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This is silly. Make the exams open book and then the only thing you really need to worry about is the correct student taking the exam. If you're testing based o

• earth_walker 6y ago
  This. Our engineering exams were all open book and tested understanding rather than rote memorization. If you didn't understand the material well there was no amount of googling that could help you.
• samkater 6y ago
  I would add some nuance to this view. For nearly every undergraduate course I agree - the ability of knowing where to look for resources in a particular subject matter, synthesizing the available information to solve a reasonably novel problem, and presenting the information in a coherent way is a skill/art that should be one of the primary goals of the education. For advanced degrees, though, I'm not so sure. I expect someone which a masters or Ph.D. to actually be an expert in the subject matter, not just someone who is really good at figuring out how to solve problems. A big part of that is being able to internalize the information so well they you in effect become a resource that could be used by an undergraduate student. This internalization goes beyond rote memorization, but memorization is a big part of it too. Just a disclaimer, though - I do not have an advanced degree, so maybe I expect too much from those who do? A big reason why I have no interest in pursuing one is that many people with a masters degree I find have little expertise to show for it, they could have just as easily learned the same information by self-study or being fortunate enough to find interesting work. (the hiring landscape is a separate topic)
  • barefeg 6y ago
    1. PhDs don’t “do exams”. You can’t cheat your way to publishing original research (exceptions of course) and have external expert researchers review it and accepted on a reputable journal. Given that that’s a requisite for obtaining your degree, there’s no point on a final exam. Most defenses nowadays are partly ceremonial (exceptions of course). Both the material and your ability to do research has been checked months before by your advisors and graduation committee. 2. Master’s degree courses follow all kinds of schemas for examination. From oral exams, to in person no extra material allowed, to open book, and take home. Being on both sides (taking the exams and creating them) I can say that it really doesn’t matter if you allow people to take the exam home and collaborate among each other. These types of exams are designed to really test a deep understanding and ability of the material. There have been exam questions where an entire class of >20 students are not able to solve it. People that are really good are able to have a shot at it and maybe make some progress, and that differentiates the good from the exceptional. 3. Nowadays undergraduate degrees are a commodity so it feels they need to make sure only the good students get one. But in the end it doesn’t really matter, since most employers (exceptions of course) will want to see how much value the candidate add, which does not correlate with having a degree or good grades
    • lutorm 6y ago
      You can’t cheat your way to publishing original research Of course you can, making up results is a time-honored tradition! It does take a certain amount of skill to do it believably, though.... ;-)
    • snotrockets 6y ago
      I felt as if exams in my masters (in Mathematics) were different: they mostly check you understand the definitions, maybe remember some basic tactics for approaching problems. You can't really check the students can solve "real" problems, as those are too complex for the limited scope of an exam.
  • ska 6y ago
    This is why PhD's typically have comprehensive exams. It varies (a lot!) by university and even department, but panel led oral exams are pretty common. At some places they are even open to the public (no pressure). These are distinct from a thesis defence, which happens at the end of your degree; they are likely to happen about a year in and are meant to ensure you have a solid background. Overall I think an oral exam run by a skilled examiner is the best of all worlds, but it isn't practical for a section of 500 undergraduate students. It's quite doable for a seminar or manageable up to say 10-15 students, becomes difficult after that.
    • gspr 6y ago
      > This is why PhD's typically have comprehensive exams. America is leaking again.
      • MereInterest 6y ago
        The US frequently merges the masters and PhD programs into a single 4-7 year program, rather than a 2-year masters followed by 2-5 year PhD program. The comprehensive exams for PhDs are typically at the end of the first two years, and cover material similar to that of a masters. The two are pretty much equivalent, but with different names.
        • snotrockets 6y ago
          To quote my advisor, who was a faculty member both sides of the Atlantic, while the path is different, by the end of the PhD, you mostly done the same amount of work, regardless of which system you participated in.
      • ska 6y ago
        > America is leaking again. Ok, from a terminology point of view that's fair - it isn't the same everywhere by any means. However, most if not all of the graduate programs I know if internationally have something roughly equivalent, whether they are comps or prelims or qualifying or whatever. The basic idea is that a department (and university, generally) has an interest in maintaining the quality of their programs, and one way to do that is to make sure that your students never leave with glaring holes in their background. The best way to do this is some sort of comprehensive evaluation, and the time to do it is at or near the beginning of a program - otherwise there is no time to address deficiencies.
