections, they can cooperate. IR ports aren't necessary.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
You should already know the fundamentals, and also know what you don't know
As I said, tests shouldn't be about what you know, but about what you understand. Knowing stuff is just regurgitating facts, and you don't have to "learn" anything to do that. A trained parrot can do that.
The Web is not going to enhance your understanding on any subject. Citing someone else's opinion is useless. The Web would be used, in this case, for gathering facts, not gathering opinions. Again, I'm sure it would depend on the subject matter. Its up to you to draw your own conclusions.
Besides, colleges aren't there to teach facts and data, they are there to teach things like critical thinking, research and writing skills, skills that are very, very valuable in the real world. Facts learned in college don't prepare you for employment...the facts you need to know for any given job will likely be learned on the job. But no employer can teach you how to think or how to write or how to do research...that's what colleges are there for.
My journal has hot
Some schools do supply laptops.
Besides, chances are if you can't afford a laptop, you probably can't afford the tuition, books, housing and other expenses involved with going to a college or university. That's what financial aid is for.
In many colleges, it is now a requirement for students to own a computer, and I know of at least one college that requires the computer to be a laptop.
My journal has hot
Wouldn't this test the student's ability to use search engines and not their proficiency in the subject matter?
Actually, I think this would depend on how the exam is structured.
Remember that really no examination in which you answer a series of multiple choice or fill-in-the-blank, or even short answer questions doesn't really test your mastery of the material. It only tests your ability to memorize and regurgitate facts. How many of you have ever crammed for an exam the night before, took the test, aced it, but then the next day or two totally forget everything you "learned" for the exam? BE HONEST.
On the other hand, an exam with say, four essay type questions really could test your mastery of the material. I mean, for example, "Discuss the imagery used in Hamlet and how it interrelates to the plot." That's even perhaps a little too specific. But you get the idea, hopefully. The idea is the challenge your UNDERSTANDING of the material. To understand the material, you have to know it first.
I honestly don't see how the TRADITIONAL type of exam, in which one regurgitates facts is particular fair or useful.
My journal has hot
Hey, someone has to work in the factories. Of course, then we're putting people in third world countries out of a job.
Once u get to higher levels of education, exams aren't testing your 'knowledge' as much as your ability to solve problems. For all my senior finals for aerospace engineering (and this was 5 years ago) you were allowed to bring in ANYTHING u wanted, as long as it didn't have to be plugged in. We were being tested on your problem solving ability, not being able to remember poissons ratio for aluminium-2120.
If you didn't know what you were doing, you were sunk. Extra resources weren't going to help u.
This is absolutely true. Without exception, every "really good" engineer, scientist, or other professional I've ever worked with had one thing in common: an understanding of the subject so comprehensive that they are at all times able to take any aspect of the discussion all the way back to first principles.
This is the kind of knowledge that allows one to *easily* derive the formulae they haven't memorized, and it's the kind of knowledge one will never develop using the crutch of a calculator to generate symbolic solutions to calculus problems. (BTW: I speak as someone who used such a crutch, and then had to learn the error of my ways once I saw what real engineers (actual rocket scientists, some of them) were expected to know and do.) Schools that allow students to use such aids are robbing their students of the real education they should be receiving.
Knowing how/where to find the answer is a very poor substitute for knowing the answer. Serious thinking is not possible without that knowing.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
They are nifty inventions, but most of the people ere couldn't build one....
O.K., for all of you saying the calculators/computers are a good thing, try this challenge: Without using your calculator or computer, design (and build, if you feel this is too easy) a fully functioning slide rule. I don't think there are very many college students today with an understanding of logarithms (big hint there) adequate to that task...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
NO! If you really know the material, the time limit is never a problem. (See my post above - knowing where/how to find info is not at all the same as knowing it, which implies it is available for immediate recall and use.)
