When I was studying (physics, early 2000s in Germany), we didn't even have a honor system, we had the assumption that everybody is there to learn something. If you cheat, you harm yourself.

Progress was assessed by weekly excercise sheets where you were encouraged to work together with others, and to learn how to use the library to find solutions. After each semester there would be a test for each course, and you would get a certificate if passed. Attendence to lectures was usually not checked. The tests were "closed" and watched, but if you were determined you could probably have easily cheated. Anyway regular cheaters would have failed miserably at the latest in the oral exams or the lab courses.

I think a major function of universities is to teach people to be independent and responsible, and if we school-ize them we loose a lot.

I'm speaking, of course, of measures like expulsion. Too much of a hit to the bottom line, too much messy litigation, and too much bad PR.

All of this is another way of making your point, which is that the core mission of universities has drifted away from idealized learning to big business and sports.

I suspect the entire thing needs to be nuked from orbit before it can be rebuilt and I'm happy to see COVID accelerating the process.

Another issue with the purportedly "optimal" testing situation of creating unique challenging and deep questions for each test (and even for each student). It's difficult to make good questions. Sometimes they are too hard, are not as clear as they seem since students might misunderstand and go off in the wrong direction giving you some trivial answer to a similar-looking question. The safest questions are the most shallow. And deeper problem-solving questions may take a few iterations of "testing" (as in trying them out on exams and seeing how students do). So what seems like the best kind of question will actually be the riskiest and least-tested.

It's like having unit tests and integration tests in software testing.

It should not matter if you have the exact line "To be or not to be" verbatim if you can explain what Shakespeare tried to convey about suffering and the meaning of life. More importantly, you should be allowed to have the book! You can't expect to jump from confusion to comprehension by reading the whole thing during the exam.

It shouldn't matter if you can regurgitate "Miranda v. Arizona, 1966" or not if you can explain when a person is giving voluntary statements or is under custodial interrogation. Access to the full PACER database wouldn't enable you to understand those distinctions.

And as comes up here all the time, it shouldn't matter in a whiteboard interview whether you have the arguments reversed in your strcmp(), an editor, compiler, or reference (or just running the code) would show you which way it was supposed to be. The important thing is the planning, algorithm tradeoffs, data structures, and debugging process that you used to write the thing. Heck, it shouldn't even matter if you can remember that the function is called 'strcmp'.

Reliance on these factoids usually indicates that the grader is taking the easy way out - scanning for expected quotes, for case names, or compiling the code and seeing if it works or not - rather than gauging comprehension. I'll grant that it is far easier to do the former, but that's not what the goal is supposed to be.

Edit: What can't be allowed is regurgitating someone else's comprehension of the question while having none of your own. If that's a possibility, you need to either ask different questions or have some way to prevent people from accessing that explanation. Remote exams need more of the former and less of the latter.

Isn't that just testing for memory rather than comprehension?

All of my BSc Applied Physics exams including the final (Exeter Uni. 1977) were open note and this really helped sort the competent students from those who thought that they were at university to learn facts. The latter brought fifty litre rucksacks full of notes in to the finals and without exception either failed entirely or scraped through to third class honours.

They seemed to have not realized that the faculty would not set questions that could be directly answered by looking up the question in one's notes. The best example was the final quantum mechanics paper which did not contain a single question that had a direct answer in the notes we had taken or the textbooks we had used.

My most recent exam was a C# course and that exam was open book. It wasn't as extreme as my QM final but had basically the same idea: apply what you have learnt.

I want my lawyer to double check the sources. Even if he has the case name memorized, joe vs sally is easy to get confused with joe vs sue (or sally vs joe...), and those details are important to get right, lest I lose the case on a technicality.

There is a time to memorize details, but for the most part I want people who verify before making a statement.

You are making assumptions based on your own experiences, and they are incorrect.

You have a lot of faith in for-profit entities.

Poland has a completely different culture from Western Europe or the US. It's rapidly Westernizing, but it's still a world of difference. I think it's a pity. I prefer Slavic cultures to Western. One of the things which bugs me most is how modern Poland is starting to have the same surface, insincere friendliness as the West.

- EU membership is clearly a net win, but doesn't help preserve Polish culture.

- Many of the cultural differences are not recognized on either side -- people say the same things sometimes, but it takes deep digging to understand that they mean very different things.

- Historically, Poles also looked up to and tried to emulate the West, which is part of the reason the culture is shifting so rapidly.

So the change was rapid, but far from complete.

Apply again next year? In Germany, a university expulsion usually comes with a lifetime ban on studying the same subject again.

This of course may have changed dramatically in the last two years given the major shift in how we all live but I would suspect that this is more common than you think.

Where there ever any rumors of that kind of thing. In a large enough class someone will be tempted to cheat, and if the school is taking decisive action there will be rumors even if they are making great effort to protect the students privacy and make the discipline a learning experience

The people I knew on a personal basis weren't the kind to do that or really care about it enough to do so and without going into a story about the people I know and how we're all doing well in life you'll have to take my word for it.

Well, that wouldn't be a problem to the person you're answering to, considering German universities aren't businesses who take people in for capital (both financial and social).

In France it's certainly very easy to get yourself thrown out for cheating or not showing up.

Typically there's a faculty union or senate which negotiates policies with the administration. Individual professors aren't all alone in the fight. Though they may individually choose to give lax punishments or look the other way.

If you actually learn something in a class, that distinguishes you from many other students.

I agree though, university is not a good system for determining who is capable and deserves the best jobs. It’s unfortunate that our society leans on it so much as a sorting hat.

Applying a panopticon to children to prevent cheating is questionable since it normalizes authorities using electronics to bully people. Applying it to adults at a university is arguably a human rights violation and a failure to write good course materials.

