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Comment by swiley | Hacker News Reader

My calculus 3 professor would pass out tests 10-15 minutes early on test days. He'd dump them right on top of your study materials and expect you to push them out of the way if wanted extra time to study.

Applying a panopticon to children to prevent cheating is questionable since it normalizes authorities using electronics to bully people. Applying it to adults at a university is arguably a human rights violation and a failure to write good course materials.

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This is the scary part. Teaching students and younger generations that's it's normal and okay to be surveilled 24/7.

instead let's teach them that if they cheat, nothing adverse happens.

Replace exams with vivas and see how far the cheats can get. At least make a viva voce a large proportion of the final score.

Probably the best way to evaluate people, I guess it just doesn’t scale that well…

It seems that the alternatives also don't scale, that's sure why this discussion is happening.

Vivas work,they are just expensive. The alternatives are cheaper but don't work.

Of course it could be that different people have different goals in mind. Some just want the diploma, others want to master the subject. So it depends on what the diploma is supposed to mean. If it just means: turned up then a viva is of course unnecessary and wasteful.

I have never had an oral exam, but I have always thought it would be great for smaller classes. Basically I would love to have an exam where I sit down with a professor for 30 minutes to an hour and talk about the content and answer questions they ask. I feel like it would be a bit more in-depth while also eliminating the possibility of misunderstanding a mistakenly ambiguous question. I am not sure how realistic that is for a class above about 15 students, and also how things like disabilities would be handled, but I'd love to try it.

> Basically I would love to have an exam where I sit down with a professor for 30 minutes to an hour and talk about the content and answer questions they ask.

That would have been fun! The only time I did something like this was when I tested out of one of the intro to programming classes. I was one of the last students to talk to the professor that ran it before he left.

Most of exams i took during my university studies were oral exams. I definitely prefer them to written exams. They were used even for big classes with 100+ students, professors just declare multiple test dates (each with say 20 timeslots) and students booked to them.

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