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Comment by usednet | Hacker News Reader

The best class I ever took in uni had 3 examinations taken by all students simultaneously, with variations between each exam making cheating nearly impossible. There was no attendance taken, all course materials were posted online, and the only grading for the entire class was the exams. I showed up to 2 classes the entire semester yet still learned all of the material and obtained an A.

At least for certain STEM classes, I think this should be the norm.

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Our CS major's main weeder class had two unusual examinations. The first one was to recreate a small project that you'd done recently as an assignment within a few hours, on-site in a computer lab. It could be one of three possibilities, which makes raw memorization a bit harder (though not impossible).

The second was after the first big project, a project that's usually a few thousand lines of code; relatively large by the standards of a student. This exam was a bug fixing exam: the TA's randomly insert three bugs into your project's source, and you have to find and fix them within a few hours. Not terribly challenging if you really did the project by yourself, but if you cheated I imagine you'd have a hell of a time.

This reminds me of the time that I had to drop a class because my ADA code returned a generic "program error" upon compilation and even though none of the professors in the department could figure out why, and even though the algorithm looked perfect to them, the professor for my class refused to hear any of it.

I had a few classes like that, decades ago; and I agree that they were the best in terms of curbing cheating. Stressful as all hell for those with anxiety issues, but the format also made some honors students become exposed for the frauds they were.

In retrospect, I think the format is still the best but I would remove the narrow time limit. Give the students a whole day to try; and so not artificially filter out those with anxiety.

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