Assessment is a usually necessary part of education. You need to figure out what your class knows. And a fair proportion of your students won't bother to really know stuff unless it'll be formally assessed. And, yes, also there's the issue with granting credentials: you don't want to give them to people who haven't reached a minimum standard.
I'm fortunate in that the classes I teach are centered project-based learning and ... not too easy to crib on. But if I were teaching core academic sequences, it's a ridiculous amount of work to make problem sets and exercises of appropriate difficulty and develop rubric for them.
You want to be able to leverage other peoples' work, and your past work, in building assessments. And you want to have a time advantage in grading: a 30 minute assessment that you give to 100 students that in turn takes you 30 minutes to grade each is a recipe for no fun.
But all of these things-- these economies of scale in instruction-- open the door to cheating. A well-proctored, well-designed exam can mostly patch over the vulnerability.
> Assessment is a usually necessary part of education. You need to figure out what your class knows. And a fair proportion of your students won't bother to really know stuff unless it'll be formally assessed.
I don't think this approach is right. There is an obvious conflict of interest when the same party provides (1) education) and (2) assessment. The better approach is actually that taken by the College Board -- they do assessment, and only assessment. If you'd like to do well on their test, you're free to get whatever training you see fit. And that training is, theoretically[1], evaluated by how you eventually do on the SAT, not by how well you do on practice exams provided by the educator.
This should be the practice everywhere else: credentials are given by assessment, and the assessor doesn't do anything other than assessment. If the assessor sells training, that corrupts their assessment.
[1] In fact, the system seems to have broken down; SAT training is widely accepted to have large effects, while actual measurements of those effects have difficulty distinguishing them from zero.
Hey, I love third party and objective measurements. But we can hardly give the SAT every week.
Educators need quizzes and other assessment measures. That way, I can know how my class is doing. My students can understand where their performance falls short. And their parents want to know how the class is going along the way. These let all the involved parties adjust for better performance.
And these interim assessment steps need to count for at least something to get a reasonable level of effort from students. (My classes are "fun", but that only goes so far: there's the fraction of the material that's intrinsically less fun, and there's the fraction of students that will not do anything without a grade incentive).
In turn, these quizzes and other assessment measures that I use, let me eventually score well on the metrics of engagement and scholastic progress that are used assessing me. ;)
> Educators need quizzes and other assessment measures. That way, I can know how my class is doing. My students can understand where their performance falls short. And their parents want to know how the class is going along the way.
Cheating on exams is only a problem for that last one, the parents seeking to know how their children are performing. If the educator isn't providing credentials, it's not a problem if someone cheats. They'll get less education, but that's their problem, not the educator's.
It's horrific for morale of students who are trying, and it's dispiriting as an educator to have no accurate idea of how your class is doing. And it starts a race to the bottom where cheating is normalized and everyone cheats.
My answer above has nothing to do with what cheaters get out of it, but instead the harms it causes non-cheaters in the same class...
They get higher scores relative to their honest peers, satisfy their parents of having learnt material that they haven't, and erode the culture of doing the work in the classroom. They also leave their instructor confused about how to best address the class. (And, it's dispiriting, as a teacher, to have teed up a lesson based on an assessment that shows your students have this down pat, and then to find 2/3rds of the way through that they didn't actually learn that material at all).
I realize we're talking mostly about undergraduate relative to the article, and I'm a middle school/high school teacher so it's a little different. Still...
> They get higher scores relative to their honest peers
This is predicated on the assumption that, as an educator, you provide formal assessments of your students' capability, intended for third-party consumption. I keep saying this shouldn't happen. It makes no sense to assume, in the world where it doesn't happen, that it will nevertheless happen anyway. The assessment should be done elsewhere, by someone who is not responsible for educating anyone.
Under this structure, it would be possible for cheaters to mess up the teacher's assessment of their proficiency, and by extension the overall proficiency of a group of students. But it is strange to assume that they would do this, because -- I asked this above -- what benefit would they derive from doing this? If this action had any effect, that effect would be to move the curriculum onward from material they don't understand to material they understand even less. That is a harm to the cheater. The problem just doesn't arise.
> The assessment should be done elsewhere, by someone who is not responsible for educating anyone.
There's room for both educator-offered assessments and third-party assessments. As I said before, educators need assessments anyways. We have a fair amount of effort that graded assessments from educators predict future performance better than these third-party assessments, too (of course, the best predictor is both together-- e.g. SAT plus grades).
> Under this structure, it would be possible for cheaters to mess up the teacher's assessment of their proficiency, and by extension the overall proficiency of a group of students. But it is strange to assume that they would do this, because -- I asked this above -- what benefit would they derive from doing this? If this action had any effect, that effect would be to move the curriculum onward from material they don't understand to material they understand even less. That is a harm to the cheater. The problem just doesn't arise.
No one looks at middle school students' grades except the students and their parents-- well, and for eligibility for participation in athletics. Still, there's rampant efforts to cheat, with the negative outcomes I described above.
You're attributing a whole lot of foresight to a short term selfish decision. Yes, cheating may eventually bite you, putting you into a class you're unprepared for. But it provides a lot of short term apparent benefit, so...
Funny, given that I teach in one! The middle school example was just to refute your point. Namely to show, despite the lack of degree-granting/admissions/pecuniary incentives to cheat, students still will cheat for short term perceived gains, with negative effects for everyone in the process.
I'm a-gonna go now, because I feel like you're being willfully obtuse.
Issue is, this system prioritizes assessment even more than actual learning.
So this would be better for getting 'fair' credentials, but it would lead to people 'teaching to the test' even moreso than right now.
The current situation where the teacher is also the assessor allows the teacher to chose what to teach, to react to students, to teach for improving their students. Then at the end, almost as an afterthought, the teacher comes up with an assessment. This serves a bureaucratic purpose, the administration requires it. It also serves a motivational purpose "Study the material or you will fail the test", which helps the teacher to actually get students to learn.
This does mean the test isn't really focused on assessing how well the students have learned. But do we need more focus, in studying, on assessing how well someone has learned? I'd argue we need more focus on actually teaching well. Using tests to determine the quality of teaching seems quite fraught. Certainly the adversarial model of an assessment makes things harder.
To summarize, I think your solution would fall to Goodhart's law:
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Whilst also de-emphasizing the actual goal of teaching.
> Issue is, this system prioritizes assessment even more than actual learning. So this would be better for getting 'fair' credentials, but it would lead to people 'teaching to the test' even moreso than right now.
Why would that be an issue? Isn't that the point of the test?
I'm fortunate in that the classes I teach are centered project-based learning and ... not too easy to crib on. But if I were teaching core academic sequences, it's a ridiculous amount of work to make problem sets and exercises of appropriate difficulty and develop rubric for them.
You want to be able to leverage other peoples' work, and your past work, in building assessments. And you want to have a time advantage in grading: a 30 minute assessment that you give to 100 students that in turn takes you 30 minutes to grade each is a recipe for no fun.
But all of these things-- these economies of scale in instruction-- open the door to cheating. A well-proctored, well-designed exam can mostly patch over the vulnerability.