Again, I think the problem is elsewhere. Where I'm from(Poland) cheating is rampant and universities have absolutely no trouble kicking people out over it. Got caught cheating? Good bye, apply again next year. It doesn't lead to litigation or messy PR. Maybe it's because all universities are free to attend so no one can argue that they paid for something they aren't getting - all they are losing is their own time.

I went to university a bit later in life. When I was in high school smartphones weren’t a thing yet and cheating in exams was difficult and not common. At university cheating seemed rampant and easy. It was easy to spot the potential cheaters but not easy to prove they were cheating so they got away with it. You just go to the bathroom (in a long exam they can’t exactly stop you from this) and you have all your notes on your phone. There were people I’m surprised got into the university in the first place getting really good grades because of this. It was frustrating but I’m not sure what universities can do in this case. It seems to me that the “exam” process needs rethought entirely. I’m not sure how it could be changed but it is far too easy to cheat now. Like a lot of things in life too, the dishonest people tend to get away with it and manage to succeed while some portion of the honest people work very hard and struggle.

Maybe making questions that you have to think about instead of just looking up the answer would help?

You need to give a range of questions from challenging like that to easy regurgitation to discern their level of understanding and be able to assign them an appropriate grade.

Why do you need a grade at all? Fail, pass, distinction. You either know the answers because you know and understand all the material, or you have no business functioning in that field period.

More granularity is still valuable though, since in topics where deep understanding is needed, the shallower levels of understanding are required to master the deeper. E.g., you need to be able recognize an integral before you can solve them. Which in turn you need to be able to do in canned rote mechanical cases before you can handle general word problems that involve assembling and solving integrals. And not all subsequent classes or careers will necessarily require the full mastery of the topics in a class. Plus it's good to have such detailed feedback for both the student and the professor to focus on shortcomings.

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.

Isn't that how good tests should be written anyway?

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

Depends on the subject. In a long form essay where you need to cite sources or technical details you could make a big difference to your score by quickly looking these up. Nobody can go into the exam blind but they can improve their answers significantly by looking up the details that others have to spend a long time trying to remember. For example in an English exam, direct quotations from literature. Or in a law exam, case names.

It sounds like the root problem is that your exam grade is boosted more by a direct quote or case name more than by your comprehension of the message from the quote or by the case name rather than the precedent established by the case.

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.

But why should you not be allowed to look them up?

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

Beats me. A well designed exam asks one to apply knowledge not to regurgitate it. You should be able to look up any of the supporting information but you also need to be able to organize that information.

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.

> Or in a law exam, case names.

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.

How do you have your phone with you? Stash it in the bathroom? At my university the invigilators make you show what's in your pockets before and after going to the bathroom (which has itself been checked, and which has a log of people and times), and you can't take anything out (e.g. formula sheet to secretly copy somehow-bathroom-stashed notes onto) or bring anything in. Phones are in bags up the front of the room, inaccessible. The kinds of things you're talking about very rarely happens, and consequences include fines and academic penalties.

> The kinds of things you're talking about very rarely happens, and consequences include fines and academic penalties.

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

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

That sentence is specifically describing my university, like the sentence before it. Nothing in my comment is about for-profit entities.

I'm not sure that would fly in the Western world.

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.

> Good bye, apply again next year.

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

in Canada you'd likely be unable to get into ANY university with a note about plagiarism in your records.

Same in Germany, but universities don't always share records. You are supposed to fill in a form on immatriculation where you state previous universities and why/how you left there, and you will get expelled if you lie on that form. However, if you pass your final exam without getting caught, there is a good chance you'll get away with it.

Idk cheating in the college I was in (Top #30 US Institution) was punished severely. I fondly remember my Data Structures professor, bluntly telling us she'd end our academic careers if we were caught cheating. Fondly because she was a great professor who clearly had no time or patience for that kind of bs. It was school policy for expulsion, and this is a very well known school.

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.

How many people do you know of who failed a class or were expelled for that kind of thing?

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

Rumors yes, there were rumors of people getting caught cheating, but I didn't know anyone personally.

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.

>Too much of a hit to the bottom line, too much messy litigation, and too much bad PR.

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.

Universities will definitely expel cheaters, though they may give a couple chances first (with increasingly-worse penalties like failing grade and violation on transcript). One of the things people are complaining about with this software is people claiming to be wrongly punished.

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.

A sibling was caught cheating in university. This would have been around ten years ago. He wasn't expelled, but he was suspended for the remainder of the semester and failed on all his classes that term. I don't remember if he finished uni late as a result or did makeup work during the summer.

being forced to do an extra semester costing like 50k+ results in some very interesting incentives, or lawsuits, when profit is involved..