Some further thoughts regarding Jose Antonio Bowen's book, Teaching Naked, to which I referred in my post on February 25, 2013, below.

Throughout the years I have been exposed to teaching at the post-secondary level, a major pre-occupation of both instructors and administrators has been to establish protocols for the prevention of cheating on exams.

In Teaching Naked, Bowen poses a question that drives a stake through the heart of this obsession.  He queries why, with so much information available on the Internet, it can be considered cheating for students to make use of that information when writing an exam?  After all, he says, making exams fully open book, which includes making them open Internet, creates a scenario that mimics exactly what students already do when they seek out information, and what they will continue to do when they graduate and exit into the world of remunerative work.

I teach law courses to business students.  Historically, I have asked my students to write closed book exams.  Intuitively, I have thought that this is the best form of assessment, because it seems to test the amount of content they have absorbed, and asks them to apply that "knowledge" in order to resolve legal problems they may encounter in their lives as business owners, entrepreneurs, or managers.

If I were to permit students to have unlimited access to outside resources during exams, including access to the Internet, the risk that is presented is that the answers the students will provide will not be the genuine product of their own thinking, but a parroting of information that they retrieve elsewhere.  As one observer has noted, the exam "would shift from being about the synthesis of concepts [the students] had learned and held in their minds into an Internet scavenger hunt for solutions to the questions we pose" (Golub, 2005).

If so, it can be argued that the marks the students receive will amount to an assessment of thinking that is not their own.  My gut tells me that smacks of cheating.

The risk that students will be tempted to cheat if they are permitted easy access to external electronic resources, in particular, is a real one.   Golub notes that in 2002, twelve University of Maryland students were found to have cheated when they were found to be text messaging each other during an exam (Golub, 2005).  The same article observes, however, that since we encourage students to make use of technology, it would be counter-productive if we were to insist that students put away their laptops and other electronic devices in order to write open book exams.  To do so would mean, in effect, that the exam would become a closed book exam. 

Nor would it resolve the dilemma for instructors to insist that students print out all their notes.  Apart from the environmental implications, it is not practical to expect students to reproduce an e-text in hard format (Golub, 2005).

Donald Norman wrote an article in response to Golub's concerns (Norman, 2005).  In it, he posed a different question – what is the purpose of an examination?  For Norman, the question is not whether examinations should be written in a context that prevents cheating.  Such a focus turns instructors into enforcers.  Rather, instructors should concentrate on becoming facilitators who guide students to employ all the resources on offer in order to solve problems that are important in our lives.

This is, in fact, what Bowen preaches.  He says that the existence of the Internet has re-defined what is meant by cheating.  Making exams open book and open Internet creates an environment that is much more akin to the real world of work.  For Bowen, doing well on closed book tests may only prepare today's students for nothing more than more closed book testing.  Truly open book tests offer students the opportunity to analyze more and memorize less, which is what instructors should, in the end, be encouraging students to do.  The answer to fears about cheating is to prepare exams that test thinking skills, and not the absorption of factual content.

If the primary purpose of testing is to provide an opportunity for students to document how much factual information they have stored in their minds after taking a course, I think closed book exams are probably a useful tool.  They will not, however, constitute a valuable preparation for the type of testing of their work that will occur after they graduate.

In the world of work, a premium is placed on working in collaboration with others, sharing information, and analyzing various sources of data before adopting a plan of action based on consensus.  Such a process would look like cheating if students were to apply it in the classic exam format in school.

For me, Bowen's approach makes more sense.  We need to get beyond the mere repetition of facts.  In order for students to develop a deeper understanding of a subject matter, in a way that will assist them in their lives after school, they need to know how to find the relevant information that is available, evaluate it, and develop their own solutions based on it.  If that means they are relying on what others have thought about the problem at hand, so be it.  In reality, that is what everyone does now anyway.

In terms of testing, a focus on analysis, evaluation, and creativity simply means that the questions posed need to be more carefully crafted.  The questions we ask must therefore engage students at the higher levels of thinking, which will permit them to make full use of all the resources that are available, good and bad, and challenge them to consider how they will employ them to resolve important problems.  That is quite a bit different, and much more exciting, than merely regurgitating facts.

References

Bowen, J. (2012).  Teaching Naked:  How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning, San Francisco, CA, Jossey-Bass Wiley

Golub, E. (2005).  PC's in the Classroom & Open Book Exams.  Ubiquity, March 2005.  Retrieved from http://ubiquity.acm.org/article.cfm?id=1066320

Norman, D. A. (2005).  In Defense of Cheating.  Ubiquity, March 2005.  Retrieved from http://ubiquity.acm.org/article.cfm?id=1066347