I took the approach of just letting my students have unfettered access to the internet during the pandemic, even for exams. You may think this would lead to everyone getting an A, but it turns out the grades were normally distributed with a B- average, which was pretty typical for my courses per-pandemic.
What I did was ask them to write real code. It’s a course on programming. If you can get the computer to accomplish the given task in whatever way you know, including gluing together parts and libraries from online, then that’s a demonstration other learned something!
And as it turns out, C and D quality work is still submitted even when students have all the time and resources in the world. The internet is not a magic wand to solve all problems for you. For example, my final project is to write a file server. Yeah you can find tutorials for how to do this on the internet, but it’s still going to have to be customized to use my specific protocol. For someone who knows what they are doing, they can do this assignment in 10 minutes leveraging the right tools. For others, they might write it from scratch as we discussed in class. Others still will barely get past writing a makefile, even with step by step instructions and examples on how to do it. So in the end the grades worked out as they usually do, distributed normally with a B- average, and about half a letter grade stdev. That’s just the way it is.
So this fear that access to the internet will lead to rampant cheating is only relevant if the questions are easily gamed: like definitions, facts, and contrived math problems. Well it turns out this is like 90% of prepared materials for the low level intro classes.
I mean, if you can get through a number of semesters of college by looking up answers on Google, the problem is not with Google, it’s with the curriculum. Because what value are these courses really adding if they are just cramming facts into your brain and then you regurgitate them, and promptly forget?
Take chemistry for example. All of chemistry should be in a laboratory setting. All of it. It’s a perfect hands on discipline, yet the standard sequence is just year after year of memorizing facts and definitions with very little comparable lab time.
And I get why this isn’t done, it’s probably not practical and there does need to be an acquisition of fundamental knowledge, but that isn’t really done by going through prepackaged web content (that can’t be resold) with all the answers available on Chegg, as is the case for a great many 100 and 200 level courses in all major disciplines at most universities.