I can understand needing to monitor students during exams. I have no problem with that, so long as the proctoring company is willing to state exactly what they’ll be monitoring and agree that they will not permanently install any software on my machine and will remove all residue of their monitoring after the exam is completed. I figure that’s reasonable, if they’re in the business of just proctoring exams they won’t need anything beyond that and if they need anything beyond that then me and whoever’s giving the course need to have a little discussion about what the proctors are doing beyond just proctoring the exam and what responsibility the course presenter’s going to take for that (I’m assuming whoever’s presenting the course isn’t dumb enough to let the students choose their own proctoring company, because that’s just so open to abuse…).
What I don’t understand is why, at this level, there’s such an emphasis on ensuring students do not have the basic reference materials available that they’d have available in all normal circumstances? To me it seems like another manifestation of something that caused another completely nonsensical problem when I was in college: we were expected to not use techniques and knowledge we’d been taught in the course immediately preceding this one. It’s like the instructors expect us to not have learned anything in several years of college, or at least to act as if we haven’t, and here I thought the whole point of college was to learn?
Design the tests to test understanding. It’s not that hard (well, unless you don’t understand the material yourself, then good luck with that). I had instructors in college who did that: it didn’t matter if you brought the book because the questions weren’t in the book, and if you didn’t know the concepts and had to depend on scanning the book looking for the section that had the right information you weren’t going to finish half the exam in the time allotted. If you knew the concepts and understood the material, having to look up the exact formulas wasn’t an issue because in the real world you’d have the books on the shelf and would do just that anyway, and if you didn’t know the concepts and understand the material well enough to look at a problem and know what formulas you needed to look up you were going to fail no matter how many books and notes you had available.
