Comment by khushia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by khushia | Hacker News Reader

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Out of curiosity - the Mid-term exam paper says:

This midterm exam is open-book, open-note, open-computer, but closed-network. This means that if you want to have your laptop with you when you take the exam, that's perfectly fine, but you must not use a network connection. You should only use your computer to look at notes you've downloaded from online in advance. If you are an SCPD student, you should take this exam in any two-hour period between 11:00 AM Pacific time, July 20 and 11:00 AM Pacific time, July 21 . If you have any questions, please feel free to call me at _ any time in this window except between midnight and 8AM on July 21, Pacific time. You may submit the exam either by faxing it to _ or by scanning and emailing it

I'm not familiar with how these things work in the US - are the students trusted to take the exam away and not use the internet to get help?

At Stanford, faculty are prohibited from proctoring. So there is no professor or grad student that sits in the exam hall with the students while they are taking the test:

"The faculty on its part manifests its confidence in the honor of its students by refraining from proctoring examinations and from taking unusual and unreasonable precautions to prevent the forms of dishonesty mentioned above."

https://communitystandards.stanford.edu/student-conduct-proc...

A professor or grad student walks into the room every 30 minutes or so just to make sure everything looks okay. They otherwise sit outside the exam hall so you can ask them questions, ask to go the bathroom, etc. But it's up to the students to police each other and ultimately themselves.

There are definitely other universities in the US that have this policy, but I would say it's more the exception than the norm.

That's really interesting. I did a CS degree in the UK and all exams were strictly supervised and we were never allowed computers.

The exception to this was programming exams for which the department would boot all the lab workstations into a locked-down mode with no internet & new homedir containing only the exam files. At the end of the exam everything got collected and marked by an automated test suite.

They went to quite some effort to ensure that no cheating could take place - http://pubs.doc.ic.ac.uk/Lexis/Lexis.pdf

I can't speak for other schools in the US but I am an undergraduate in the CS department at Stanford, and it's fairly common to have an open-computer test to refer to notes and the textbook. Other students sit around you and it's most likely fear of another student approaching a TA that makes this enforceable.

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