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by snickerbockers 30 days ago
Wait, is this not how things are now? Do students do exams at home now?

I guess it has been 14 years since I graduated but I didnt expect it to change that much.

2 comments

I was in college during COVID and in upper level classes we typically had take home exams with a few days or a week to do it that were open book and open internet. Think challenging proofs that had to be typeset in LaTeX or a series of short responses that weren't expected to be as polished as our 10+ page term paper.

I went to a liberal arts college that prided itself on small class sizes and the honor code, and where professors typically had a good enough read on every student that they could tell when work wasn't your own or you'd collaborated with classmates. Our in person exams were not proctored except by your peers, the professors would sit outside the room. My understanding is that this sort of arrangement has been common at liberal arts colleges and similar universities for a long time - I know UVA has long prided itself on unproctored exams.

There's been a massive culture shift in the US where cheating is more and more accepted, beyond just the AI stuff, over the last few decades, and these sorts of peer based honor codes are no longer sustainable.

Students do exams at home with an answer key. It isn’t possible to get a mark lower than 80, as this is emotionally damaging. If you require assistance a professor will do the exam for you.

Back in my day we’d sit down ‘t muddy corpse pit having questions screamed at us by ‘t dragon who were also ‘t drill instructor. Get one wrong, and that was that, fricassé.