Testing Equality Among Schools: One Student's Learning Aid Is Another's Way To Cheat

washingtonpost.com:

My daughter is with us for the holidays, having survived her first barrage of law school exams in California. The exams were longer and more difficult than anything I ever had as a graduate student in Chinese studies. But her professors allowed students to have notes with them. This got my attention because her boyfriend at a neighboring law school was forbidden to have notes in two of his exams.

Read the whole story: washingtonpost.com

Comments

[ClearNSimple2012]

09:15 AM on 12/29/2010

Cheaters Find an Adversary in Technology!

The state had looked at just one metric: the number of times wrong answers had been erased and changed to right ones. The schools it identified as suspect had a statistically higher rate of wrong-to-right erasures than the statewide average. It inferred that adults had tampered with the tests.

Caveon maintains that counting wrong-to-right erasures is only one of several ways to mine answer-sheet data, and it can lead to false accusations. Dr. Fremer said it was common, for example, for students to lose their place in a test and erase a string of answers once they realized the mistake.

“Our analysis was better,” he said. “It was more in-depth. It didn’t inflate small differences and make a lot out of them.”

Caveon’s philosophy is that it is not necessary to ensnare every cheat to reduce cheating over all. Since cheats rarely confess even when confronted with overwhelming evidence, it is better to identify the most egregious cases and ignore the borderline ones.

“Your goal is not to catch a bunch of people and hang them,” Dr. Fremer said. “Your goal is to have fair and valid testing.”

“Prevention is the goal,” he said, as matter-of-fact as Joe Friday. “Detection is a step. We detect and prevent.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/education/28cheat.html?pagewanted=2&ref=general&src=me

[Bids Well]

08:55 AM on 12/27/2010

I always had test anxiety, and trouble memorizing and regurgitating facts as a child--still do, to some extent. Especially if it's a subject I have no interest in. As someone who went back to college as adult, after working in the real world, I agree with Alfie Kohn: ""the default condition in most American classrooms - particularly where homework and testing are concerned - is reflected in that familiar injunction heard from elementary school teachers: 'I want to see what you can do, not what your neighbor can do.' (Or, if the implications were spelled out more precisely, 'I want to see what you can do all by yourself, deprived of the resources and social support that characterize most well-functioning real-world environments, rather than seeing how much more you and your neighbors could accomplish together.') . . . " What an insightful person! In the "real world", you can look up information! In the real world, rarely does one have to regurgitate dates of events, or obscure facts that one is not interested in that have nothing to do with ones career path! Our school system is geared towards those students who display a certain type of personality, usually taught by those who displayed the same type of personality when they were in school. The real world is different. I hope more educators are like Alfie Kohn.

[giono]

07:33 PM on 12/26/2010

Valid collaboration is one thing -- Good. Copying as I frequently see in my students homework is another thing -- Bad....

[realitytrumpsbull]

04:44 PM on 12/26/2010

In a day and age when computers are omnipresent in every office across the country, why are the people in the picture shown here still using pencils? 21st century, wakey-wakey, computer-based testing isn't some kind of Jules Verne thing, they do it right now. Matter of fact, stuff like law is something you can study online and at home. I don't know if you could take the tests at home, but the real deal is whether or not you know the material and can pass the test. If you're going to be a professional ambulance chaser or whatever, then you need to know your stuff. And, chances are you'll have a computer in that law office where you can reference information online. I say administer the test in the same condition the person being tested will be working in, telephone, computer, wall of books, and a time limit. As a baseline reference, go find someone with a practice and a law degree, and put the test questions to them, see how they do, with all the above materials provided, with the same time limit.

[crookedcountyillinois]

10:01 AM on 12/26/2010

The headline on this one is very misrepresentative.

[MKWaters esq]

09:29 AM on 12/26/2010

As a former high school teacher and law student now lawyer, I can say absolutely that open book/note tests are harder to take and are graded with more scrutiny because the information is in front of you. In law school, open note/book tests best imitate research in the practice of law because you wouldn't rely on your memory when writing a motion or anything for court,

[plthomas]

09:17 PM on 12/25/2010

HP headline misrepresents the article entirely. . .And Kohn is right. . .as he tends to be. . .

The overwhelming body of research supports the value of cooperation and collaboration over competition; let me recommend a volume that confronts competition in many fields: https://www.sensepublishers.com/product_info.php?products_id=809&osCsid=882f80263709557af0b2707443a5a7a9

[eric14]

06:52 PM on 12/25/2010

One way around this is to have (some) questions which cite, and quote, sources for consultation and interpretation. Thus textual support is common to all.

This, of course requires examiners to do a bit more work.

[SF TKF]

03:22 PM on 12/25/2010

Generally, and open book exam has entirely different standards than a closed book exam. Neither is better or worse, they're just measuring different things.