Non Proctored Exams?

I read somewhere on this site that there are RA schools which offer "at home exams". Is this true? I thought only degree mills operated in this manner. If there are any RA schools that do this could someone provide me with thier names. Thanks in advance for any info in this regard.

FC

 

Just a start...

http://coned.uscolo.edu/ Many open book, open notes tests
or lessons without exams. RA.

http://www.ccconline.org/ All exams are at-home,
online with time limits but
can be done open-book. These are
community colleges in Colorado, all
RA.

http://www.mscd.edu/ Several History courses that appear
to be only lessons and book reviews.
RA.


Ron

 

The most difficult exam I ever took was that for a graduate quantum mechanics course at Stanford. Take home, open book, and 96 hours to complete. And we needed most of those 96 hours to finish the exam.

I hope I never see another take-home exam in my life!

 

Thank you Ron for the following list of schools. Ill take a look at them.

FC

 

I feel your pain. In my graduate nuclear physics course, the final was given to us two weeks prior to the end of the semester -- everyone finished (I think), but I don't think any of us complained about closed-book in-class finals again...

FWIW, if I remember correctly, the prof for that class was a Stanford grad -- maybe that's the Stanford way!

Richard

 

When I was working on my M.Eng at Lehigh University (hardly a degree mill), most of my exams were take home. I would have rather had some in-class exams at times. Most of the "take home" exams took about 40 hours to complete. This was due to the "Depth" of knowlege and synthesis required to answer the questions or develop the required "prove that..." You can't test to this level with a 50 minute in-class exam. Open book exams can truly open minds if developed properly.

Regards,

Dick

 

Just in case no one noticed, most of life is "open book." Every day I make decisions and solve problems, and I have all my resources available with which to do so.

But just as life is normally not "closed book," nor is is normally "multiple-choice."

 

Take home exams

I am about a third of the way through the Masters in Financial Planning program at Kansas State University's via DL.

All the exams are done on the computer without a proctor, open book. I thought it would be easier but apart from having less stress due to time constraints I have found them as hard or even harder than proctored exams.

Whoever says that DL is easy obviously hasn't DONE DL.

Rafael

BS Western State University
JD Western State University, school of Law
MBA Pepperdine University
MS, Kansas State University 2003

 

What some diploma mills (and non-wonderful schools) do is go through the motions, by administering what they usually call closed book exams which students can do on their own, because "we trust you."

Legitimate 'open book' exams are typically writing an essay (or essays) in a fixed time frame. The open bookness is a part of the process, since it shows how familiar you are with the literature, so that you can use it efficiently within the time constraints.

An ultimate in this direction are the open book qualifying exams Marina took as part of her Vanderbilt Ph.D. program. On day one, you are given six topics.* On day five, you come to the departmental office and roll a ceremonial die. Whatever number comes up, you now have 36 hours to write a 20-page paper on that topic.

And this is done four times, a month or two apart.

_______________
* The questions range from ones that take five pages to ask, to my favorite, the one-liner: "How do you know you are not a brain in a bucket?"

John Bear
Quite possibly a
brain in a bucket

 

No way. I don't have a bucket to p**s in!

 

Take Home NightMare

When I was in the Army...I was taking a sociology class at Rutgers Camden and had to go away to BNCOC (Army Basic Sergeant's Course). My professor gave me an exam to take with me and and envelope to mail it back to him in a week. That was the hardest exam that I have ever taken. I would have loved to take the exam in class in the 55 minutes allotted during class....I probably would have got more than a 68% for the exam!!


Mike

AA Burlington College, B&M
BA TESC
MS SMSU (2003)
Entering Chapman Univ Law School (Fall 02)

 

Non proctored exams

7/1/2004 - Any new schools that have non proctored exams. I think this would be a help to new members. Hille

 

Not wishing to be unduly controversial (perish the thought!) but all our contributors to the thread clearly were severely tested by the off-campus out of sight 'open book' examinations they experienced, and, as clearly, are people of the highest personal integrity.

But exams do not just need to be tough, they also have to be fair and, crucially important, they have to be honest tests of the persons whose names or number are on the cover as the candidate.

How does the Quality Assurance Agency (or its equivalent in your country) assure the persons who rely on the awarding body's attestation of fitness that the graduate passed the exams upon which they were judged by the University to be so awarded?

In DL programmes, the opportunity for fraud off campus and out of sight in an examination regime (not necessarily in science subjects only - what about in history, language, management, and so on ?) and, experience suggests, that where there is a vulnerable element that makes fraud possible, it is surely taken up by candidates and, as sure as fate, soon becomes rampant.
This serves only to discredit DL, even though the same risk exists on campus and much of the public evidence for it is from campus degree programmes.

 

I would speculate that this is a non-issue in nuclear physics class (how easy it is to find a person to cheat for you? why do you take this course in the first place?), but a serious issue in your typical mass-production MBA, whether on-campus or off. Espesially in a setting like EBS, where the professor have no way to know a student besides his exam papers. What I'm trying to say is, your experience might not generalize well to all of education.

 

Exams

Personally I hate multiple choice exams because it always seems that two of the answers could be correct. As a student at a B&M school, some of my upper division classes involved take home essay exams, which were graded harder than an in-class exam. The take home exams took much longer to complete than in-class tests. I think the professors liked the take home version because the student could type/word process the essays, saving them from trying to read handwriting that was not always the best.

 

In singapore and many asian countries, it is quite common to pay someone to sit for you in an examination. This can be a DL or traditional program. With the internet full of places where you can get a fake id, getting an id with someone elses name is not an issue.

I have known of few cases where the students pay around 5K USD and they get an MBA with their own name and from a real university. Scary but it happens quite often.

 

Stanislav

A fair point that you make and well taken.

But the same thing is true for your example from nuclear physics. Education is much wider than in subjects like physics, or indeed MBAs.

The incidence of cheating (plagiarism from downloads; help from a friend, paid or unpaid; professional cheat agencies writing low level essays through to PhD theses; personation, professional or as a favour) has spread throughout and across all levels of education.

Off-campus and out of sight pedagogies lend themselves to fraud. The examples from one discipline are used as precedents in others. The US is not immune from this - it is not a foreign trend only - and 'honour' systems are no protection.

Fraud starts at the margins but once established spreads. Classes of 80 are reported to have been found with wholesale cheating, and what is perhaps really worrying, the perpetrators see nothing wrong in what they are doing (in a recent case a cheat is suing his university over his human rights!).

Complacency in defence of ethical standards is not a good idea.

 

I wonder what it tells about management as a profession if you can get away with something like that and still have a career.

 

You are absolutely right, and this shows why proctored exams are nessesary. I probably have seen more cheating than you did since I come from a Soviet education system where cheating is epidemic and tolerated not only by students but by a society as a whole (including most professors; the worst thing a caught cheater might face is an F for the course and a chance to retake the test; it is interesting that the education system haven't imploded and continues to produce decent graduates). The only thing I tried to say is that take-home tests might also be a valuable mode of assessment in more situations than you might think.

 

Here is an article that talks about this issue in Asia.
http://it.asia1.com.sg/newsdaily/news008_20020612.html

" Mr Chan said that he also paid about $6,000 for a Master of Commerce from Lancaster University earlier this year from the same site, using a vendor who had sold a friend of his a Business Administration degree.

When he checked the university's site, he found his name there, even though he had never been to Britain."


I wonder if anyone would be able to "outsource" the dissertation work from any online PhD to less developed countries for cheap prices. I haven't seen this problem but I guess it could be possible to find brains in other parts of the world that would be able to complete dissertations for low cost.