That would have been fun! The only time I did something like this was when I tested out of one of the intro to programming classes. I was one of the last students to talk to the professor that ran it before he left.

Vivas work,they are just expensive. The alternatives are cheaper but don't work.

Of course it could be that different people have different goals in mind. Some just want the diploma, others want to master the subject. So it depends on what the diploma is supposed to mean. If it just means: turned up then a viva is of course unnecessary and wasteful.

The problem is, I knew some of the guys who graduated, with extremely low GPAs, who didn't cheat, have the same degree as me, exited with the same student loan debt as me, and can't code their way out of a wet paper bag. I've ran into some of them working retail jobs back in my home town.

It's a fucking travesty. They had to be saddled with a student loan debt load they would have no chance of paying back. I only paid mine back so early because of a lucky break on an insurance claim. I'd still be paying on them, 20 years later, if I hadn't lost everything I owned in a flood.

Universties talk about how they don't want to be seen as vocational training facilities. Well, they need to admit the reality. Primary education is not preparing people for the work force. We give people a free education for 13 years, and if they want to have economic opportunity, they want to do something more than just manual labor, we can't give them another 2 to 4 years? It's bullshit.

Your type of social group is not the one that this behavior happens in.

Same results as always. Exactly the same.

Someone will have cheated. Well, as always: I am sure people cheat at my exams as they do at any other.

I do not repent and I do not think I would do otherwise.

*However*: I DID spend a lot of time preparing materials, attending tutorials, replying to emails, correcting my lecture notes, recording videos...

I honestly think my students acted in accordance to my attitude: if you are honest, we are going to be as well.

People asked if he was concerned that people cheated or wouldn't learn anything and he once gave an insightful comment m that stuck with me: if people cheat, and they will, they're only cheating themselves.

He was right because while almost everyone passed his classes, not everyone ended up with successful careers. If they did, they probably had to pickup the sort of knowledge he crafted together like a masterful chef and hand fed us. The education is the product, not the degree. The degree is often a necessary rubber stamp to get past the first interview filters but it's not going to help you in most positions for the subsequent interview or actual job demands. You're really only cheating yourself of the education because the education is the real product here.

Things have changed a bit and you can find pretty much anything online readily, but you have to chop up the information, prep it, and craft it into a meal. Over time these skills improve and you too can become a knowledge chef but your (good) university programs give you the tools to become a knowledge chef in your field. They start you out as a cook who knows how to do certain things but they also give techniques you need to make your own new dishes. That's what you're paying for.

That can hurt the school's reputation if it becomes known for passing students who aren't actually prepared to do the work. Employers would prefer to recruit from schools where having a diploma actually means one is capable of doing what the job requires.

But I think, most importantly, I put a lot of emphasis on group work & home work. This has also its own issues. I like to do group homework because I believe that in the real world, you rarely work alone, and group work allow to have more fun project than what you can do in a 1-2h exam. On the other hand, I know some student hate it because there is always a slacker in every group. And home work is also an issue because not every student has time to work outside of school sadly. I try to give time during the classes for them to work on their homework but it is not all the time possible (limited number of hour for the whole course).

Overall, I hate grading and exams, I consider that my job is teaching, not grading, but this doesn't really work in the real world sadly.

My experience is that there is sometimes somebody who is not a slacker, and it's usually the only one doing the work for the entire group.

IRL:

- people has much higher stakes, while in school tanking a class project is no big deal for most slackers. IRL, they can get excluded, isolated, shamed, fired and so on.

- such group would exist rarely in the first place, because institutions filter people;

- if you are in the rare situation it happens, you can get out of it, but you it's very hard to move in the school structure, not to mention out of it.

Anecdotally, I've seen the scenario playing out many times in schools, but rarely in a restaurant, a dev team, a NGO or a sport club. There are productivity differences, sometimes immense, and an occasional slacker, but that's not the same order of magnitude at all.

We (as a species, really) are bad at interviewing lots of people that we don't already know well - just like we're bad at testing academically, surprise! - and we're also bad at coaching/firing/managing them.

Real world work is nothing like group work. In real world, you can carve part of project on yourself and be judged on that. You can complain about co workers doing nothing. The teamleader deals with interpersonal or productivity issues.

And ultimately, you can leave team or find new job if above dont happen.

> group work allow to have more fun project than what you can do in a 1-2h exam.

Or someone else from the group do the fun parts and will try to offload only boring parts on others.

School group work is less fun then individual, unless you are lucky to work with really good matching people. It has none of the processes and structures that mediates political issues in real work.

It seems like with software, you could easily write math questions with different inputs, as you suggest (in fact, our homework software already did that for math last semester), but it seems that those tools are not built into the testing software so much. It definitely seems like a solvable issue though!

What an awful burden to put on the shoulders of the already overworked and underpaid professors.

International students pay significantly more, and there are often 100 students or more in a class.

So it’s also not a great solution to put the burden of overworked professors onto the students by invading privacy and making them use poorly built suffrage to do so.

The trouble is at the institution level.

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I...

It's a whole platform for e-learning. The exam system is ... usable. The fine arts, law, and social silences like it very much, because long form answers are readable.

The natural sciences with the math bit have to work around it. We manage.

I don't believe “e-proctoring” companies are capable of it, either. I got disqualified from an exam for five `onblur` events (while my screen was being recorded), and it kept counting while the “DO NOT CHEAT” lockout message was displayed; if that's “works reasonably” then I don't know what isn't.

We spent 6 months on it and as far as I heard was still in use as late as 2015.

You don't have to create a whole system; just a database that prepares variants of questions, and a method to put it into the existing exam software.

Why is it unreasonable? What level of duty do you perceive course instructors having to achieving positive outcomes for their students? Who is responsible for pushing improvements beyond the trough of the status quo?