Some students who grow up with a wealth of information at their fingertips — on smartphones, tablets and laptops — call working together on a test collaborating.Their professors call it cheating. Local college officials and students say they’re seeing the same tension that became evident in a cheating scandal that erupted at Harvard University last month.
More than 100 students from a single government class at Harvard are being investigated for cheating on a take-home final where a professor noted that many tests contained similar answers. But some students told The New York Times that collaboration among students is innocent and acceptable.
The Rest.
For the love of Google, would people PULEEZE stop blaming every new fangled, 21st century academic issue on online classes?!?
ReplyDeleteFor crying out loud, the Harvard incident which instigated this latest round of navel gazing began with a take-home exam in a lecture class. Surely, take home exams pre-date online classes, hell, the entire Internet and computers too!
I'm sure there are more than a few people here remember the scene from Animal House where the Deltas try to cheat by finding the mimeograph master of the final exam. MIMEOGRAPH!
There was a news report about Turnitin when it was just starting out and they included several cheating techniques. My "favorite" was writing a tiny notes on the inside of a wrapper on a water bottle. When full, the water would magnify the notes so they were legible, but once the water was consumed, the notes would all but disappear.
So, there you have it .. cheating is as old as water!
The only way out is to put them in little cells, naked, with hidden microphones and cameras.
DeleteAre you willing to send them to Room 101?
At least theoretically, the existence of Google et al. should lead to tests that are designed less to measure factual recall and more to gauge interpretive/evaluative skills. But such tests require scoring by well-educated humans who, in a large class/testing pool, spend some time conferring with each other. And time-consuming pedagogy is not the wave of the future.
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