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Comment by nr2x | Hacker News Reader

It’s the only way.

Give exams in a room, proctored, on paper, at a scheduled time. Open book/open note -- like real life. Everyone takes it at the same time. If you aren't there (without a good reason) you fail.

The deeper point is an exam is a very poor proxy for actual learning to start with. The fact is profs by and large don’t give a shit about teaching quality, let alone learning, and most want to toss up an exam on the learning platform, get grades submitted before the deadline, and move on.

A lot of professors would prefer to skip exams that become a part of your grade. However, we (I teach at a college) are REQUIRED to at least give a final exam and are REQUIRED to have that as a part of their grade. sigh

I'd much rather teach and talk and enjoy with my students, but, alas, the design of most universities box us in at different levels (and let's not even get started on the "must publish research" side of teaching).

Just my $0.02.

I used to teach myself, but thank god I didn’t have that level of meddling.

> The deeper point is an exam is a very poor proxy for actual learning to start with.

It's far from perfect, but it's better than the alternatives, and various organizations and people and powers-that-be reasonably want some kind of measure of whether someone actually learned something in a class/degree.

that just makes it harder. Students have been cheating on in person exams since the dawn of time. You get people texting in the exam, people going to the bathroom and looking up answers, students paying other students to take the exam for them, and on and on and on. There is no exam that can't be cheated on. I'm sure that if I weren't so good at school and had significantly fewer morals, I would have been _great_ at cheating on exams

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