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Comment by tribeofone | Hacker News Reader

> series of discoveries that led him to bring the final take-home exams submitted by his students

What? They have final TAKE HOME exams at Harvard?

Take home exams are somewhat common at modern universities, and in fact are sometimes used as an anti-cheating measure.

Rather than having questions which can be easily answered with access to research materials, the exam is designed to be difficult even if you have the textbook open on the desk right next to the exam. Take-home exams often specifically grant permission to use the textbook and any other class materials.

Because a take-home exam is built on the premise that the student will have access to all of their materials, the professor writes the exam expecting that you have attended all the classes, read all the textbook chapters, and understood all the notes, so the exam is much more difficult!

It's also meant to make exams more like real work. Nobody at my company gives a damn if I need to crack open a math textbook to find an algorithm, or Google something - but a real job requires that you can understand and synthesize the information you find. You can't build an entire (...good) product out of copy-and-pasted answers from Stack Overflow but you can look up specific issues or points where you get stuck.

Remember that we're seeing this story because the students failed to get away with cheating - in part precisely because of the nature of the exam. One of the questions is an open-ended invitation to pick two events and explain them, and it's very suspicious if a group of students all pick exactly the same two events and present similar-sounding explanations.

>the professor writes the exam expecting that you have attended all the classes, read all the textbook chapters, and understood all the notes //

As opposed to?

Seriously the exams should test your knowledge and application of elements from the whole range of the course material. Giving that as a reason why you can take the exam home and [have someone else] do it sounds entirely absurd to me.

I always found take-home exams to be the hardest exams I ever took, and I think they most accurately test a person's depth of knowledge about a subject. The problem with in-class exams is that they often reward test-taking and memorization skills rather than organization and analysis.

I had a lot of take home mid-terms and in class final exams with the same "figure out 2 or 3 proofs" format. The professors were always more forgiving on the final exam since you only had 3 hours. But if you missed one step in the take home mid-term that you had 4 or 5 days to complete, BAM mark that baby way down.

And the problem with take-home exams is that everyone cheats on them. It's common knowledge to students. Usually nobody gets caught, though.

Take home final exams are everywhere and they can easily be some of the most challenging. I like this story of one of Tyler Cowen's final exams[1]:

"Tyler [Cowen] once walked into class the day of the final exam and said, “Here is the exam. Write your own questions. Write your own answers. Harder questions and better answers get more points.” Then he walked out. The funniest thing was when a student came in late and I had to explain to him what the exam was and he didn’t believe me!"

[1] http://blog.sethroberts.net/2012/08/09/tyler-cowens-unusual-...

That's essentially a funny way of describing a term paper.

Do people find that surprising?

I don't, but I went to Caltech so am used to the idea of take home exams. At Caltech, essentially all exams, including finals, are take home. If a professor wants to give an in-class exam, he has to get special permission to do so.

I think MIT now also has take home exams, but I'm not sure. Any MIT people here who can clarify?

  Do people find that surprising?

Somewhat; because of its nature, cheating is very hard to quantify - I know there was some at my school but I can only speculate as to how much went on behind closed doors.

Was collaboration permitted/encouraged on all assessment? In a lot of the group work at my school there tended to be some people who contributed nothing but complaints about their hangover - but who got good grades on the back of the group. I would have thought more group work would exacerbate this problem; do you think that was the case?

I think MIT now also has take home exams, but I'm not sure. Any MIT people here who can clarify?

I had at I think one take-home exam at MIT during my time there (1991-1995) and we were explicitly allowed (and encouraged) to collaborate, so long as we gave credit to the person we collaborated with. During one of the other HN Harvard-cheating-scandal threads, another poster mentioned that a take-home exam s/he had at MIT specifically forbid collaboration.

I never took any take-home exams when I was at MIT (1983-1988). Most of the in-class exams I took there, though, were open-book, open-notes, etc., so making them take-home would not have been too much of a change. (Someone upthread commented that a good take-home exam is much more difficult because the professor can assume you have access to all reference materials. That fits my experience with the open-book, open-notes MIT exams.)

No take home tests while you were there fits in with what I infer from this document: http://web.mit.edu/faculty/reports/exam-termregs/report.html

It's a report from their Faculty Policy Committee's Subcommittee on Examination Terms and Regulations, undertaking in 1998. Among the things the report covers is consideration of lifting the ban on take home tests. From the documents they reference, it appears that MIT tried in experiment starting in 1992 to allow take home tests, and discontinued the experiment in 1994.

In that report, they recommend allowing out-of-room exams, where the exam would be given out at 1:30 PM, the students would have until 7:30 pm to turn it in, and the students can take the test where they want. It looks like the main point of this was to make it so students could have access to computers and libraries during these tests.

Their concern with allowing take-home tests seems to be that professors might give monstrous take-home tests that would consume too much time.

Upon further Googling, it sounds like this policy or something similar was adopted and is still in place today: http://web.mit.edu/catalog/overv.chap5.html

I had take home exams (2000-2004) but they were rare. I think professors abstained from take home exams as a favor to the students -- a sit-down exam is only going to consume 2 hours of your week, whereas a take home exam will balloon to consume all of the time you have available to work on it, to the detriment of your other classes/activities.

It's much better preparation for the post-college world anyway. The internet enables unparalleled access to information, so knowing a disparate collection of easily searchable facts is not really that useful. Rather, successful people know how to analyze, synthesize, and summarize information, test sources, weigh competing claims, reconstruct arguments, etc. A take home exam is more than able to measure that at least, or better, than an in-class exam.

Take home exams are common at my alma mater. Hell, I had more than a few limited-time (as in, do it in X hours but it is due in Y days), closed-book, take-home finals.

It lessens the importance of rote memorization.

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