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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?
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.
It may not be cheating, but it certainly makes cheating easier. Here's my main objection -- the students should basically know everything prior to the exam, and with the help of a cheat-sheet, they should have all the information they need. They shouldn't need dig around to answer the questions. Moreover, research is not the kind of thing that should be performed in an exam room ( IMHO )
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?
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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.
As far as preparing the computers, this could be done easily with a room full of iMAC's that are netbooted from OS X server. If the only application they needed to use was a web brower you wouldn't be discriminating for which OS people use, just provide Netscape, IE and Mozilla (or any others people request) and a two button mouse. Each computer should be the same, running the same setup as provided by the boot server.
I'm sure similar netboot set-ups exist for the PC (or soon will).
no sig.
In a word, "Nah."
When I was in university (about a decade ago), we were usually allowed a 'cheat sheet' with formulas, constants, etc. on it. If you needed more than a few things from it, you were doomed anyways. Some exams were open book--bring in anything you want, except for a live person. Same results--if you really needed those textbooks, you probably weren't going to pass with or without them.
A good exam will test your knowledge, and even having a person on the other end of a phone or computer won't help that much if you don't know your stuff. There will be a few people who can successfully cheat and pass, just like there always have been. They'll continue to be in the minority.
Besides, when you get past first or second year university, there aren't many cheats left because the people remaining are paying LOTS OF MONEY to suffer through hell--they usually want to know the stuff they're supposed to be learning.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
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
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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
In the real world, you don't start a project, and turn in the solution to your box 2 hours later. Exams are designed to test basic knowledge of and competency with the subject matter. They are not designed to test research skills, or skills at solving hard problems, in fact they are woefully inadequate at this.
Obviously, if you lack basic knowledge are woefully incompetent with your subject matter, you will not be of any use in "the real world".
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,
I'd certainly hope they had some skill and/or knowledge. Obviously, it's not the only criterion, but surely, there's a minimum acceptable level ? As a mathematician, I have great problem solving skills, but I'm not much use as an organic chemist, because I don't know anything about chemistry.
Sure, asking for help is OK. Research projects ( which often involve or even require collaboration ) are a good idea. But an exam is not a research project.
so I think all that should matter in university classes is the ability to solve the problems in question
Yes, but how do you measure this accurately ? What if the student pays a tutor to solve the problems ? In this case, the student hasn't solved the problems, a tutor has. And the method the student has used ( paying a tutor to do it ) is not going to be a very succesful strategy in the work place.
There is certainly a place for collaboration, where students work with other students and jointly solve problems ( ie not one person doing the problem for someone else ).
Like it or not, if you're in a university class, you're not doing it for acadaemic purposes anymore.
The fact that grades have become so important makes it all the more important to make sure that the assesment mechanism is fair.
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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