5 ms·

Maybe I'm naive but I believe cheating can be eliminated by allowing students to have a notecard when taking tests and where they're allowed to write down formu

Maybe I'm naive but I believe cheating can be eliminated by allowing students to have a notecard when taking tests and where they're allowed to write down formulas or whatever is necessary for them individually before the tests. I know a misconception exists in education "about memorization being something every student can perform optimally for succeeding" in getting top marks. That ignorant belief is simply not the case for everyone and I find it cruel we penalize children that could have succeeded if they're allowed to use their organization skills optimally. Otherwise they're hindered by their genetics or neglectful/abusive home-life that resulted in development issues with memory. I know I'm not alone as a programmer using a trusty note taking app for multiple things I rather not memorize. Obviously I don't use it for syntax of the language I'm writing. Thus, brings me to my last point of how students will still be unable to cram all the subject material on a notecard and for completing a test within the time limit given. That makes it so the student gains a real life useful skill of organizing and breaking down material being taught. Further helping the longterm understanding than just memorize a few nights before the test and all is forgotten later depending on the subject being taught.

lainga 6y ago
We got that in signal processing. Two sides of one sheet of engineering paper, anything you can fit, prof gets to examine it as you enter the exam. Some people would put their sheets through the printer and go for 8pt font... I used pencil
- sgerenser 6y ago
  In middle school I had a social studies teacher that allowed a 3x5 note card for tests. Put it in my laser printer and printed my entire few pages of notes in 4pt font.
- unishark 6y ago
  The real value is it makes you view the materially critically and condense it. You're almost cheating yourself by cramming too much on there. Plus of course it puts everyone on the same page with people who are going to sneak in cheat sheets anyway. They always are there.
KMag 6y ago
I've had classes where we were allowed to bring our textbooks and notes into the exams. For most Mechanical Engineering classes, if you haven't learned the material, cramming during the exam isn't going to help you. Or, if you can figure out how to do it during the exam just by using the textbook, you're going to be fine in the real world. It's a pretty niche job if you need to do thermodynamics calculations under time pressure without any reference material.
- ptsneves 6y ago
  I had a machine organs exam where the teacher allowed to brink laptops even. I did not bring it but i would fail just the same. The only way the laptop would help would be if somebody was solving it for you, but this would be overt cheating.
- sq_ 6y ago
  > For most Mechanical Engineering classes, if you haven't learned the material, cramming during the exam isn't going to help you. Or, if you can figure out how to do it during the exam just by using the textbook, you're going to be fine in the real world. I had a similar experience in my better CS classes. Some professors clearly realized that, if you hadn't been paying attention and learned how not to screw up, you wouldn't be able to figure it out, even given pretty wide ranging access to information. So they'd hand us a take-home exam, due in a day or two, and we'd be allowed to use all relevant documentation. I always liked these, as they seemed the most similar to what would happen in industry, unlike some other professors who expected you to have memorized obscure library functions and be able to write perfect code on paper under time pressure.
  - eru 6y ago
    Generally agreed. However there are two problems: First: the more support you allow, the harder you have to make the test. Second (especially relevant for the equivalent situation in job interviews / hiring): the student can hire someone to do the exam for them. (Or more casually: a friend can help.) There's no guarantee that on the job you'll always have that friend available, or are willing to shell out for hired help, nor even allowed to leak company secrets like that. So that hired help doesn't approximate real world conditions as allowing to look stuff up on Googe definitely does.
teraflop 6y ago
It would be nice to think so, but sadly, some students will cheat even on open-book tests. Check out this recent Reddit thread, discussing an incident in which over 100 students were caught cheating in an introductory college calculus class after it was moved online due to COVID-19: https://www.removeddit.com/r/rutgers/comments/g9f57x/126_of_us_are_caught/ https://www.removeddit.com/r/rutgers/comments/g9f57x/126_of_...
- CPLX 6y ago
  That’s interesting but a little hard to follow. The most interesting part I noticed is Chegg which I hadn’t heard of before.
  - Loughla 6y ago
    Really? Chegg was like the first textbook source that existed for college students. That used to be (maybe it still is) it's number 1 business. You could rent books from them for cheap for courses you didn't need to keep the text. Working in higher ed for a few decades, I've seen their reputation go from - hey, they're undercutting our bookstore - to hey, they're a super good resource for students - to hey, their 'homework help' is just cheating for a cost. They're a garbage company right now, from the perspective of a higher ed professional. They've gone off the rails with what could be a good business model.
dkersten 6y ago
Memorisation is also just not that useful in my day to day as a programmer. I mean, sure, it’s great when I know something off the top of my head, but I have autocomplete and reference material and an interactive shell and whatnot. In uni, we had one particular class where we were supposed to study something like ten or twelve different concurrent algorithms in some weird concurrent language that I’ve forgotten and not seen since, and would be asked to write four of them out in the test and talk about them a bit. We didn’t know in advance which four, so most people tried to memorise as many of them as they could and hoped that the four that came up would be among them. Me, being stubborn, thought that was too much effort. Instead, I learned the bare minimum about the language so I could wing it in the test and write it up myself. I already programmed as a hobby so thinking critically about problems wasn’t a big deal. My code was a bit weird, because, for example, I only learned the syntax for while loops and not for loops, so had to make do with what I did know, but it didn’t matter which four problems came up. The problem description gave me enough to figure it out. I got really good marks in that class and put substantially less effort into preparing for the test than my classmates did. My point, I guess, is that memorisation is a stupid thing to optimise for (I guess it’s harder to design good tests that can’t be best beaten by memorisation), isn’t that useful in “real life” and is a lot more work than if you were thought the actual building blocks so that the students have a toolbox they can use to approach problems.
gwd 6y ago
> Maybe I'm naive but I believe cheating can be eliminated by allowing students to have a notecard when taking tests and where they're allowed to write down formulas or whatever is necessary for them individually before the tests. I think there's different "cheating by writing down formulas / information we're supposed to have memorized" and "cheating by copying someone else's answers". In the article, he actually describes a situation where there were identical problems, but with slightly different numbers between seats. One of the students had test version A, but the correct answer from version B. This clearly falls into the latter category; reading the full story, it's really not clear that having a notecard would have helped him.