  • 101008 6y ago
    My experience with people who are PhD is that they know things you expect to memorize just because they use it a lot. They learn formulas or whatever not because they spend 5 hours memorizing it, but because they needed it once, so they looked it up. The second time they needed it, they weren't 100% sure, so they looked it up again just in case. Every time they search for it, they need it less and less and at the end they know it by memory. That's how you learn most of the stuff these days and that should be for everything. Natural learning. Why memorizing things you dont need to know?If you use it often enough, you'll end up memorizing it. Same for concepts or any type of knowledge.
    • politician 6y ago
      There's a term for this and several software packages to help exploit the effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition
    • twic 6y ago
      I can tell you the peak excitation wavelengths of a dozen fluorophores. Not because i wrote them on flashcards and memorised them, but because i spent four years in a darkened room sliding filter cubes around to take pictures of slides stained with them!
  • Miraste 6y ago
    It depends on the degree. If you're becoming a medical doctor you'll have to do a ton of memorization, but in other fields doctorates are the least memorization-intensive part of your education, because the focus is on generation and synthesis, on the assumption that you've already learned the rote knowledge. You don't need to memorize anything to write a dissertation but that doesn't make it easy (and you'll end up memorizing everything anyway).
    • TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
      > medical doctor you'll have to do a ton of memorisation Which is a load of dingos kidneys. Gate keeping. All the good doctors I've ever been to have a wall of reference material and use it, even if only to show the patient, but it's there and accessible. And besides, it's not like practising medical doctors don't make heaps of mistakes. The number one cause of complications in a medical setting is medical intervention, so it could be argued doctors should be using more reference material and not relying on their over worked brains.
      • why_Mr_Anderson 6y ago
        But parent post is arguing that to become a doctor you need to memorize ungodly amount of things, which is absolutely true. And about that wall of reference material .. yeah, it's usually there to impress patients, most of those books were never touched :) (I'm from family with too many MDs)
        • TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
          It might be true, but I'm arguing it isn't necessarily the best. We need more doctors, if that means changing the culture within the profession so they're more inclined to use those reference material that would be good thing.
      • skylanh 6y ago
        Anecdotes in support of this comment: I lived with a orthopedic surgeon doing a specialization in pediatric orthopedia. He was very very very good based on my understanding of the places he had worked, the offers he had to undertake his specialization, the change in operation waiting times and his model of how he worked within the hospital, and that immediately after returning to his home country he was head of the newly created orthopedic pediatrics ward. His description of how he would approach a surgery was straight-forward: - he would review the surgical referral, his notes from his patient intake - he would review appropriate notes and documentation from the hospital on the allowed surgeries allowed, including reference texts on that particular surgery - he would create a full plan for entering, performing, and exiting the operation - (surgery) - he would review the plan, add notes on how it actually went So it's not like he woke up, walked into a surgical room, and ad-libbed it. As an anecdote, he said he liked B-students for his surgical teams because they had to work hard to get there. I also was good friends with a very nerdy emergency room doctor. He offered the anecdote that he was "called out" for using Google. His justification was that "once you throw in the appropriate medical terms, all you're getting is the latest research on treatments--and I was attempting to offer the best and latest in proven care". He also made the several changes to the shifts at the ER, including using time-sheet and patient data to show that patient outcomes suffered during longer doctor shift rotations. His anecdote on his schooling; "I was a bad student, and I'm a poor doctor, but my job is to get you stable until we can intervene properly". He funded a startup and wrote (in Java) a medical EMR system.
  • ladams 6y ago
    I'm a physics grad student, and this is completely wrong. The purpose of graduate classes (at least in physics) is to teach you how to navigate a the standard reference texts. For example, the main thing I learned in my grad E&M class was where to find information in Jackson (aka "Classical Electrodynamics"). Classical mechanics was a mix of Goldsmith and Landau and Lifshitz. Quantum mechanics used Sakauri. And statistical mechanics used Pathria. Also, referring to these classic texts by author is very common, much moreso than by title.
    • wespiser_2018 6y ago
      Valuable comment right here for the autodidact, thank you!
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • reedjosh 6y ago
    Often the tests at this level are difficult enough that the need for memorization is implicit. Open book is also fine in this case because without a base of memorized understanding an open book isn't that helpful anyway.
