Quote:
Originally Posted by burn_this_city
The biggest advantage of all is having really good eyesight. 20-15 vision allowed me to cheat on most of my high school exams so I could ditch class and have fun.
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I'd never do it, but I don't have the option of copying off of other people's papers with my eyesight. I'd have to be so close to their paper that it would be impossible for everyone to not know that it was happening.
I realize that it probobly wouldn't work for all subjects, but I think tests could be made pretty cheater proof by changing their format. I had some exams that were totally open book, you could bring whatever you wanted into the test. The tests are then formatted so that the questions involve interpretting whatever data you brought in (with essay questions, this is totally possible) I had a couple like that, and IMO, it really serperates the people who know their stuff form the people that don't.
My brother talked about the exam he had for his "Critical Thinking" class one time. The total value of the test was 200%, and it was made up of various essay questions worth various amounts. In the two hour time period, you had no hope of answering much more then half of the questions given. The catch was, the exam was completely open book, you didn't even have to stay in the exam room. You were free to leave the room, talk to the other people in class, talk to anyone you wanted, research whatever you needed, etc. You just had to be back in two hours to hand your work in. For a course in critical thinking, I think that exam was pretty appropriate.
I had one prof pause the exam roughly half way through, and he took the whole class to the coffee shop and bought drinks for the whole class, and we had a ten or fifteen minute break. This was an exam that clearly wasn't going to take anyone the whole alloted time. He was the kind of prof that had an exam made up of mostly true or false questions, and could make the exam really hard.
For another exam with a different prof, the Prof had given us an outline of what was to be on the test beforehand the kind of outline, that if you really wanted to, you could be very well prepared to get a good mark if you put in the work. Anyway, we get to the exam, and he puts up on the overhead projector (the movie "The Matrix" had just come out several weeks before) "you can take the blue pill, and take the exam just as had been discussed, or you can take the red pill - do something completely different - follow the white rabbit to what is unknown. If you take this path there will be no return." The prof expected that roughly 10 (out of 80 or so) people would "take the red pill." Half the class gets up and follows the white rabbit to the library, myself included. We get the mission that we must write a 1000 word essay by the next afternoon and the subject is "the gospel of the Matrix vs the gospel of Christ." (this is a Bible college) I was somewhat lucky, as I had already seen the movie on Easter Weekend back at home. Those people who hadn't seen the movie had to go to the late showing of the Matrix so that they knew what they were talking about. A few people told the prof that they had flights leaving for home the next morning, and thus must be required to go back and do the original test, which the prof obviously had to allow.
For my one literature class, the prof told us exactly what the test was going to be - 10 quotes from works we had studied in the class. For each quote, we had to give the name of the work, the author, what happens in that work, what happens immediately around the quote, etc. The prof then also gave us a list of 30 quotes (with no background information), and said that 10 of the 30 quotes would be on the exam. No notes were allowed to be brought into the exam however (for obvious reasons). So, if you had the time and desire, you could go through the entire list of quotes, find them all, and toally prepare yourself. Searching for 30 somewhat obscure quotes was no easy task in the days before the internet could do it quickly.