> Cheating is a social problem. I want to quote Sir Ken Robinson [1]: > They have spent ten years at school being told that there is one answer – it’s at the

> Cheating is a social problem. I want to quote Sir Ken Robinson [1]: > They have spent ten years at school being told that there is one answer – it’s at the back…and don’t look, and don’t copy, because that’s cheating. I mean, outside schools, that’s called collaboration. I don't think cheating is the big picture problem. I think it's how we think of are tests. Imagine a test designed in such a way that you couldn't cheat - or even that collaboration was ok - what would it look like? Could it be an open note/open book test? The way I give tests to my students is open book/open note but not open neighbor. I do this because I'm realistic - memorization is not comprehension and whatever they did memorize will be lost 5 minutes after class ends (they have N other subjects that they need to memorize material for - even though I teach a core class they have much more important things to worry about). My tests are long and short answer but not hard - so if you have been comatose for the lectures you won't do well (I have had people fail my tests...). Some teachers have the one notecard rule and think that they are clever tricking the students to memorize the material - they aren't. You may retain some more information - but it's still the core of the problem memorization != comprehension. Yes I understand some fields do require memorization - such as history or the medical profession. But people don't need to memorize the bubble sort or the binary search algorithms - it's been done a million times and if anyone ever needed it for their career a quick google search would reveal this site [2]. Yes they need to understand it - but they don't need to memorize it. [1] http://edtechnow.net/2012/01/20/sir-ken-robinson/ http://edtechnow.net/2012/01/20/sir-ken-robinson/ [2] http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Binary_search http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Binary_search