lainga 6y ago

We got that in signal processing. Two sides of one sheet of engineering paper, anything you can fit, prof gets to examine it as you enter the exam. Some people would put their sheets through the printer and go for 8pt font... I used pencil

sgerenser 6y ago
In middle school I had a social studies teacher that allowed a 3x5 note card for tests. Put it in my laser printer and printed my entire few pages of notes in 4pt font.
unishark 6y ago
The real value is it makes you view the materially critically and condense it. You're almost cheating yourself by cramming too much on there. Plus of course it puts everyone on the same page with people who are going to sneak in cheat sheets anyway. They always are there.

KMag 6y ago

I've had classes where we were allowed to bring our textbooks and notes into the exams. For most Mechanical Engineering classes, if you haven't learned the material, cramming during the exam isn't going to help you. Or, if you can figure out how to do it during the exam just by using the textbook, you're going to be fine in the real world. It's a pretty niche job if you need to do thermodynamics calculations under time pressure without any reference material.

ptsneves 6y ago
I had a machine organs exam where the teacher allowed to brink laptops even. I did not bring it but i would fail just the same. The only way the laptop would help would be if somebody was solving it for you, but this would be overt cheating.
sq_ 6y ago
> For most Mechanical Engineering classes, if you haven't learned the material, cramming during the exam isn't going to help you. Or, if you can figure out how to do it during the exam just by using the textbook, you're going to be fine in the real world. I had a similar experience in my better CS classes. Some professors clearly realized that, if you hadn't been paying attention and learned how not to screw up, you wouldn't be able to figure it out, even given pretty wide ranging access to information. So they'd hand us a take-home exam, due in a day or two, and we'd be allowed to use all relevant documentation. I always liked these, as they seemed the most similar to what would happen in industry, unlike some other professors who expected you to have memorized obscure library functions and be able to write perfect code on paper under time pressure.
- eru 6y ago
  Generally agreed. However there are two problems: First: the more support you allow, the harder you have to make the test. Second (especially relevant for the equivalent situation in job interviews / hiring): the student can hire someone to do the exam for them. (Or more casually: a friend can help.) There's no guarantee that on the job you'll always have that friend available, or are willing to shell out for hired help, nor even allowed to leak company secrets like that. So that hired help doesn't approximate real world conditions as allowing to look stuff up on Googe definitely does.

teraflop 6y ago

It would be nice to think so, but sadly, some students will cheat even on open-book tests. Check out this recent Reddit thread, discussing an incident in which over 100 students were caught cheating in an introductory college calculus class after it was moved online due to COVID-19: https://www.removeddit.com/r/rutgers/comments/g9f57x/126_of_us_are_caught/ https://www.removeddit.com/r/rutgers/comments/g9f57x/126_of_...

CPLX 6y ago
That’s interesting but a little hard to follow. The most interesting part I noticed is Chegg which I hadn’t heard of before.
- Loughla 6y ago
  Really? Chegg was like the first textbook source that existed for college students. That used to be (maybe it still is) it's number 1 business. You could rent books from them for cheap for courses you didn't need to keep the text. Working in higher ed for a few decades, I've seen their reputation go from - hey, they're undercutting our bookstore - to hey, they're a super good resource for students - to hey, their 'homework help' is just cheating for a cost. They're a garbage company right now, from the perspective of a higher ed professional. They've gone off the rails with what could be a good business model.

dkersten 6y ago

Memorisation is also just not that useful in my day to day as a programmer. I mean, sure, it’s great when I know something off the top of my head, but I have autocomplete and reference material and an interactive shell and whatnot. In uni, we had one particular class where we were supposed to study something like ten or twelve different concurrent algorithms in some weird concurrent language that I’ve forgotten and not seen since, and would be asked to write four of them out in the test and talk about them a bit. We didn’t know in advance which four, so most people tried to memorise as many of them as they could and hoped that the four that came up would be among them. Me, being stubborn, thought that was too much effort. Instead, I learned the bare minimum about the language so I could wing it in the test and write it up myself. I already programmed as a hobby so thinking critically about problems wasn’t a big deal. My code was a bit weird, because, for example, I only learned the syntax for while loops and not for loops, so had to make do with what I did know, but it didn’t matter which four problems came up. The problem description gave me enough to figure it out. I got really good marks in that class and put substantially less effort into preparing for the test than my classmates did. My point, I guess, is that memorisation is a stupid thing to optimise for (I guess it’s harder to design good tests that can’t be best beaten by memorisation), isn’t that useful in “real life” and is a lot more work than if you were thought the actual building blocks so that the students have a toolbox they can use to approach problems.

gwd 6y ago

> Maybe I'm naive but I believe cheating can be eliminated by allowing students to have a notecard when taking tests and where they're allowed to write down formulas or whatever is necessary for them individually before the tests. I think there's different "cheating by writing down formulas / information we're supposed to have memorized" and "cheating by copying someone else's answers". In the article, he actually describes a situation where there were identical problems, but with slightly different numbers between seats. One of the students had test version A, but the correct answer from version B. This clearly falls into the latter category; reading the full story, it's really not clear that having a notecard would have helped him.