Comment by nlh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nlh | Hacker News Reader

I found myself brewing with rage while reading this article. The approach of closely inspecting a student's words & physical actions while taking a test just feels...dated. Ancient. Anachronistic. Embarrassing.

In the real world of 2020+, almost everyone has a portable Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in their pocket. Let people use calculators. Heck, let people use Wikipedia! If they copy an incorrect fact from Wikipedia, well, that's their problem and penalize them for that.

Education needs to be considered in the context of the world we live in. If you want to test students, then develop ways of TESTING students - move to live oral exams. Written long-form essays. Develop education techniques that USE the tools we're blessed to have around us instead of fearing them.

I don't have all the answers as I haven't thought about this deeply enough. But I've got to imagine there are ways of testing learning & knowledge that aren't based on fact memorization & regurgitation or performing calculations in your head that can easily be done on a calculator.

All good points. If these types of monitors are being used, then clearly the tests are flawed.

The hardest test I ever took was the AI final at CMU. Open book. Books didn't help :(

> move to live oral exams. Written long-form essays.

Yes. The application of principles, concepts and information is not terribly difficult to test in either a timed or take home setting.

Live oral exams can be an effective method of assessment. They can also be confounded by the testee's charisma. (See: any discussion of programming interviews, which are live oral exams.[1])

They do have the advantage of degrading fairly gracefully from in-person examination to remote examination.

They're also tremendously expensive compared to a test given en masse.

[1] Oral exams in a school setting would feel much fairer to people than programming interviews do, mainly because you know what to expect on an exam in a class you just took.

> They can also be confounded by the testee's charisma.

Agreed, but I don't think oral exams are the only type of effective live testing. Nor are live/timed exercises the only way to demonstrate knowledge.

Case studies, short/long form writing and creative exercises are all viable options. The primary concern seems regarding scaling grading and review, which with a little effort and ingenuity is solvable.

My Engineering Thesis had an oral component it was legitimately of the most nerve-wracking things I ever went through. I had to spend about half an hour in a room with 3 professors getting absolutely grilled over everything from basic theoretical knowledge to detailed technical nuances specific to my experiment. At times it felt like they were deliberately trying to trip me up by asking leading questions and trying to steer me in the wrong direction.

It would be very, very hard to bluff your way through something like this with Charisma alone. You have to be damn sure you know your topic in and out. For once off exams before graduation I think it is acceptable but I'd pity students who had to go through a grilling like this every couple of months.

There are, they just cost a heck of a lot more. You can no longer have a course taught for a $3000 adjunct.

Folks are doing take-home exam wrong.

Caltech had tremendous success with a culture of honesty and take-home exams.

Caltech is also smaller and extremely hard to get into, hardly representative of avg college student.

Moreover, they select students that want to learn, and value honesty.

Most students go to college to get a piece of paper.

They couldn't care less whether they get it by cheating or by honest work.

The piece of paper is all that matters.

That means they are admitting too much.

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