Ask Slashdot: How To Allow Test Takers Internet Access, But Minimize Cheating? 330
New submitter linjaaho writes "I work as lecturer in a polytechnic. I think traditional exams are not measuring the problem-solving skills of engineering students, because in normal job you can access the internet and literature when solving problems. And it is frustrating to make equation collections and things like that. It would be much easier and more practical to just let the students use the internet to find information for solving problems. The problem: how can I let the students access the internet and at same time make sure that it is hard enough to cheat, e.g. ask for ready solution for a problem from a site like Openstudy, or help via IRC or similar tool from another student taking the exam? Of course, it is impossible to make it impossible to cheat, but how to make cheating as hard as in traditional exams?"
Re:Whitelist it. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sometime the old ways (Score:5, Funny)
When I had "take-home" tests, I would always forget where I lived.
Re:Whitelist it. (Score:5, Funny)
Panspectral? Not merely multispectral?
Will the students be issued flashlights, or will the tests be administered in braile?
Re:Sometime the old ways (Score:5, Funny)
I had a student once -- Whenever we had an "in-class" test, his mother would always have a heart attack.
Re:Sometime the old ways (Score:5, Funny)
Then stop having in-class tests! My god, you're killing the woman!
Open-note = nearly guaranteed pass (Score:5, Funny)
Many of my engineering classes allowed "formula sheets" or a "formula card", usually a single sheet of paper or a 4x6 index card, that the student was responsible for formulating themselves.
I used this to completely ace the exam in several of my EE classes where I otherwise would have had great difficulty. (Analog just wasn't my thing while becoming a CompE; I rocked my digital and computer classes.)
My tactic: Virtually all professors provide sets of review problems, and the answers to the review problems (along with all homework questions and mid-terms) were on file with the library. I'd go the library and make copies of those materials. I would then go back to my room and pass-through every single homework assignment, mid-term, and review question, and solve every problem to the point where the remainder of the solution was "busy-work." If, after much staring, I simply could not figure out how the professor got from point A to point B, I simply copied the entire solution to that problem (writing very small with a very sharp pencil if I was confined to a card, or just about 3 rounds of reducing on the copy machine if I wasn't) onto my formula sheet/card.
90% of the time, the problems where I had to copy the solutions wholesale onto the card ended up on the exam (with some trivial parts changed), and I was invariably one of the few people in the class to get it right, despite the fact that I had utterly no idea how the solution worked.
Re:Sometime the old ways (Score:2, Funny)
Obligatorily hilarious analysis:
http://www.math.toronto.edu/mpugh/DeadGrandmother.pdf