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?

actual learning?

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?

Curious fact that I have noticed

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

Re:sure

Assuming these tests are supposed to be some sort of test of your use in the real world.

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.

Re:unfair testing

It really depends on the subject, but in many cases, if you don't know what to look for, the best search engine won't do you a wit of good.

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.

NOT smart, if you ask me.

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 [themes.org])

better calculator = better grade

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.

Re:More money = better grade at the end?

Yeah, there's nothing like tacking three or four thousand dollars onto already exhorbitant education fees. And there's no sense even comparing the two costs -- a good college education is intended to last the rest of your life (relatively speaking) whereas a laptop is guaranteed to be obsolete by the time you graduate.

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.

-----------

"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

Re:More money = better grade at the end?

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.

!= Cheating.

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

Re:Rose-Hulman

I can't agree with this policy on any level. I paid for my college education practically on my own, receiving very little aid from my parents. I took out loans, worked my ass off, and still, I didn't have anything close to the money to purchase a computer of any sort, let alone a laptop. I don't care how much people say that this is a great example of how people are moving forward in the information age. I say it's an example of how some people are getting left behind in the information age.

technology and education

Technology is giving us new tools for teaching - from the Internet to televisions in the classroom. In 1980, teachers showed their students decades-old educational films. In 1990, teachers showed their students months-old educational videos. Now, with educational TV and Internet content, teachers can show their students news as it breaks.

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 [tecsoc.org].

A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society [tecsoc.org]

Exam software.

I have a friend who is studying for the bar exam in Los Angeles (California). She told me that you now can take the bar exam with a laptop computer.

But you have to run some software from to take the exam. [examsoft.com]

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. :)

Flawed

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"

When you have a hammer...

Everything looks like a nail.

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.

unfair testing

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

Re:Rose-Hulman

This school requires every incoming freshman to purchase a laptop. I think that this is a great policy

Yes, that's fantastic. Good education could do with another way of weeding out the poor.

More money = better grade at the end?

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...

Calulators in math class

I can vividly remember my father (who was a slide-rule toting engineer) being utterly discusted with my school when they asked parents to buy their kids a calculator for math class. I even remember my father taking me down to meet one on one with the math teacher, and my dad getting up on the board to show the teacher a thing or 2 about the subject he was teaching, then going on to argue that the subject of math requires not only the solution, but the means of acquiring that solution.

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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