Schools are still stuck in the past in regard to "cheating". I recall reading a rant on the Internet--I forgot where--about how the real cheat is when a teache

Schools are still stuck in the past in regard to "cheating". I recall reading a rant on the Internet--I forgot where--about how the real cheat is when a teacher gives the same exam to every student, year after year. In the future, everyone will be connected to the Internet constantly, including students. We are close to that now. I can look up any obscure bit of information in only a few moments. Expecting students of the future to take a test without that digital link to everyone and everything is like teaching someone to juggle, and then making them tie one hand to the opposite foot for the test. It's ridiculous--almost like asking algorithmic questions for the whiteboard interview. No, I didn't memorize forever the big-O for eight different sorting algorithms, because I have been using Internet search engines since AltaVista, and card catalogs and textbook indexes before that. The era when someone had to become his own information library, with comprehensive index, to be good at his job has been over for a long, long time. So I think the burden is on teachers and testers to devise new methods of testing that make instant information lookup and collaboration entirely irrelevant to the methods of student evaluation. Make "cheating" an optional feature rather than a bug. I think in the short term that means that tests will have to be time-limited and questions will have to be procedurally generated, and unique to each test-taker. And further, the questions will have to be structured such that they can't be solved by just copy-pasting them into a search box. I recall how I programmed my TI-85 to show "Mem cleared Defaults set" before my exams. It wasn't because I wanted to cheat, but because I didn't want to lose the other programs I wrote just because some teacher didn't trust me. Obviously, someone else could have easily done the same to protect a crib sheet or answer key. When your school system mandates that every student have the same calculators, that type of cheat only becomes more common. The teachers that wrote their exams as "open textbook" never needed to worry about crib sheets. They wouldn't care if you memorized the image of the required pages, or just the page numbers, or just the index key, so long as you could get the correct answers before the end of class. The tests I took in school are obsolete. No school should be trying to extend their lifespan by creating administrative calculator monopolies and arbitrarily blocking newer technologies. Welcome yourself to the 21st century and write better tests.