Wednesday

Cheating! In schools? Say it isn't so.

This just in from the BBC, complete with a scary headline to drive traffic to the story:
Hi-tech exam cheating increases says Ofqual

Yes, cheating on exams exists. It has always occurred and now we have a new bogeyman - those evil cellphones! Here's the interesting part of the story, or as I like to say; How to scare people with useless statistics:

Figures from Ofqual show a 6% rise in cheating by candidates although the body points out cheating is still very rare, affecting 0.03% of exams taken.

So .03% of all exams taken had some sort of cheating occur. That's just HUGE isn't it? Not so much. The real issue is that we are still trying to quantify learning based on multiple-guess assessments. How about if we make the assessment non-Google-able instead, and assess student ability to locate data, and discern if that data is valid, and then use it to make new knowledge from that data?
Back to the story:
Another approach, tested in Denmark, has been to stop trying to prevent the use of technology in exams and allow pupils to have open access to the internet.

I wonder which country will have better creative thinkers in the coming years? My money is on Denmark.

1 comment:

Nate said...

.03%? Quite the epedemic