I always loved those exams (too few and far between, admittedly), where I knew the material cold, walked in, aced the test in 20 minutes, checked my answers for another 10 minutes, and walked out confident while those that didn't know and understand the material were sweating it through to the bell.
BTW, one of my better profs used the length of the exam, even in an open book situation, as the mechanism to separate those that knew from those that didn't. If you knew the material, you had time to finish - if you didn't, you soon found you didn't have enough time to look everything up. Excellent tests, excellent testing method, and they produced a class of students that did know the material.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
I'll bet you a big bag full of Helium-3 filled buckyballs that your PC or calculator is obsolete before the spiral notebook.
In fact, I'll bet the entire concept of PCs is obsolete before the spiral notebook.
Oh, and even acid-based paper spiral notebooks can be reasonably expected to preserve their information for a century or so with no power and little liklihood of the data format becoming unreadable.
Somehow, that spiral notebook doesn't look so obsolete after all, does it?
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Definitely. I never could understand the validity of a high-pressure, stress-inducing 2 hour session of answering questions as a true test of what I had learned in 3 and a half months of study. What I have learned is what I have learned, and a better measure of that is how well I can utilized it under real world conditions. A traditional exam setting is about as far from a real world simulation as you can get.
The artificiality of the exam situation is highly suspect as a measure of an individual's true knowledge and their ability to apply that knowledge. It also represents the failure of schools to do true QA on their main product, educating people.
It would be much better to monitor students throughout the duration of the course and grade them on their overall progress.
Ideology is for ideots.
I guess I have mixed feelings on this issue -- although I do agree with you that having a laptop at college is a worthwhile cause, I don't believe it should be an integral part of one's education. Simply because a good education has so little to do with a laptop. It's a handy tool, but the focus should remain on more imporant things.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
That's just it - good tests force you to do things symbolically (though Maple and Mathematica can help you cheat a little there), but a good "show all work" kinda thing is really the point.
Integrate this from 5 to 12, integrate this from t0 to t1, show me an example graph with different values of w all on the same plot, and explain what this means show an increasing amount of knowledge on the student's part. The first is trivial with a calculator or laptop. The second requires several steps, and may need some work with it. The third could be done with a graphing calc, but it would still require some understanding to put things on the same graph. The fourth is the kind of analysis that you really want to get at, most notably in an Electromagnetics course, where you've got all sorts of great 'div, grad, curl and all that' equations, but what does any of it mean? I'm still happier with an engineer that can explain to me how something works than one who can crank through needless calculations, but cranking away is often part of the path to understanding.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Why, back when I was at RPI, they were just starting off the studio class programs... I was in normal physics/calc, and I had some friends in the studio / pilot laptop versions of these courses. Our take on that? The laptop versions were way easier, and you got less out of it, partly because the curriculum was different, and nobody was used to teaching this way yet. But by my senior year, it had been decided that the laptop program was in for good. At first they said that the laptops were not going to be part of your tution, and not even considered with financial aid (yikes!), but they seem to have relented there, and the software discounts from the conputer store aren't all that bad. I still think that mandating laptops and focusing a greater number of courses around them is a poor idea, though it does have its place. Unfortunately, I think that Calc 1 should *never* be one of those places - learn it, then learn to use the computer to do it. But learn it first. Maple is your friend (gosh, the earlier versions were so awful), but if you don't understand what it is doing, you're not gaining anything.
All that being said, your education is what you make of it. Laptops or not, graphical calculators or not, you still have the opportunity to learn a lot of neat and important things, and it's your decision to deprive yourself of that knowledge.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
A friend of mine has a slide rule mouted on a plaque with a little plate that says "Use in case of emergency" or something like that. Pretty good. I'm thinking of mounting one of the slide rules I have around (2 right now - one 'pocket' rule, and one larger, more accurate one). Pretty nifty inventions.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
um.... ok... if you are talking about Chubb or ITT tech 'engineering'. Of course, that's not a real school, and not real engineering.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
At Caltech we had open book take-home exams in some classes--but that didn't mean that things were any easier. In fact, in those classes the questions would be corrispondingly harder.
