Comment by abathur
7 days ago
I don't disagree with you that a reasonable way to cope with the current problems is to ensure everything that "counts" is done in a controlled environment, but pedagogy and its goals are vast.
There are things you learn from spending several days structuring a 20-page argument that you will not learn (and cannot assess) from oral examination or a 5-paragraph essay written in a blue book.
If you have spent several days structuring a 20 page argument in October on any topic you'll have learnt a great deal about the subject matter. When you get to the exam hall in, say, May it will stand to you.
That knowledge will show up in the blue book vis-a-vis the other exam candidates.
Sure--yes--the student will learn something if they actually wrote a 20-page paper on some given topic. But how are you going to evaluate their ability to compose the 20-page argument?
I would prefer not to be confrontational here, but I am having a hard time imagining that you've deeply considered the pedagogy of how to teach and evaluate students on squishy skills like this.
Knowing a bunch of facts about something is a world apart from structuring a compelling in-depth argument about it.
In the simplest case, where we'll say the exam question was precisely the topic of the 20 page paper, the candidate would be golden. Of course, it's unlikely in a 3 hr. exam that you'll be asked to write a 20 page response; but in edited form, you could definitely produce three cogent pages about some particular aspect of the original paper - if you've done the work. If you truly wrote the 20 page paper, you can surely produce three literate, cogent, responsive and topical pages.
I think schools need to set up additional, new proctoring sessions for this type of work. This will likely be something they have to hire for. A student can come and work for four hours, then hand in their in-progress draft and leave, then return later to finish it. (And please for the love of god, let students do this on offline computers, don't make them handwrite everything!)
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This assumes that the assignments and the exam cover the same material. That's not always the case.
That would be really poor course design :-)
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But there's no reason to expect that work to be graded. It should be a learning exercise which trains skills later tested under exam conditions.
Many students will simply not do these assignments. They should but they won’t. Continuous assessment partly solves this.