Most of us regard an exam as a welcomed opportunity to test our knowledge in a pure and undisturbed one-on-one situation (student vs. test), so much resembling the many tests we will have to pass on-our-own in our later lives. But for some people this logic apparently does not make too much sense, since they do zero to prepare themselves for the test and then just proceed to copy from me or other better-prepared students in their surrounding. And I do very well notice it when people copy from me, make no mistake about that…
Ideally, each student would be assigned to an individual (perhaps video supervised?) room where she can take the test in the dignity of solitude. This financially wishful thinking aside, I think the root of the problem lies not so much in the fact that multiple students occupy a single room, but that they can see each others’ work. While the technologically-inclined among us will now probably brainstorm ideas ranging from clinically paralyzing students’ necks to implanting devices in students’ heads recording every cheating glance, I think this would overcomplicate the problem unnecessarily. Instead, I propose turning our attention to ways in which our society already deals with similar situations.
Think of race horses. When they come to take their test (i.e. to race), the last thing we want them to do is to look around and see what other horses are up to, instead of focusing on delivering their top performance. It is easy to see that despite marginal differences in settings, the goals are the same in both situations, inviting us to learn from the race experience. Blinders, as you might by now have guessed, provide cheap and effective protection against unwanted looks. If every time she wanted to steal my work, a cheater would have to turn her head by 90 degrees, I am sure she’d think twice before coming unprepared!
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Partitions might be expensive, but a simple cardboard framework over each desk would be more comfortable than blinders and these temporary obstructions to unwanted viewers could be folded flat and stored between tests.
What stopping me from writing a cheat sheet in my blinders. Simple solution is to make a permutated test. Or one where each student get a different problem but the same question.
For exampleif you want to test distance=velocity*timeStudent 1 Question: what is the distance when Velocity=2,time=3.Student 2 Question: what is the distance when Velocity=5,time=2. and so on
well technology would likely route around this...
alreading I've met people who have talked with students who cheat today by means of camera phones (email photos of the test to friends who have not yet taken it)....
Sad. But true.
The best solution to "cheating" is to inspire the students to want to learn (and thus want to push themselves), generally done by great teachers, the "tests" then become just one small aspect of the learning experience. And cheating is shown to hurt the students who "cheat"...
It's easy to solve cheating problems. Give the students several different forms of each test. Then they can't easily cheat. Also it helps if the rooms they sit in are not cramped together.
Blinders would not prevent students from seeing the work of people sitting in the next row in front of them. It would also make it harder for the teacher to see if their eyes are wandering where they shouldn't. More importantly, this just wouldn't go over well with the students. It is basically telling the students that you expect them to try to cheat. This is quite an insult to the honest students, who are probably the majority. If you don't want people cheating off your test, then use a coversheet. Many of my teachers required them, but you can use one even if they don't. BTW, your statement "Most of us regard an exam as a welcomed opportunity to test our knowledge..." made me groan. Maybe some students feel that way, but most? I don't think most students welcome exams period.
There is a very low-tech way of solving this problem. A teacher prepares the same test with the same answers but there are 4 versions of the test, each with distinctly different answers. Tests 1 and 2 are shuffled and dealt down the odd rows, test 3 and 4 are shuffled and handed down the even rows. You'd never be able to see people with the same version, and you'd never be able to rely on pairing up with someone else to cheat. In todays scan-tron environment, it would be impossible to copy somone's answer sheet and get any answers right. It could be easily adapted for word problems.
An even lower tech solution is available for many tests. Simply make tests in which the students must answer the questions with complete sentences. Not only is it mighty hard to read an entire hand-written sentence from a distance, if you copy a sentence it's pretty obvious to the grader. Writing out sentences also does a better job of demonstrating what the students know.
agree with shannon. let them know the worth in learning. let them know what a frickin waste of time cheating is. if you don;t want to be there and to learn then go and do what you want.
Being a teacher for twenty years at four different secondary shools. I believe that our whole system needs revamping. What does 80 % on a course or exam really mean. Does it mean the student knows 80% of the knowledge that the course has covered. Not really; because the teacher has made the course based on his/her knowledge and the exam will never cover all the information in the course. The concept that I am talking about is an old concept called " outcomes based learning" first decribed by John Dewey. The basic concept is that; " education results in a change in behaviour". Many programs in schools try to do "outcomes based learning", the only problem is that there is no real courses of study being designed. These C.O.S. now are being done by teachers that are teaching six classes a semester with on average 30 students. Do the math (180 students). Once real C.O.S. have been seriously deasigned by ex-teachers who spend real time, just like programmers designing software, then and only then can real evaluation be done that is meaningful. Forget about percentages or point grades; what programming teachers would design next would be a list of skills that the student has completed while working in school with the teacher or the application of knowledge that the student has leaarned which could be self-tested on the computer. And get this idea ( because I do it all the time) set-up a multi-choice data base: say of 1000 questions that are randomly generated for the students to examine themselves. One key point about multi-choice is that each question say A,B,C,D,E, can have 1 or more answer, up to 5, (to eliminate guessing). This forces the student to check each answer as being correct or incorrect. All this may sound to complicated and impossible; well; look at Microsofts's or Adobe's accreditation courses, these are outcome based learning programs. Imagine applying to a school or a job and both you and they know what skills you have. Oh, one last thing, children and students should be our priority not the buck. Who will push your wheelchair in the future?