When I Were a Lad, Slide Rules Were Banned!
A lot of universities already ban phones in exam situations, but now, I see, they are starting to ban watches as well, because ‘smart’ watches are starting to come on to the market. I guess Apple are to blame for the current bout of paranoia. Actually, with the current generation all they have to do is to insist the students arrive two hours before the exam is due to start, and the watch batteries will be dead during the exam!
Joking apart, this is only part of an ongoing battle which started with students snaffling answers to coursework questions off the internet. There is now quite a thriving industry in programs to detect such plagiarism. This ‘arms’ race is starting to look suspiciously like the music business’s efforts over copyright, and we all know how successful that hasn’t been.
It’s a classic case of trying to treat the symptoms, rather than dealing with the underlying problem. The problem is that, traditionally, you ascertained whether a student understood what he or she had been taught by a system of practical exercises (eg engineering students using theodolites), written papers and written exams. The practical exercises are fairly safe for the time being, though the results could be open to collusion.
The problem is that, in a connected society, written papers and even written exams are no longer a means for tracking understanding. Obviously something better is needed. One tried and tested way of doing this has been in operation in the Universities almost since they were founded – the ‘Viva Voce’ (it’s the Latin for ‘with living voice’).
What it means is that you have to defend verbally what you have written. This already happens with higher degrees. Expanding it to lower levels would make it much easier to tell who understands what they’ve written, and who just mindlessly copied. At the coursework level, it means picking a student at random out of the group to verbally defend their essay, and at the exam level requiring each student to verbally defend one or two answers chosen at random.
I’m not saying this is the only alternative, just that there are alternatives to fighting a losing battle against ‘cheating’. All that’s necessary is a mind open to new ideas, and after all that’s what our higher education facilities are supposed to be about, isn’t it?
http://www.androidheadlines.com/2015/02/universities-starting-blanket-ban-watches-fear-smartwatches-will-aid-cheaters.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_exam
Alan Lenton
15 March 2015
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