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College professors are going back to paper exams and handwritten essays to fight students using ChatGPT
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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There are places where analog exams went away? I'd say Sweden has always been at the forefront of technology, but our exams were always pen-and-paper.
Same in Germany
Norway has been pushing digital exams for quite a few years, to the point where high school exams went to shit for lots of people this year because the system went down and they had no backup (who woulda thought?). In at least some universities most of or all exams have been digital for a couple years.
I think this is largely a bad idea, especially on engineering exams, or any exam where you need to draw/sketch or write equations. For purely textual exams, it's fine. This has also lead to much more multiple-choice or otherwise automatically corrected questions, which the universities explicitly state is a way of cutting costs. I think that's terrible, nothing at university level should be reduced to a multiple choice question. They should be forbidden.
Covid forced the transition to electronic exams in many areas.
Here we went back as quickly as possible because electronic exams are hell
The university I went to explicitly did in person written exams for pretty much all exams specifically for anti-cheating (even before the age of ChatGPT). Assignments would use computers and whatnot, but the only way to reliably prevent cheating is to force people to write the exams in carefully controlled settings.
Honestly, probably could have still used computers in controlled settings, but pencil and paper is just simpler and easier to secure.
One annoying thing is that this meant they also usually viewed assignments as untrusted and thus not worth much of the grade. You'd end up with assignments taking dozens of hours but only worth, say, 15% of your final grade. So practically all your grade is on a couple of big, stressful exams. A common breakdown I had was like 15% assignments, 15% midterm, and 70% final exam.