Educators at [Penn State] hope the [testing center], which opens this spring, will lead professors to embrace computer-based testing while at the same time acting as a major cheating deterrent. Students will have to swipe their ID cards and allow staff to match their faces with a photo on file. Each test taker will get a specific computer assignment, and the person they’re sitting next to might not even be from the same class.
The comments beneath the article certainly bring up a lot of possible negatives to this idea, but I have to say that I'm for it. If a center like this could operate like the GRE does, cheating would definitely be reduced; while the article focuses on copying-your-neighbor's-paper style cheating, the inability to access the internet while typing the paper certainly reduces downloaded papers. ALSO--anything that eliminates having to decipher student handwriting gets my vote!
Thoughts?
2 comments:
i am anything for deciphering. why do folks become teachers anyway????
But it's not like we can do this kind of testing in the composition or even literature classroom. Most of the questions have writing components--like, "Discuss the feminist implications in X" as opposed to multiple guess-type questions such as "When was Sylvia Plath's Ariel released?" with a list of possible dates.
I'm all for reducing cheating, but don't know how practical this is for our needs.
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