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Disregarding how easy it would be to hide stuff in the system to the extent that school staff can't find it I find it hilarious how attractive complexity is. I
by yason 9y ago
Disregarding how easy it would be to hide stuff in the system to the extent that school staff can't find it I find it hilarious how attractive complexity is.
It used to be pen and paper, maybe a slide rule. You couldn't cheat except by bringing in extra books or papers which were easy to detect.
Then they allowed electric scientific calculators which were checked prior exams. You could theoretically store some meaningful constants in their memory but it wouldn't have been very useful.
Then laptops... what a can of worms! Even making read-only terminals available for students during exams would open up loads of potential holes for cheating. But that's nothing in comparison to private laptops. Even private laptops booting the school's own USB images would be highly untrusted but letting students run their own software and hoping school staff to find any problems by inspecting them is, from the policy viewpoint, just going bananas.
In fact, if I were a non-hacker student I would oppose strongly to the whole idea because I could be certain that at least some of my peers would be using their laptops to hack themselves an advantage over me and most others.
- mosselman 9y agoI don't really agree with your last statement. It might be a cultural thing, I have no idea where you went to school, but what do I care what grades other students get? If you are on the verge of failing on a test, then yes, the average of the group will determine whether there will be corrections made to all grades which could make the difference between passing or failing (5.3/10 becomes 5.6/10), but apart from that I could not have cared less when I was in school or university. You are right that pen and paper was complex enough. In fact there are many studies that show that children learn better when writing on and reading from paper than on and from screens. In picking schools for my kids I will take the use of paper and real books into very strong account.
- viraptor 9y agoSome tests are graded depending on how the whole group performed. That means that one of the tests I took in highschool where the answers leaked was: 1 wrong answer - mid grade, 2 wrong answers - fail. Normally, you'd need 10+ wrong answers to fail that one. Anyone trying their best without cheating was likely to fail.
- adrianN 9y agoI care because I want to live in a fair society where cheaters are punished, not rewarded.
- mosselman 9y agoI am not saying that cheaters shouldn't be punished. It is just that I wasn't interested in other people's grades back when I did things that involved grades. Also, if you really want that you are probably pretty bad off in most societies. Sadly, many people get away with cheating (criminals, corrupt politicians/companies, etc).
- dalbasal 9y ago..Because they're people and people are sensitive to fairness, especially as you get into more formal ways of doing things like tests.
- viraptor 9y agoI think that depends on the test only. If you have a test which involves doing calculations provided to you - you shouldn't need any extra tools - it's the execution that's tested. On the other hand, if the test involves you figuring out the solution, then it shouldn't matter what you have with you. (As long as you can't communicate with others) I know this is not that common, but for good tests, cheating like that should be irrelevant.
- icebraining 9y agoCalculators have been fully programmable computers at least since the 90s, you can download programs, games, etc. For example: http://www.ticalc.org/pub/86/basic/math/ http://www.ticalc.org/pub/86/basic/math/