  • flashgordon 6y ago
    Just as a counter example. I have 2 "advanced" degrees - in engineering and in management (btw I did NOT do them because I was smart - but rather because I was curious and had a lot of time on my hand. I definitely struggled in both of them - though really really enjoyed them both). I am not what you call a model test-taker. I got barely passing marks in all my exams and yet my "assignments" I was consistently a high scorer in (sadly assignments at the time only accounted for atmost 20% of your grade with 80% being what you can cram-and-dump in an exam). I still cannot "remember" how to perform a discrete-wavelet-transform from memory (my honor's thesis) but i found myself digging into it a couple of months ago (just fiddling on pet projects). An hour on googling got me on the track. Point is there is so much even those with advanced degrees have to know and having to retain it all in memory all the time is both infeasible and wasteful. Yet expecting kids/young adults to do this is truly hypocritical and disingenuous.
  • rocqua 6y ago
    When I have discussed this, most people I know argued the opposite (for Mathematics). The undergrad courses are supposed to lay the foundation. Stuff you need so often, and stuff you need to recognize when useful, you should know it by heart. At graduate level, there is too much stuff. You know the outline, you know where to find stuff. But you don't need to know everything exactly. If you forgot one passage from a definition, that should not cause a failure. Because in 'real Mathematics' you get to look at references. A nice trick for open book is to make it time-infeasible to just look up everything. But allow students access to the materials incase they have a brainfart.
• isbvhodnvemrwvn 6y ago
  Well, that's the problem. Someone can read out the question and receive results from someone else or be actively sharing their screen. It doesn't really matter what kind of test you have.
  • soperj 6y ago
    Honestly, any tests I took that were open book were long enough that if you were constantly looking things up you'd never finish. Same would occur if you were talking to someone and they were having to relay the info.
  • Green_man 6y ago
    Part of the benefit of open book tests is that it brings up the "floor" of resource access, limiting the potential differential between honest and cheating students. Obviously, this could be negatively compensated for with other factors, like having more questions or stingy grading.
• touisteur 6y ago
  I think part of the idea is to discourage sharing of answers... But then you should build open book personnalized exams. But then the student might hire someone to answer for them. But then why bother everyone because of those cheating people...
• davidweir 6y ago
  Exactly - assessment methods that are difficult for the sake of being difficult benefit nobody. They’re only marginally more meaningful than FAANG interview questions. Employers, students and society as a whole have all moved on; they want assessment to demonstrate that students can do what the course has taught them (known in the jargon as “alignment”), not memorise a bunch of facts that they can regurgitate on demand.
• smiths1999 6y ago
  I teach at the university level and this is what I have done with my exams. Everything is open book and in my experience there is no difference in the average exam score between open book online and closed (or open) book in person. It is also way easier for me to not have to worry about who is cheating and where everyone is looking (I also don't like the idea of forcing students to turn on their webcams).
  • checkyoursudo 6y ago
    I finished up the coursework for my masters degree at the start of the pandemic. My university was quite flexible for how instructors would examine us, given how sudden everything had to change. One of my courses, which only had about 8 students and two instructors, decided to do an oral examination, which ended up being basically a very in-depth, one on one conversation about the course material and based on the expectations set in the syllabus (so, no surprises). While obviously not practical for large rosters, this was by far the best exam format that I have ever done in my many, many years of schooling. I'm sure not everyone would prefer it, but the students unanimously agreed to try it (wouldn't have done it that way otherwise), and it was just so great. It was not at all like an oral thesis defense, which was what I was a little worried about.
    • dariosalvi78 6y ago
      When I was an engineering student at the university of Naples, all my courses were examined both with a written exam and an oral one. No exception, no matter how many students. It was hard for us and the teachers but, boy, you had to really study that stuff! Since then I've become an academic myself and have been teaching in several countries. I have never found the same level of rigor in any place I've been.
      • robaato 6y ago
        I remember friends in the '80s studying law in Turin always having orals - as you say "they had to know their stuff"!
      • 6y ago
• anticristi 6y ago
  Our university physics teacher allowed us to bring one-page self-made cheat sheet. By the time you compressed the essence of a whole course into a one-pager, you were pretty much done learning. :))
  • quasse 6y ago
    This was common in my engineering school too. I enjoyed creating the cheat-sheets more than any other form of studying, because what better way of learning three chapters of thermodynamics than having to distill them into 10 lines of text on a notecard.
