Comments on: Better Pedagogy, Less Cheating: Three Ideas

By: Jan

Jan — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 13:36:35 +0000

Number 3 is standard practise for Health Safety and Environment tests that allow access to (petro)chemical industries where I come from. There you have to watch an instruction video and afterwards answer 5 random questions about that part of the video, those 5 questions are randomized from a list of about 100 different questions about that 5 minute instruction part. In the end, you answered about 25 questions from a random pool of 500 questions and each set of 5 has 1 question among those 5 that is a mandatory pass/fail question, as in, have one of those wrong, you fail the test and are not allowed on-site. People coming to work at that location must have passed that test and have to redo it every 2 years.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 20:25:27 +0000

I think your last point is a great one: that even from the perspective of the bottom line, paying for all sorts of elaborate third-party remediation might actually be more expensive than various hand-administered strategies that depend on trusting in the quality of your instructional staff. As you say, not a popular position at the moment, to the point that some administrators and politicians seem to prefer to spend far more just trying to secure the institution’s inner workings from the teachers.

By: Contingent Cassandra

Contingent Cassandra — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 19:35:50 +0000

All very good ideas, but, as you realize, all except #3 are almost certainly too expensive to implement in most places under current conditions — well, unless the institution simply demands that professors implement them, and pretends that it won’t really swell their/our workweeks to way, way beyond 40 hours. I’ve seen that happen, and the only thing more frustrating than trying to deliver high-quality education to too many students at once is sitting through workshops revolving around the premise that if you were doing it right it wouldn’t take you so long. Some things just take time, and the system you describe also assumes that professors will periodically sit back and take time to reflect on what they’ve learned from one semester’s responses, so as to design the next semester’s work. That’s time well-spent, but it’s not something that can be rushed, or that’s likely to be well done (or done at all) under a crushing load and the resulting fatigue.

But, yes, it works, and it might actually be cheaper in the long run than the various forms of remediation necessitated by the current system. I do think that emphasizing the value of a course designed, taught, and regularly revised/updated by the same person is one way to talk about what a good-quality (as opposed to mass-produced) education looks like. But that requires trusting the people doing the designing/teaching/revising, and that idea isn’t popular right now.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 10:39:40 +0000

Ah, good catch–obviously had the construction in mind as I wrote. The perils of blogging on first draft.

By: rob

rob — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 04:24:54 +0000

I think that the second paragraph has a few too many negative modifiers. I can’t be certain but I think that you wanted “if students or employees believe that tests no longer measure anything important…”