Undergrad college had 'infinite time' and 'open everything but people' exams, but graded on a curve so that sometimes getting half the questions right was an A. Much more stressful, learned more, and basically no cheating.
With the technologies of today, the ability to recite knowledge (versus using said knowledge when provided, and the ability to look for said knowledge) is rapidly losing value. But our education system has not moved on and are mostly stuck at using recital to judge student capability.
A complete rethinking of how to assess student performance is long overdue. For subjects that cannot be assessed without recital, maybe rethink the necessity of existence of those subject for teaching.
I didn’t think you are implying that having knowledge (ready to go) is of no value.
Having more knowledge gives a huge advantage in time and space. Not only can you solve problems much faster (you don’t need to find, read, understand, and internalize the “knowledge”) you can also make connections that others would miss because to gain knowledge is deeper than mere recall.
It focused on a planned development (hotels, grocery stores, etc) in a part of town that everybody in the class is quite familiar with and asked us to apply concepts from lecture to predict the impact to a given set of species.
It was masterful. Hit all the points, anchored in our everyday lives, applied in a way that rote memorization just wouldn't help with. I had a moment like: WTF I've lived here my whole life and never seen a wild ferret. Searched it after the tests and turns out they're native and critically endangered.
Just saying, the good ones are out there.
I tend to really appreciate 'open everything but people' exams, since they're a good way to actually check that people know how to complete a task. I think that a good one is probably harder for a professor to write, but the ones that I've taken have been a much better test of my understanding of the topic than ones where I was concerned with memorizing what the API for POSIX threads was.
Not so sure about infinite time, though. Seems like it makes it really easy for someone who has the time to dedicate a whole day (or the obsessiveness to do it even if they don't have the time) to do way better than someone who, for whatever reason, can't.
To me, the gold standard for computer science exams would be ~90m-3h with an open everything policy, including both a "do you know/can you apply the theory?" and a "can you do something practical with that?" section.
Cheating was prevalent in certain situations. I had a teacher that would leave the room during exams leaving the students to do whatever they wanted, which included the whole class hot debating the answer of each question. An engagement level that would never occur in a normal class.
In the CS lab (C++ for engineers) it was common for the student that finished the assignment first to mail the code to the whole class. Most would simply copy it, leave early and call it a day. Many also struggled with programming and put it in the category of "things that are hard and will not need to know".
Can you expand on this?
I lived the two models as a student and still can't make up my mind on which is best. I feel like it just takes catching some bad cold the week of the exams or a bad exam subject / topic to fail them which seems pretty unfair, but I also know my shit better and have more perspective the week of the exam and prefer not having to stress every week because of the continuous assessment.
ChatGPT might just fit into an educational world that values outcomes over fact retention. One may dream.
There are variations, but if you're curious check out "Standards-based grading" or Mastery-based grading. It's in a weird and shitty limbo where a lot of primary and secondary schools have adopted it partially with inadequate training/support, and it's also getting fucked by our shitty publishing industry, same as the botched common-core rollout.
For example, continuous assessment tends to force students to devote a constant amount of time throughout the course, which is fine for those who can afford to be full-time students, but disastrous for students who need to have a job to pay the bills. I have seen plenty of students like that getting frustrated because they lose points to this.
On the other hand, continuous assessment typically relies on assignments at home and these are deeply unequal and classist as well. The difficulty of these assignments depends on whether the student has someone more experienced to ask, whether they are paying for a private tutor, or whether they can plainly buy the assignment. I have known cases of students that basically bought every project and assignment that could be done at home, you know what made them sweat because it couldn't be bought? The final exam.
But almost no one cares about these things, continuous assessment is seen as the "progressive" thing to do because it's more modern and different from tradition, even if it's extremely classist and disproportionately harms working-class students.
On the other hand, it is true, as you point out, that the final exam model disadvantages students who have the bad luck of getting sick in that week. It's a real drawback, sadly. I still think it's better all things considered, for the reasons above.
I wish people didn't have to work during studies. That's one of the biggest reasons of failing.
In college/university a fairly big part of the education was learning what was compulsory reading and what was optional. There was always more reading than hours in the day.
Maybe because I'm from a latin country, but I was always under the impression that only on-site assessment mattered, as continuous assessment provides no signal considering many students cheat. Even what we call "continuous assessment" is done on site.
Still in my time most exams were done on paper. Think of algorithms in pseudocode. But also a lot of logic like reasoning, with process automata, or relational algebra (databases).
Surely you understand ChatGPT is infinitely more scalable. How many people can just "ask a friend" or have a spare money to pay someone else multiple times?
The problem has always been there but it was largely ignored because it wasn't that frequent (although I think it's definitely more frequent than most people make themselves believe).
Now that everyone has a "friend" to ask thanks to ChatGPT, people begin to care. How dare the plebs have the same options to cheat as privileged students!
Any assignment that can be cheated by using ChatGPT could already be cheated before by asking a friend, an expert or paying someone else to do it.
But most teachers assumed this doesn't happen often, and thus acted as if it wasn't a thing. Making life much simpler and easier.
Facing ChatGPT will probably help us make assessment fairer in the long run (and the path is probably going to be a lot of traditional on-site assessment, abandoning the continuous assessment fad that has always been rather disastrous for equity, even if again, life is easier ignoring this).