4 ms·

In Germany it is mandatory (at least that's my experience) to identify oneself with one's ID or driver's license when taking a test at uni. Is there no such pr

In Germany it is mandatory (at least that's my experience) to identify oneself with one's ID or driver's license when taking a test at uni. Is there no such procedure at US institutions?

mkaziz 11y ago
I can remember only once having to take out my ID for a test - and that too was a school ID and not a state one. I went to a high tier midwestern school.
adventured 11y ago
That varies dramatically from one university to another. There's no national standard. Think of each university in the US has having its own culture and way of doing things. Many universities certainly use best practices, but there are no federal regulations on such things as test identification.
theandrewbailey 11y ago
Not where I went. Classes were often small enough that the instructors recognized you (the school itself was also small), and most tests were on the school LMS. Note that not every American has state-issued photo ID, especially among the poor.
fwn 11y ago
It is, however, in it's general implementation not affecting your ability to pay someone to take the test for you.
dagw 11y ago
If you're willing to pay someone to take a test for you, you are probably also willing to pay for a fake ID for them. Or you could find someone who looks close enough to you and hope that no one looks too closely.
Lawtonfogle 11y ago
There is the problem that our ability to recognize and differentiate faces is quite lazy. It basically uses the simplest set of characteristics it can get by with. This creates a problem when someone interacts with very few people sharing some give phenotypes as their heuristic is far less likely to pick up on differences between the generic phenotype. Basically, the less familiar you are with members of a certain group, the more those members look alike. Basically, the stereotype that all <insert group> look alike does happen, NOT because they do look alike, but because to someone who does not know members of that group, their facial recognition system (mental schema) are not developed enough to tell people apart. Think of it like if you trained a neural network to do facial identification by only giving it white people. Compared to a near identical network where the only difference was that it was trained on a cross section of all of earth's people, which would you expect to do a better job?
logfromblammo 11y ago
Well, my professors were all able to associate my name with my face by midterms. A good portion of the teaching assistants were also able to identify me on sight. Though some of them knew me by "Log" rather than my proper name. Strangely enough, the Chemistry Department was better at recognizing me than my own Comp Sci Department. Perhaps it was because my major stood out on the class ranking printouts. In one course, the profs gave out a new CRC Manual as a prize to the top scorer in the class, and they were lucky Sujata Bhatia beat me, because it might have been embarrassing to the department otherwise. Maybe lucky isn't the right word--the lady had mad skills with a molecule. I suppose it would have been theoretically possible for me to have been impersonating another student the entire time I was at university, but so long as I answered to the same name during lectures and labs as I wrote on the test, and that name was paid up on tuition according to the bursar, that was pretty much all the verification that was needed.

In Germany it is mandatory (at least that's my experience) to identify oneself with one's ID or driver's license when taking a test at uni. Is there no such procedure at US institutions?

mkaziz 11y ago

I can remember only once having to take out my ID for a test - and that too was a school ID and not a state one. I went to a high tier midwestern school.

adventured 11y ago

That varies dramatically from one university to another. There's no national standard. Think of each university in the US has having its own culture and way of doing things. Many universities certainly use best practices, but there are no federal regulations on such things as test identification.

theandrewbailey 11y ago

Not where I went. Classes were often small enough that the instructors recognized you (the school itself was also small), and most tests were on the school LMS. Note that not every American has state-issued photo ID, especially among the poor.

fwn 11y ago

It is, however, in it's general implementation not affecting your ability to pay someone to take the test for you.

dagw 11y ago

If you're willing to pay someone to take a test for you, you are probably also willing to pay for a fake ID for them. Or you could find someone who looks close enough to you and hope that no one looks too closely.

Lawtonfogle 11y ago

There is the problem that our ability to recognize and differentiate faces is quite lazy. It basically uses the simplest set of characteristics it can get by with. This creates a problem when someone interacts with very few people sharing some give phenotypes as their heuristic is far less likely to pick up on differences between the generic phenotype. Basically, the less familiar you are with members of a certain group, the more those members look alike. Basically, the stereotype that all <insert group> look alike does happen, NOT because they do look alike, but because to someone who does not know members of that group, their facial recognition system (mental schema) are not developed enough to tell people apart. Think of it like if you trained a neural network to do facial identification by only giving it white people. Compared to a near identical network where the only difference was that it was trained on a cross section of all of earth's people, which would you expect to do a better job?

logfromblammo 11y ago

Well, my professors were all able to associate my name with my face by midterms. A good portion of the teaching assistants were also able to identify me on sight. Though some of them knew me by "Log" rather than my proper name. Strangely enough, the Chemistry Department was better at recognizing me than my own Comp Sci Department. Perhaps it was because my major stood out on the class ranking printouts. In one course, the profs gave out a new CRC Manual as a prize to the top scorer in the class, and they were lucky Sujata Bhatia beat me, because it might have been embarrassing to the department otherwise. Maybe lucky isn't the right word--the lady had mad skills with a molecule. I suppose it would have been theoretically possible for me to have been impersonating another student the entire time I was at university, but so long as I answered to the same name during lectures and labs as I wrote on the test, and that name was paid up on tuition according to the bursar, that was pretty much all the verification that was needed.