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Why are people promoting the idea that exams are not written or given in person anymore? I graduated relatively recently and maybe had 1 take home exam during m
by RhysabOweyn 6mo ago
Why are people promoting the idea that exams are not written or given in person anymore? I graduated relatively recently and maybe had 1 take home exam during my entire education. Every other exam was proctored in person and written. The professor who made the take home exam also made it much more difficult than a normal exam so I would not really say it was easier than a normal in person test.
- dublinstats 6mo agoTake home exams were very common when I was in school, which was before you could get answers on the internet. After internet answer and cheating sites came along, a professor would have to either not care and let cheating run rampant, or struggle to constantly make unique new kinds of take home questions somehow. AI has basically killed that option too.
- bmitc 6mo agoI loved take home exams because they allowed me to study before hand but not have the insane pressure and condensed studying required for exams in the classroom. Even though they were normally much harder and longer, I liked them. I felt I learned much more through them because I could take the time to understand concepts I had missed without feeling the time pressure of in-person exams. It's a shame that humans find a way to cheat ourselves out of things that benefit us by over "optimizing" the wrong things.
- ghighi7878 6mo agoExams in classroom with all the time pressure is also an important part of education. May be they should be low percentage of grade to prevent too much stress but it's am important learning experience
- bmitc 6mo agoI disagree. Take home exams represent how work and progress occurs in the "real" world. There's nothing in the post education world that resembles in-person exams. Maybe the medical profession is a counter example.
- close04 6mo ago> There's nothing in the post education world that resembles in-person exams. I’d argue that dealing with any high criticality operational incident is like an in person exam (maybe even the most difficult kind, the open book one) if you are the one responsible for fixing it. Everyone is looking at you, you have time pressure to solve it ASAP and you can’t afford the time to dig through all the docs on the spot. So there’s at least some similarity with some real life situations.
- bmitc 6mo agoI can understand that argument, but I don't think in-class exams are specifically good at that. I think for those situations, it requires more specific training regarding the domain, which is why I gave the medical profession as a counterexample.
- beej71 6mo agoI'd like to see some data on this. My general-ed recall is minimal, and in programming before school, I certainly learned a ton more by coding than by testing. That's my perception of my time in school, as well.
- phoronixrly 6mo agoDid you by any chance graduate before the COVID-19 pandemic?
- ryukoposting 6mo agoThings have changed drastically since COVID-19, at least in the US. Tons of schools and universities shifted to online systems, and never abandoned the systems they built up when it was time to go back to school. I graduated in 2020, so I've only gotten to see the changes secondhand through friends and family who are teachers, and through my sibling who graduated a few years after me. But the difference is staggering.
- doctorpangloss 6mo agoon the flip side, surely people know that people cheat all the time on "proctored in person and written" exams