I'm giving the final exam in my introductory E&M class this morning, which means spending a couple of hours sitting in a room full of students taking a test and doing my best not to fall asleep. As far as I'm concerned, getting rid of exam proctoring is the best argument for an honor code system-- I'm less worried about cheating than I am annoyed at wasting my time.
Anyway, here's a thematically appropriate poll to pass the time:
PollDaddy handles multiple-selection polls in a stupid way, so it would be helpful if you could check the first box in the choices, so I know how many people have responded. Feel free to add your own suggestions of tedious and annoying activities in the comments, too.
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The final exam for my modern physics class is this morning, which means I'll have a bunch of time to kill while I proctor the test. This will likely involve a lot of brainless time-wasting, but I need to be on hand both as a formal guard against cheating, but more importantly to answer questions…
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All of your options, except possibly waiting at the station, are particularly irritating because of the uncertainty about how long you are going to have to wait and the consequent inability to plan anything productive to do with the wasted time. Invigilating is a pain but at least you know how long the test is going to last and can take a suitably judged amount of work or reading in with you to occupy yourself.
I almost always have plenty of grading to do. I can't remember the last time I had to just sit there bored. Can't you bring your computer in?
Marking said exam?
(sorry)
I brought my computer in, and spent most of the time doing my morning blog reading. I was a little too sleep-deprived for anything more useful than that, alas.
If you implement an honor code make sure that (a) students buy into it because they value honor, and (b) you don't hand over all enforcement control to panels of students.
Vanderbilt's honor code was a sick joke for both reasons. Students would tell me that their perception of their classmates was that others didn't cheat simply because they were afraid of being caught, not because they valued honor. That's not an honor code, that's a joke. What's more, the enforcement was done entirely by committees of students, and as a result students could get away with obvious cases of cheating-- not because I think (mostly) the students on the honor council were being dishonest, but because they would play little laywer and try to think of any possible reason why an obvious cheat wasn't a cheat. (What's more, my most horrendous cheating student-- whom I turned over to the dean, because I didn't trust the honor council, and that went nowhere-- later on was *on* the honor council. If I hadn't trusted it before, I *really* didn't trust it then.) It's essential that faculty members maintain at *least* a majority vote when it comes to deciding whether or not a cheating case is really a cheating case.
I just have to comment that the British invigilating (mentioned above by Ian Preston) is much better than proctoring.
I have checked those which can't be accompanied by reading the internet or a book. Any time you can pass reading passes bearably.
Actually I found it harder to avoid laughing when that look of absolute terror on the faces of the unprepared. I did once teach a class of first semester Sophomore mechanics where the final exam was to find twenty unphysical things in a Coyote-Road Runner cartoon and I left the exam unsupervised.
A new wrinkle for me has been students who don't have a calculator per se for the class, but have downloaded an app that performs equal duty. Some of these apps are pretty sweet and I can't fault a student for doing this rather than carry around two clunky devices, one of them rather nerdy. However, my feelings about permitting these are mixed, to say the least.
Will it be the case that in the future all exams will be conducted in specially-built room-sized Faraday cages?
Here in Canada we don't proctor; we invigilate. I guess.
I think honor codes fail badly in first year, 400-person classes with everyone packed cheek-to-jowl.
Just make sure to ask a few questions involving cross-products so you can entertain yourself by watching their contortions.
i assume most of you have seen the professor smacking his students down for cheating? Swans on Tea has a post about it:
http://blogs.scienceforums.net/swansont/archives/7138
essentially there was a bimodal distribution in the scores and the prof investigated why.
reminds me of a lower level grad course in stat mech i was in. the first test had a bimodal distro. that confused the prof until he realized that the lower peak was all the undergrads in the course. ha! stoopid undergrads! :)