One math class I had, an abstract algaebra class, our midterms was open-book, take home, and was handed to us four weeks before the test was due. And it had only one question.
Simple? HAH!
"Classify all simple rings of size less than or equal to order 60 up to isomorphism. Show all work."
I hated that class.
I can't wait for the "Open Answer" tests, where you can make up any answer you want and it is correct. Or you can just copy them over from the answer sheet they provide you.
Anybody ogling at how cool this is also realize how stupid it is?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I did fairly well in the course, so I didn't complain even though I don't own a laptop. It seemed kind of unfair, however but I think my professor probably figured that it didn't matter that much. I mean after all there was a time limit, what were the students going to do, write each algorithm into a program and then try to run it on a computer to make sure they had the right answer?
No, the only thing I think the professor should've done was allow a whole notebook worth of notes, since the storage on the laptop was much greater than just one sheet of paper (or a TI-85.) (Please note, laptops were allowed but not modems, that's a big difference. My professor assumed "modem==outside help" and would allow rampant cheating.)
My personal opinion is that, in an ideal world, there would be a standard computer lab where everyone would take their exams on school computers.
Unlikely to happen at my school though, they'd rather spend money on the football team.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
If you have all this trouble yourself with using the web, and you let it get to you like that, then you're probably not worth hiring for a high tech job.
You mean you've never accessed a site and had it be dog slow? You've never been unable to connect to a favorite site? What if the college network drags to a crawl because some new game demo just came out?
Setting up a special web site containing notes and such, yeah that's clever, but it's hardly the point. You would be much smarter to just photocopy the notes and bring them to class. Or put them on your laptop and search for the information in a local file. In a high pressure situation, you go for the most reliable solution.
Searching the web can be *infuriating*, especially if the local network is bogged down or a site you need to access is having trouble. I love the web, but I have to admit that finding information on it can soak up a surprising amount of time. If I had an exam like this, I'd think the ability to online searches was a red herring; if you took advantage of it, you'd never get anywhere, just as if you were allowed to take a 50 minute math exam with in a room filled with math texts,
An excellent test under real-world conditions. Who hasn't been distracted by Slashdot while "working from home"?
I agree with you about this to some extent. Particularly when you say when a person who needs to just look at a sheet to confirm memory. I don't think however, this is the kind of learning that the open net test will encourage. I think that this net test will encourage people to not look at the equations at all and just look them up during the test. The process of trying to memorize the equations leads to a lot of understanding on what they do. I'm not saying you should have them utterly memorized (though I probably sounded like that in my post) but you should be very comfortable with them. At least in my experiance, if I try to spend a while trying to memorize the equations, it is much easier for me to go through a problem because I basically already know where each piece of the problem will go.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I'm not quite sure if this is a good idea or not. I can see some places where this might work, plaes that generally do groups exams and such anyway, but isn't this really condusive to cheating? Or even if a person doesn't cheat, what do they learn if they can immediatly just look up the information on the net? Now you may say the memorizing needless facts that can be looked up anyway should not be important. To some extent I agree, but memorizing facts leads to a much stronger understanding of whats going on. Say I'm working on a complex physics problem. If I don't have all of the equations I need to know down cold, I probably won't be able to use them together to solve a problem. Memorizing doesn't just ential knowing each term of an equations. Memorizing leads to a deep understanding of that concept, how and where to use it, and any details about using it. A person who needs to look these equations up will be nowhere near as succesful on a problem as one who knows them by heart because the person who has memorized them knows every detail about them and knows how to use them together to solve a problem.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Many students don't pay the full listed price when attending universities, due to grants, making up the gap with loans. This means that a fairly poor student may be able to attend a *nominally* expensive school with far less net expense than listed, leaving with a degree of student debt that's less than expected. However, such a student may not be able to afford the *additional* expense of a laptop.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
How would taking a laptop in help on a high-level math test? Then there's the composition/essay tests like in philosophy... 'Please search the net for your opinion and turn it in...'
