Exams in the Google World

Last time I talked about the impossibility of monitoring students in the online world: if they’re going to cheat, they’re going to cheat, and there’s not a lot we can do about it. Just the other day, I had a student who got an “11” on the first (in-person exam), based on indecipherable scribbled work, get a “90” on the second (online exam), based on letter hand perfect work.

Can I prove academic dishonesty? No.

Should I worry? One of two things is going to happen. Either the student is going to go to the next class, and their inability to do the work without help is going to hurt them…or they’re never going to use the skills the test was evaluating them on.

Still, there’s the hope that we can still do something resembling exams online with some level of integrity. In the longterm, there’s only one good solution: scrap exams entirely, and shift to project-based learning: You pass an engineering course by building a bridge that doesn’t collapse. Of course, that’s easier said than done, and what it really takes is one-on-one interaction with the students. Fortunately, that is the longterm solution, and we don’t have to implement it by the end of the semester.

The short term solution: Lots and lots of words.

Ideally, every problem should be a word problem. But once upon a time, I got into a debate with a colleague over why we didn’t make every problem a word problem. Their response? While they though it was a good idea, the weaker students needed the problems they could do by following an algorithm. In other words, the non-word problems are there so the weaker students have a chance of passing the exam. The student who won’t flinch when you say “Solve 3x + 5 = 35” will be unable to solve “Three times a number, and five, is thirty-five. Find the number.”

However, in the internet world, this is our (short term) solution to apps like WolframAlpha, Mathpapa, Sybmolab, Cymath, and others. They don’t (yet) know how to handle word problems, even simple ones like the one above. WolframAlpha thought we were asking about newspapers:

Symbolab responded in what looks like Old English (Beowulf, anyone?)

MathPapa’s response:

Of course, a student could figure out that “Three times a number, and five, is thirty-five. Find the number” is the same as the problem 3x + 5 = 35, and then run that problem through their favorite problem solving software.

But maybe that’s not such a bad thing. It’s using a human brain to do what a human brain is good at (understanding questions asked by another human brain), while using technology to do what technology is good at (applying an algorithm that requires no logic, thought, or insight).

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