Internet excess?
The Danish government is to allow pupils full access to the internet during their final school exams.
What a piece of work
Fourteen schools are piloting the scheme and all schools are being invited to do the same by 2011.
To thine own self be true
What about cheating? They have a plan. The plan is… er … to trust the students not to cheat
A king of infinite [web] space
The minister for education in Denmark, Bertel Haarder, says he is proud that Denmark is leading the world on this, and believes other countries will adopt this system.
Maybe they will.
Flaming youth
Or maybe they won’t. Leaving the infrastructural problems of installing networked machones into examination halls, there are bound to some concerns that this is dumbing deeper down that many would care to dumb.
A leading English academic said yesterday (or it might have been fifteen years ago…):<splutter>We will fight this in the seminar rooms, we will fight this in the lectures, we will never surrender.</splutter>
http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/11/05/danish-students-allowed-use-of-internet-in-exams
The Danish government is to allow pupils full access to the internet during their final school exams.
What a piece of work
Fourteen schools are piloting the scheme and all schools are being invited to follow suit by 2011.
To thine own self be true
What about cheating? They have a plan. The plan is… er … to trust the students not to cheat.
A king of infinite [web] space
The minister for education in Denmark, Bertel Haarder, says he is proud that Denmark is leading the world on this, and believes other countries will follow suit.
Flaming youth
Maybe they will. Or maybe they won’t. Some are bound to think this is dumbing down deeper than many would deign to dumb.
A leading English academic said yesterday (or it might have been fifteen years ago…):
<splutter>We will fight this in the seminar rooms, we will fight this in the lectures, we will never surrender.</splutter>
I cannot think of any situation in the ‘real world’ where I would be required to sit in silence answering questions with no reference material. It’s one of the things which really annoyed me about my science exams – we had to memorise all kinds of equations, facts and figures which in the ‘real world’ you would either a) learn in the course of your work because you used them every day or b) be able to go look up.
However, I do appreciate that exams need to be a test of the person’s skills at what they’re doing, and not someone else’s. Perhaps instead of open internet access allowing only specific sites through which the student would be expected to use? After all, most Google searches would end up at Wikipedia anyway.
This is interesting. The Chinese famously held examinations in libraries, on much the same grounds as Nick points out above. The difference being of course that it is quite possible to get not only useful facts, but complete answers which could be used verbatim by idiots or paraphrased by the slight more astute . Perhaps the computers could be nearby, and the number and duration of visits to access
Google Academic, sans answer paper of course, could be strictly controlled?