This may serve to further weed out the dumb ones. When taking a test, the idiots would rely on the answers to the questions being on the net somewhere. Where the smart ones would actually study and spend the test time actually thinking about the answer.
I gotta wonder how they're going to keep people from cheating... What are they going to do, watch everyone like a hawk to make sure they're not emailing their friends?
I just think this is a bad idea. Maybe with a firewalled net appliance with no email program enabled you could keep people from cheating. Who knows? Maybe this is a useful life skill, learning how to rely on someone else's work to get ahead. But I'm a cynic.
It'd be fun to put up some good spider food for this purpose, fake answers and stupid ideas. You could have a lot of fun with this, messing around with freshmen... Did I mention that I'm both a cynic and a jerk? Thought so.
Then again, here I am about to put up an example program website, I guess I'll have to make it clear to everyone that they shouldn't use it for tests in comsci...
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
Someone has to design your TI-89. They can't use a calculator to design itself when it hasn't yet been designed.
Someone has to write your Perl in a Nutshell book, etc. etc. If we start relying on knowledge passed down from those who came before us in the form of machines and textbooks, we'll be screwed if we ever have to come up with something ourselves.
Just another way of looking at this..
kugano
A) Reading text off the sreen is not a skill (I have software that will do that).
B) C&Ping text from one document to another is not a skill, (I can do that)
C) Figuring out how to quickly find data is not a skill. (I have search engines that will do that).
D)Organizing and filing this information is not a skill. (I have a database do that).
If you really want to set your sights on achieving such resume' items such as Google master, and Dogpile guru you're setting your sights to low, and people won't pay well for those services.
What companies need is people who have a deep understanding of the issues challenging the company, and how to take the next step with confidence. This requires a person to work well with a team to provide intuative answers everyday, all day, off the top of your head in order to form and consesis and build enough confidence to move forward.
If you're asked questions by your fellow co-workers and are constantly refering to a web site for trivial answers on the topic you've majored in, then you're selling me on the web site, not yourself. What the company would need to do, in that case, is get the team access to the sites you're refering to and stop wasting time asking you questions.
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The use of books came with the loss of oral history. The use of pocket calculators came with the loss of the slide rule.
As long as you know the basics, you're not screwed at all. The reason we do long multiplication (or learn poems) in school, for instance, isn't that we need the skill, these days, but to understand the principles so that (a) you get the understanding and (b) you can fall back on it if the calculator's batteries give out.
You can do without all the fancy Internet searches or computers or calculators or books. It would take a lot longer, though. In fact it would take so much longer that you wouldn't be able to come up with something new in the field in the first place.
Because you need to know how to ask the machine the right question.
I would put up big money on the bet that kids who learn to do calculus on paper are much better at applying their knowledge than kids who learn using calculators.
At some point, if you're lucky, you realize that education isn't about learning the answer to every question- it's about learning how to answer the questions.
-cwk.
Much like the take-home exam, the questions need to appropriate for such a test. I would love to give a test like this, advertised as open web and then I'd put questions on the test that could be answered quickly by a student who knows how to solve the problem. I'd put enough of these questions on the test to make it time limited, with ONE question that would require 10 minutes of net research. The real test would be for the student to recognize which question requires info they have not been given in the course and see if they can find it quickly. Students who surf for all the answers get hosed.
I'd tell the students my strategy beforehand so as not be tricking them.
As many others have already noted this would have to be firewalled and monitored apropriately to prevent cheating. Set it up for http requests only and snif all packets so you can investigate suspicious test answers for cheating.
In the real world, if your boss asks you a straitforward technical question you are expected to answer it immediately, if the question if difficult and you find the answer on the net you are considered resourceful.
no sig.
