| >so some students are in some classes purely to tick a checkbox As a student I was forced to take classes I would have never willingly chosen to take, and yet I still learned from them. I worked for an A and didn't consider cheating an option. I'm not really sure why, I can answer why I wouldn't today, but I can't particularly say why my yesteryear self was so against it, yet it remains as a key point in me gaining a very useful education. >Forcing people to take a course they don't care about is a futile ability. While I think sometimes we include too many unrelated courses, I also don't agree with the idea of only giving someone courses they are interested in. I would have been weaker for it. I think the issue is the culture that encourages cheating as a valid response, but where does that come from and how to fight it are massive problems. >The only viable way is to have a extremely controlled exam environment, but that greatly restricts what sort of things you can examine. I think oral exams are great at testing knowledge, but they suffer other problems. They don't scale at all, and they leave more room for bias than other forms of exams. I'm sure there are other problems, but those two are enough to start with. If only there was some option that had the benefits of an oral exam with an expert without the issues (this sounds like I'm hinting there is such a solution, but I promise I'm not, it is just wistful thinking). |