It seems to me that this is pretty much immune to plagiarism as well as being much better for the student.
It seems to me that this is pretty much immune to plagiarism as well as being much better for the student.
However, you also mentioned a final project. You’d be shocked how much commissioning exists where people have their projects produced for them. I’m not talking an overly helpful study group, I mean straight up essay mills. Tools like ChatGPT make the bar for commissioning lower and cheaper. I don’t know how you can combat this and still have long-term projects like dissertations.
Many years later I took a course in C# at a university in Norway and that was not merely open note but also open book (you could take the set book in). Again that gives the exam author the possibility to really discover who knows what.
I doubt that your rich middle-western student would have passed either of these
I doubt that anyone could have produced a plausible report without actually doing the work. And to defend it one would have to understand the underlying physics and the work that was done. Plus I think my supervisor and the other two students who worked with me on the project would have remarked on my absence from the laboratory if I had simply bought the paper!
You can still have long term projects and dissertations so long as the degree is awarded for the defence of the dissertation rather than the dissertation itself; that is the student must demonstrate in a viva that they understand everything in the dissertation rather than merely regurgitate it.
There are certainly similar projects being completed by students every year, and doubtless those students are not cheaters, but for each dissertation like yours, there are probably 10 or more projects that are not collaborative and have no artefacts or supporting evidence other than a written report. Such projects are fairly easy to commission. For a reasonable price (potentially thousands of dollars) you can pay a poor research student in the same field as you to churn out a mid-tier dissertation. This can be detected with a viva, but the academics need to be very confident before accusing someone of cheating. More often than not, you can get away with it and just get a not great grade.
I think that in general the natural/formal sciences don't suffer nearly as much as social science and humanities do, simply because exams and labs tend to highlight irregularities, and cheaters are less likely to be drawn into "hard" fields. However, it still exists in every field.
Of course the current setup works badly for those who explain it much better by speaking.
Those of you who severely lack any of the three will be penalized. Just like someone who can discuss a topic orally but could not write it up would be penalized.
Yes, there are people who have trouble with public speaking to a debilitating degree, but it would be excessively rare for someone to not at the very least in a one on one with their professor/teacher be able to be so badly affected as to not seem they've even heard of a topic or at least be able to prove they've worked on it to a certain degree.
I would be immediately skeptical of any student who claims they are completely unable to explain their knowledge unless they are allowed to work in complete isolation with nobody to monitor they aren't cheating in some way.
Lots of elite prep schools in the US use a similar system, for similar reasons.
I think the hard answer is that to some extent you just have to learn to. I mean, you could sit silently in supervisions if you really insisted, but to participate properly you just needed to build the confidence.
Is it fun? No, but it's a pretty accurate reflection of life after school: nobody in the real world gives you points for "couldn't say the right thing at the right time, but was thinking it"
Can you communicate it in real-time through writing? Maybe that's an accommodation that could be done?
Similar re: exams, they were available but sticking rigidly to them didn’t help much.
Yeah, the General Problems exam was a nightmare, I think the professors competed each year to come up with the toughest questions. Getting 50% was an excellent score.
It did force you to learn all the material though, especially as at the end of 3-4 years you may have forgotten some of it, like Optics or whatever. It was pretty hardcore though, especially compared to my friends studying other subjects.
When you audition for a symphony you perform behind a curtain and are required to wear soft slippers (so they can't tell if you are a wearing high heals - female).
We can probably use voice changers so the examiner cannot tell who you are by your voice, but those tend to be fatiguing.
Not saying this is a fatal flaw, but there is a bit of a tradeoff there.