I see the time frame is more restricted in this case, and also the bandwidth between the student is limited. I don't see how this make up for a wholy different kind of tests though.
oh yeah, and all this shit about how laptops split the poor from the rich is irrelevant to this story. This discussion happed when universities started first considering those kind of policies.
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This post was compiled with `% gec -O`. email me if you need the sources
This school requires every incoming freshman to purchase a laptop. I think that this is a great policy. We are turning into an information society, and especially engineers need to have as much information available to them.. Many people will whine and complain about how this is cheating, but in the real world, one can and should use any information possible, it does not need to be memorized, just accessible. What colleges teach is not information, but how to use information.
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
What I meant in that paragraph is that much of the learning that required expensive private tutors just a century ago will be available cheaply (or freely) over computerized networks that allow students' curiosity to control learning.
And (risking mutilation from my family and friends who are teachers), I can imagine a day when computerized systems might be so advanced that they make most teachers obsolete. People worry about how "impersonal" distance education will be, forgetting that any distance education over the Internet will be far more engaging than the "personal" education common for much of human history (like scholastic monks learning from thick handwritten books in the Middle Ages) or even U.S. history (recall the image of Abe Lincoln reading books by firelight).
Also, many students have been scarred, not helped, by teachers and peers in our public education system, and this might provide some relief.
A. Keiper
How good of a programmer are you if it takes you three hours to write a "hello world" program?
Fight Spammers!
Fight Spammers!
Why would you have people taking the exam help you? Why not set up a few "life lines" to experts in the field? Having classmates help would be like the blind leading the blind.
Fight Spammers!
at a university? wow.
I mean this is a good thing. The questions asked will be on how to apply the knowledge, not the knowledge of the knowlege itself. That in itself is invaluable. I wish high schools worked that way but many are still stuck on the "To get the answer right, you must do it exactly how we taught. If you skip steps or do it another (valid) way, you will fail."
The part about requiring a laptop and wireless access is kind of stupid if you ask me. Why laptops? What's wrong with using the lab computers? Making each student procure a laptop is a little silly and tends to weed out the poor from the rich kids.
As far as the infrared sharing goes, You could bathe the room in randomly modulated infrared light. Or simpler, just get some bright orange electrical tape and cover the infrared port. Think of it though. All these guys are connected to the 'net. What's so hard about firing up an ICQ ActiveList or IRC or even plain email?
I have consistently found that the people who I considered to have learned the best are almost all people who are willing to sit down with large bodies of information and master them.
:-(
Sure, "Learning to Learn" sounds great. But realistically the way you learn to learn is to develop enough knowledge that anything you go to learn fits in a context. The specific facts usually don't matter so much as the context - if one person hears 1812 and thinks to the US invasion of Canada, and another thinks of Napoleon, both will have a context and will have a far easier time fitting the fact into their brains than someone with no grasp of history. (The one who thinks Napoleon will have an easier time with remembering what the 1812 overture is about though!)
I will leave the specifics of your calculus class for another time. Suffice it to say that if you do not conceptually understand how the math works, you won't be able to comprehend a lot of things down the road. But hey, you can still get a job for big bucks in Silicon Valley or on Wall St, so why does it matter?
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
When I took basic physics during my short college career, the professor let us bring a 3x5 card to class for the test. We could write anything we wanted on it -- the all-important formulas, the entire textbook, Verdi's opera scores.
Of course, the only thing that would really help were the formulas that applied to the subject matter, but you had to know which formula to use, and how to use it. The professor wanted to test our understanding of the subject matter, not our memorization skills.
Sure, one could possibly find the exact problem on-line, but unless this is an unlimited-time test, you'd be a lot better off knowing the subject matter (and perhaps looking up some formulas) than trying to do your studying during the test.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
Sounds like a spiffy idea at the outset, but, keep in mind that quite a few laptops these days have IR ports on them. Nothing prevents you and your neighbor from sharing/comparing your answers. It defeats the whole purpose of having a test in the first place -- a test is meant to determine how well you've aquired a certain skill or chunk of knowledge -- not how fast you can _retrieve_ that knowledge from a secondary source. Friend in the seat next to you, internet, or otherwise.