  • cmckn 6y ago
    I still have a couple of the cheat sheets my study group compiled -- they're so fun to look back on. One for Computer Organization is almost unintelligible to me now; we were so proud of the density of that sucker.
    • mousepilot 6y ago
      did your instructor also allow a desktop microscope?
      • joatmon-snoo 6y ago
        One of the more creative tricks I remember was writing a cheatsheet in red and blue text overlaid on each other and using 3D glasses to read it, which allowed you to squeeze more on. Never actually did it, so I don't know if it was useful...
  • vincent-manis 6y ago
    I always permitted/encouraged this when I taught (I'm retired now). Every once in a while, we'd find some enterprising student selling pre-made cheat sheets, which were of course of little value to the purchaser.
    • shadowfox 6y ago
• TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  I never understood the concept of cheating. If you don't know the answer to a question and you look it up, that's not cheating, it's research, or at least referring to reference material, which is always permitted in real life. Except for some contrived or rare circumstances someone will now point out. Even the Apollo 11 crew had support. Any professional in any industry is allowed to say: "I don't know" and "I'll get back to you" and "let me look that up".
  • tzs 6y ago
    That only works if the answer can be looked up. Real life isn't always kind enough to only give problems that someone has already solved and published somewhere you can find.
    • TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
      That's only a helpful responds if you believe exams are testing for your ability to synthesis novelty, which seems absurd to me.
      • TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
        I mean synthesize, too late to edit.
    • Xamayon 6y ago
      The class should effectively teach you how to make that distinction in a given field/topic. If you didn't pay attention at all, you won't know what to look for or how to figure something out quickly enough to pass. Cheating would be most damaging if the actual answers were shared or similar attacks on the integrity of the test itself. Knowing how to find or determine the current correct answers yourself is often more useful in the long run than memorizing what amounts to trivia. This is especially true when it comes to open ended and quickly changing fields...
    • deleted 6y ago
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• kiba 6y ago
  Understanding always aid memories and memories are important to mastering anything. Brute force memorization, however, are subject to decays and constant forgetting. It is astonishingly difficult to memorize a bunch of meaningless numbers unless you taken the time to do a mnemonic for it.
• alasdair_ 6y ago
  >Make the exams open book and then the only thing you really need to worry about is the correct student taking the exam This doesn't solve the problem of a student having an expert sitting off camera, feeding the student the answers.
• officeplant 6y ago
  By far this is my favorite part of working in the fire & safety industry. Open book exams for certifications just show that you know how to apply the knowledge within the code books. All it requires is that I remember a handful of section numbers relevant to areas of the code.
• t-writescode 6y ago
  My mom is a college professor, among other things, and her exams are always open book. She has every expectation of the students to have the book in front of them when taking the test. She's a fully online professor, though, so maybe that's the difference? Different dynamic from the traditional, in-person classes professors? I also don't think anything but her quizzes are multiple choice? Everything else is essay format, participation (discussion posts in class forum), and a HUGE paper, so there's really nothing to cheat on, aside from plagiarism, and ... there are ways of catching that.
• tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  > the only thing you really need to worry about is the correct student taking the exam Which is the hard problem these solutions try to address, because even if the correct student is sitting in front of the computer, that doesn't mean he isn't just proxying the questions and answers to someone else (possibly paid).
• Siira 6y ago
  People can easily share the solutions to real exams, as well. (Though I agree the bar is much higher.)
• matheusmoreira 6y ago
  I completely agree with you but good luck convincing anyone to do that. Memorization and regurgitation questions are easier to create, evaluate and grade. Asking meaningful questions, evaluating each student's answer and taking an individualized approach to each student requires a lot of time and effort which are the most scarce resources in today's mass education centers. So they'll keep asking stupid questions as if the student was a database being queried. It's no wonder that people can solve them by querying actual knowledge bases! Schools won't accept that: they are selling degrees and they don't want to make it too easy for students to pass their courses. So they come up with the absolutely ridiculous notion of cheating. The whole thing's so phony and artificial it's mindboggling. I don't think it's even possible to get a high quality education anymore. Maybe if a student is lucky enough to have a one-on-one mentorship.