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Am I the only one that thinks closed book exams are not that relevant any more? Certainly in most work sectors you have others to bounce off, and we now have access to a massive library of cat videos at our fingertips, not to mention all the information in the world.

So what if someone passes tests by reading notes or using a calculator. Students need to be taught how to learn, how to research, how to work.

I sat my French exams in 89 & 90 with an English-French dictionary to hand. Theory was that if you were bad enough to need the dictionary too much, you'd lose time looking up words to be able to finish the exam in time. You needed the base vocabulary and could look up the odd word which doesn't come up often.

I've also done an IT technical interview where I could use Google as much as I wanted; was stuff like "configure Tomcat to do XXX" or "this MySQL DB isn't working, go fix it", so it was useful for looking up the obscure error messages or "how to" bits for things I hadn't done before on Tomcat.

I've also had to sit certification exams where some of the specific knowledge you need is obscure and not required very often, so it seemed odd to include it in such an exam. I could have found the answers quickly in the documentation, but that wasn't allowed.

There is space for both sorts of tests - in the same way that there is space for both with and without calculator maths examinations.

They are testing two different things, one is testing your recall of the basic foundations of the subject, which you shouldn't need reference material for - the other is your ability to understand the topic, know it well enough to get to the correct place in the reference material and put forward a reasoned argument for something much deeper than could be achieved in a closed book exam.

In terms of the calculator I very rarely type anything into a calculator without having done the mental arithmetic to know what sort of number I am expecting to see come out (order of magnitude, approximate value of first digit, should it be rational...). And that's a key skill, for which explicit mental arithmetic training and testing should be encouraged.

The thing is, you need a base of knowledge on a subject to be able to tell whether the information you are looking up is relevant or accurate. This is something that is severely lacking among a large number of people these days.

But the exam is there to see how much you have learnt, do you actually know the subject being taught. It isn't an exam to see if you can look up random topics online. I do agree that they need to learn how to learn and how to do research, but that is not what an exam is there for; it is there to see if they have managed to learn and do their research.

I use search engines regularly to supplement my knowledge - the key being supplement. If I spent all of my time just browsing forums and reading online articles, I'd never get any work done. That basic knowledge has to be there to start with.

All my University Mechanical Engineering exams were open-book. You could take anything you liked into the exam, so long as it wasn't too big and you could carry it. Books, notes, calculators.

This meant you had to really understand the subject, and know where to look for answers. Just like in the real world. No engineer would rely solely on memory, so why would testing that ability be of any use?

This was way back in the 1980's, it's not a new concept.

Agree entirely.

I sat some (non-tech-related but UK-based) open-book examinations back in the early noughties. IMHO, they are a two-edged sword. It's nice to be able to look things up BUT you still need to know your stuff otherwise you waste (a) valuable exam-time looking things up and (b) checking-time at the end. Consequently, the pass-mark was 60%, not 50%.

I think there's a certain prudishness against open book exams. Wen I waz studaying tu be a Enjinear in the early '90s it was really dependent on the department or even teacher as to whether it was allowed.

As you say, you need to know the foundations to make any sense of reference material in the first place.

Also fuck Materials Engineering for making me remember entire sets of Phase Diagrams off by heart. No disrespect to any Materials Engineers out there and fortunately enough alcohol has been consumed to erase most of my memory of such things past gone.

I trained as an electrical engineer, at that time the university I went to didn’t have a separate IT degree. This meant that in addition to computer-type courses (FORTRAN, PL/1, C, programming logic, networks, etc.) I had to take the likes of electromagnetic field theory and electrophysics. Emag FT was extremely annoying. We were allowed to take a cheat sheet in (actually, up to four pages) with stuff of our choice which we thought might be useful. But… if you knew where to look for the correct what’s it, odds are that you already knew the correct what’s it, and looking it up just wasted time. And the tests were written expecting that we would have certain items either in our heads or on the cheat sheet, so that’s more like _required_ than allowed. I will say that knowing how antennae behave (and what an antenna is, it’s amazing how few know all the things which can be considered to be antennae… hint: that USB keyboard cable is an antenna….) made tracking certain network problems down easier. I still have the emag FT textbook… (I dumped the ephys text within five minutes of getting out of the final…)

Protorio or Proctorio?

It comes across as a bit slapdash when the name of the subject of the piece seems to vary. I found that the impact of the discussion was lessened because of the inconsistency.

Nitpicking perhaps but this sort of thing is something that should be spotted before publication.

Oh, one last point. If the name of the company is Proctorio is their application called Proctoscope?

In the States, proctors is the term given to invigilators at exams.

I am now wondering if the study of proctors would be proctology the same word as that used to describe the study of arseholes.

What i find amazing about this story is that a company is actually selling sofware that claims to invigilate and detect cheating by looking into the students eyes.

also amazing that anyones bought it!

Its a great idea , but shurley to anywhere near usuable it would need another 20 years R&D

We've barely mastered face or voice recognition thus far after decades of trying

I would guess the people making the purchase decision probably have no background in tech. They simply believe the sales pitch.

It isn't sold as being able to tell if someone's cheating. Just to suggest targets for observation by humans.

As long as the results are treated as being largely false-positives by whoever is getting them, it's no different to what invigilators do in exam halls when they look for e.g. students who aren't looking down at their desks, and watch them for a minute to check they're staring into space and thinking, rather than trying to crib answers.

What you state may be the guidance, but the reality (I seem to recall some coverage of this a little while ago) is that it is used specifically to identify 'suspicious' activity and that is accepted by the shoe size IQ operator as 'cheating'.

of trying to throw pills or technology at problems that would be better tackled by addressing the root cause.

It is a great idea, and stop calling me Shurley!

Presumably it's tracking pupil movement to see if the examinee is looking at concealed notes, etc.

Is there any aspect of education that hasn't been diminished by corporate rapacity?

I'm old enough to still find it breath-taking that students' "learning" is now barely more than a grudging, copyright-controlled loan from an educational megacorporation and that they're being deliberately inculcated with the notion that their future is inevitably subject to Orwellian surveillance.

There was a time education was specifically about the opposite.

"Proctorio uses an opaque proprietary system to measure 'behavior', calculate 'abnormalities', and then assign a 'suspicion level' to each student,"

Orange lied to us! We were promised a bright and orange future, not this dystopian hellscape where computers assign us suspicion levels from cameras in our homes. Fuck any university that thinks this is ok.

You weren't lied to, you were just sold the potential benefits.

It's just unfortunate that the orange you bought was difficult to peel, sour and mostly pips but it's a nice colour.

"Proctorio uses an opaque proprietary system to measure 'behavior', calculate 'abnormalities', and then assign a ' suspicion level ' to each student,"

The entire premise here is that the students cannot be trusted which is not a good thing.

As others have noted, you have to have an understanding of the core subject to make any lookup (on searchengine fu) meaningful.

If I were enrolled in something like this (unlikely as I am well past that age by several decades, but still), I would insist they provide me with one of their computers (which would have very limited access to anything else on the very slow network it would be provisioned for) as I would most certainly not permit this sort of surveillance crap on any privately owned kit.

Your intellectual property that is blatantly displayed in public video available on YouTube ?

Is this a joke ?

You're not protecting your IP, you're trying desperately to protect your reputation, just like Diebold.

And, just like Diebold, you're going to find out that using lawsuits to silence criticism does not work.