Then again, if you trust anything you read on the Internet, you deserve to fail.
Written from my happy IR-equipped Thinkpad,
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://propaganda.themes.org)
Bowie J. Poag
At Western Washington University students are required to have a TI-82 calculator or better to take math courses.
This causes 2 problems. First off, the teachers are so dependent on their calculators they only know how to tell students which buttons to push. If Tommy bought a TI-86, he can just forget about getting help from the Professor because his buttons are different.
The second problem occurs when little Johnny buys a TI-92 calculator that is capable of solving more problems. He doesn't even need to understand calculus to pass the class... he just punches in the integral and presto! The answer appears magically. Meanwhile his fellow students who know what an integral is... are struggeling to find which sequence of buttons they need to push on their calculators to do the same thing.
End Result: Johnny gets an A because he spent $100 more on his calculator than Tommy. Tommy gets a C not because he can't find a derivative, but because he spent too much time trying to learn which buttons to push.
Most sigs are dumb. This is one of them.
And all for what? What does a student really learn from having a laptop? How to take care of a laptop? That's about it. Sometimes technology is just for technology's sake and it often has no place in our education system.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
What about the fact that 99% of people out there can't afford laptops, or who could only afford a much less reliable laptop than others?
Surely until such time as everyone could afford a suitable laptop, or the school were prepared to provide the laptops, then this would be an extremely discriminatory practice?
We have a similar situation in my calculus class. 3 or 4 of us have TI-89s that will integrate or differentiate almost anything, which makes taking tests a matter of button pushing. I personally work everything out on pencil and paper and check myself with the calculator, but some don't.
It's unfair, but at the same time, why is it important to know how to do everything by hand if you know how to make a machine do it for you? You don't have to memorize the periodic table because you can look at it, you don't have to draw graphs by plotting (x,y) coordinates because a calculator will do it for you, and you don't have to spend hours memorizing regular expression syntax because you have your "Perl in a Nutshell" book on the desk, and you'll memorize eventually by doing anyway.
I think the ability to find information is going to become much more important than being able to memorize it. There's far too much out there to be able to know it all, and the people who will excel are the people who know where to find information they need in short order.
Unfortunately, I agree that this will widen the rich-poor gap in education. However I think this is an inherent fault of technology and its associated cost; it would be counterproductive to fight it, and turn out students who do everything the old-fashioned way because some people couldn't afford the tools to make it easier. You could hardly voice your support for a woodworking class that used only non-electric tools because not everyone could afford jigsaws and drills.
While this may be considered cheating in the current academic climate, I think this kind of thing is going to be the porthole to a whole new way of thinking. What is tested in schools now is mostly the ability of a student to retain knowledge. While this is an inarguably useful trait, anyone can memorize a given sum of information with a certain amount of time on their hands. So as a result, school is easier for some students and much more frustrating for others.
What if, instead of being tested on how much the brain can retain, we are tested on how fast the brain can use all of it's available resources to find the information it needs to complete a given problem. That tests creativity, adaptability and resourcefulness rather than just memorization. These traits are much more important in my eyes for life than memorization is.
Now that we are entering the information age and so much information is being linked together in such a way that is can be easily associated with other relevant information, the information itself becomes less important than its meaning with respect to the information associated with it.
For now, we will have to use laptops/cellmodems or workstations/ethernet, but eventually when we all have wireless implants, this kind of testing will be the only way to go since everyone will have instant access to all of the information they need and memorization will no longer be restricted to the unpredicatble nature of the human brain. at least I hope so...
//Phizzy
"Most European technology just isn't worth our stealing," -- Former CIA chief James Woolsey, referring to Echelon
A century ago, wealthy families would spend huge sums so tutors could pay individual attention to a student. Now we can envision a day when all students get individual attention, from computerized teaching systems that have instant access to information unobtainable scant years ago.
