Comment by pibaker
6 days ago
Let's just focus on CS for a moment because this is HN and I have a CS degree. How do you evaluate a student's ability to implement a piece of non trivial software following a specification that would take, say, over five thousand lines? This is a fairly common type of coursework for CS students. It's not possible to do it in one exam setting. Well, unless you can type continuously without having to stop to think or check your work.
What will likely happen if you have to force all evaluation into one exam is you will get a Leetcode style programming quiz, that tests something, except that something is only barely connected to your daily job after college. Or you end up with something like a multiple choice exam that is again disconnected from your work and can be gamed by studying just for the exam.
This exact line of argument that we should just abolish coursework keeps coming up on HN. Courseworks exist for a purpose. You can't just throw it away and pretend it never did anything useful.
A clever solution my professor did was we write the program in our own time, then take the code into an exam where we have to modify it to answer some novel question. It doesn't matter if we "cheated" writing the code as long as we understand it enough to change its behavior.