In the middle of “dead week,” with finals fast approaching, tests are on every student’s mind. Fortunately for students, in a land overflowing with Scantrons and blue books, some educators are exploring the risks and benefits of open-book, group and even open-laptop exams.
Traditional college tests completely fail at evaluating a student’s preparation for the real world. Too many classes base test grades on a student’s ability to regurgitate memorized facts or procedures without evaluating any abilities actually important to being a successful, educated member of society.
Engineering can be particularly guilty in this respect. Tests in many engineering classes boil down to how well a student can reproduce a homework problem on an exam rather than applying knowledge to new situations. These classes are geared toward preparing students for exams rather than preparing them for their careers.
While students who can ace these tests will undoubtedly receive high grades in these classes, they are not necessarily prime candidates for engineering positions.
Employers are putting more and more emphasis on communication and interpersonal skills when evaluating job applicants. Engineering is a career-oriented field, and its curricula should reflect the needs of employers as closely as possible.
To its credit, the University has started emphasizing communication skills through the Communication Across the Curriculum and service-learning programs, but there is always room for improvement.
Allowing students access to their textbooks and notes would make recall-based questions trivial and force teachers to test critical thinking and other skills than memorization. In some classes, teachers could go even further. Placing students in groups with access to reference materials, maybe even the Internet, would more closely simulate a future work environment.
Obviously, these new methods have to be tailored to individual classes. Imagining most introductory-level courses without traditional tests is difficult, but some courses, particularly smaller, upper-level classes, could benefit from a more innovative approach to testing.
Students are already exposed to managing teammates and group dynamics through group projects, but most classes also require students to take several individual tests during the course. Holding students accountable for their individual learning is obviously important, but learning how to effectively work in a group is absolutely critical in the modern workplace.
Implementing and combining these methods would also drastically cut down on cases of cheating by sanctioning most conventional cheating methods. Cheat sheets and sharing answers between students would be required rather than prohibited, as students are forced to use all of their resources to solve complex problems within the allotted time.
Moving toward group or open- laptop exams would require significantly more work from individual professors, because these testing methods are largely untested and unproven.
The difficulty and timing of the exams would need to be carefully calibrated to ensure an accurate reflection of how well the students learned the material and how well they were able to work together to achieve a common goal.
Some students would surely try to skate by without preparing for the exam, relying on reference materials or the Internet to answer the questions. Some of these students would probably fail utterly, but others may do fairly well relying on their searching skills.
Well-prepared students would likely outclass both of these groups, but quick-witted, tech-savvy students deserve some credit for their efforts. The ability to Google a question accurately or quickly gleam information from a Wikipedia article is a legitimate skill students should be rewarded for developing.
While little research has been done on the effectiveness of these unconventional methods, they hold promise to prepare students for the modern work environment better than traditional tests by emphasizing group work and problem solving over memorization and regurgitation.
Andrew Shockey is a 20-year-old biological engineering sophomore from Baton Rouge. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_Ashockey.