Already there are online - and accredited - high school and university classes. Soon, neither work nor age nor location will impede your continuing education.
What's more, technology is not just changing how we learn, but what we learn. As others here have noted, we're moving to a system wherein the teaching of information literacy is becoming more common. But what does that mean? Does it merely mean the ability to navigate your way to the information you need? Or does it mean we will become know-nothings, unable to make the simple associations of knowledge that are possible when facts have been crammed into our mind by brute force? Santayana famously said that those who are not familiar with history are "doomed to repeat it"; if you don't know history, but merely know where to find it, are you doomed to repeat it? It's up in the air.
We have a number of articles on this topic on our Education page.
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
But you have to run some software from to take the exam.
This software will prevent someone from loading other packages during the exam. I guess they think that a lawyer would cheat on a bar exam. Nah, of course not. :)
Fight Spammers!
There are several reasons why this idea is flawed. Firstly, a fair exam requires that nobody in the exam can communicate with anyone else in the world during the exam. Anyone with a basic knowledge of cgi programming could easily cheat by punching the questions into a web form, having arranged previously for someone not taking the exam to collect this input and send some valid answers
Secondly, equal opportunity. Laptops aint cheap.
Thirdly, security. There's always going to be one kid in the class who leaves a script somewhere on the net to take out half his classmates. Even one successful DoS attack per exam would make the technique unacceptable. Firewalls? Well, how about using a small 2.4GHz frequency jammer. You can at least postpone the exam.
I mean, if you're going to allow connectivity and communication, you might as well take away the time limit and call it "course work"
A good education teaches you ways to think, and solve problems, not just to use tools. We "geeks" are often guilty of viewing technology as an end in itself, and not simply as a tool, which is what it is.
Colleges too often fall victim to academic fads, the most recent of which is this apply-technology-to-everything silliness. The real tragedy is that in the rush to embrace the latest Big Thing, money often gets redirected away from things like hiring more or better faculty.
-cwk.
Wouldn't this test the student's ability to use search engines and not their proficiency in the subject matter? Last week I found an example using google that was exactly the same as a problem on my Vector Calc problem set, with the only differences in the wording. If I could find an exact problem on the subject of line integrals, imagine what one could find on a subject like Hamlet or American History...?
-j
-sigs of the world unite
What about the fact that 99% of people out there can't afford laptops, or who could only afford a much less reliable laptop than others?
Surely until such time as everyone could afford a suitable laptop, or the school were prepared to provide the laptops, then this would be an extremely discriminatory practice?
While the idea is kinda neat, the fact is in an exam like that the person with the better laptop who could (for example) view more information on screen or get audio data along with plain text, would have a distinct and unfair advantage?
Just seems that way to me...
Interestingly, one of the other students in the class took it uppon himself to memorize the button locations on his calculator that produced the desired result. When his calculator broke and was replaced with a new one (one of those old TIs with the row of red numbers) he was lost, and had to learn the interface all over again. The problem there was, he was concentrating on the answer instead of the process (the what, not the why).
The same problem still exists today with the use of internet gateways in the learning process. It can speed things up a lot, but the emphisis should be on the content, not the means of aquireing it. Supose little johnny builds himself a well anotated bookmark file of content rich sites that provide him with the answeres being posed in the class. This may get him through the semester, but without understanding the relationship between those answeres (the why behind the what) nothing is learnd. Sure, little johny has learned how to query his favorite search engine and filter content, but after graduation, when he's asked one day to come up with a presentation on the subject he's majored in from a hotel room, with no net access, the depth of his understanding will be tested.
Everyday, little johny will be relied upon from his co-workers as a source of knowledge on the topic he majored on. Being able to provide the team with the answers they need (on the fly, every day, all day )is a the key to a successfull team.
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