Sometimes life’s just too funny. I get stuff like this in my inbox from a site that stores old tests:
Why use a study guide when you can have the old
exam? Spend more time partying and less time studying.
Needless to say, when the site advertises things similar to “Why study the night before an exam when you can study on the day of the exam?” I wonder who buys this stuff. In the end it sounds like an invitation to cheat. Fortunately, most of the times this does not work, unless we professors get too lazy. This is when random number generators actually do a great job for science courses.
What is more dangerous nowadays is that people cheat by using the internet during exams even if they’re not allowed to. The problem is catching them. Fantastic tools like Wolfram Alpha can be used to remove the thinking out of a problem. Check this one (simple) example I just cooked:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=time+velocity+%3D+120+Km%2Fhr%2C+distance+100+m
The main problem is that at some point one actually needs to know if the student actually knows what a velocity really is. Or if the student can actually convert hours to seconds. In the end this is what certification of knowledge is about: we need to be able to certify that a student actually knows this stuff.
In the meantime, in the famous words of Garth and Wayne, party on.
I used to be a mathematician.I sometimes wonder how much many students understood!!
Dear David, I think that you’re on the same frequency as I am but the folks behind e.g. Wolfram Alpha, in particular Stephen’s brother Conrad, are thinking very differently:
http://blog.wolfram.com/2010/11/23/conrad-wolframs-ted-talk-stop-teaching-calculating-start-teaching-math/
In the video, Conrad Wolfram essentially advocates this kind of “Wolfram Alpha” cheating. As I’ve discussed in detailed texts, I think that this really means that the kids won’t know what the velocity is. What’s essential is knowing how the gadgets such as Wolfram Alpha operate to get an answer. If answers to questions arrive as a “complete black box”, then the user inevitably fails to understand the concepts.
So however boring such calculations may be, students must be forced to do them, at least a certain number of times, otherwise their potential to become experts is doomed.
Cheers
LM