+- Online Degrees and CLEP and DSST Exam Prep Discussion (https://www.degreeforum.net/mybb)
+-- Forum: Main Category (https://www.degreeforum.net/mybb/Forum-Main-Category)
+--- Forum: General Education-Related Discussion (https://www.degreeforum.net/mybb/Forum-General-Education-Related-Discussion)
+--- Thread: Open Book Exam Courses (/Thread-Open-Book-Exam-Courses)
Open Book Exam Courses - sirjake - 08-06-2010
This might ruffle some feathers. I'm OK with that. Bring it.
The recent post about Penn Foster courses that fulfill TESC requirements really bothers me. My understanding is that these courses have no required proctored exams. They are all open-book exam courses. If I'm wrong on this, then this only applies to courses that ARE open book exam courses (Straighterline and FEMA, for example).
I think that every single one of us should write ACE, TESC, Excelsior, and COSC and request that they stop accepting *ANY* course that has zero proctored tests. I don't care that ACE "approves" it. Their approval means nothing to me when anyone with half a brain and a bit of honesty knows that this is ridiculous. If they want to be legit, they should *stop* approving them.
The truth is that the integrity of our degrees is at stake. In the real world, people know that students cannot be trusted. Accepting these credits flies in the face of that.
For example: I just finished a Straighterline course earlier this week. What a joke. Every quiz's answers were freely available in the textbook's resources online and many of the exam questions (if not all--I didn't check since I'm not interested in cheating) were available via a Google search from abused services like Cramster or Yahoo Answers. The above is exactly why these courses should not be allowed to count for "real" college credit.
This isn't counting the other collusion that does go on. You know, like a student on this forum sending me a message asking me if I would give him copies of my exams from a course I just took for one that he just took since we were soon to be taking the other's course--yes, that happened. No, I didn't go along with it. (The other member was IgnazSemmelweis. I have zero problem with ratting out cheaters. Again, bring it.)
Could you learn from these courses? Sure. Of course you could. That isn't the point. You can learn the information that you need to know to do virtually *ANYTHING* without a college course. Name one thing that you can't learn outside of a college classroom. Seriously. The point is that it's supposed to be a good faith verification that you've achieved some level of understanding. You simply are not getting that with open-book exams and time alone with an internet connection.
CLEP credit is looked upon with disdain by some. I understand that, but it is still a proctored exam. It's a good faith effort to limit cheating and make sure that a student actually knows a good portion of the material covered. Even if it's short-term memory, you still *must* know the information at some point. That simply is not the case with a course whose testing is made up of nothing but open-book exams.
We can't keep this a secret. Eventually, our degrees will just start being worth less (if not worthless). It doesn't take much. When people find out that a good portion of a degree can essentially be faked, it lowers its esteem in the public eye. We will start seeing requirements for positions or higher degrees that explicitly forbid "our" schools. I've already seen it once for one school: Excelsior nursing grads are not allowed in Illinois due to a type of testing they do. I could see the same happening for other applications: professional designation requirements (CPA, CFP, etc.), grad education (law school, med, etc), and even businesses. There is a reason why national accreditation isn't widely respected; I think that this is it, or at least a large part of it.
They won't care that you personally didn't cheat, did learn, etc. They'll care that you had ample opportunity to do so.
Write these schools. Express concern. We need to do something about this asap.
Open Book Exam Courses - BrandeX - 08-06-2010
Quote:My understanding is that these courses have no required proctored exams. They are all open-book exam courses. If I'm wrong on this...Yes and no, they are open-book AND proctored at PFC. Plus they are timed, so if you don't know anything and are trying to look up the answers during your proctored test while the timer is ticking, you will likely fail all of your final exams imo. I typically go right to the max time limit at the end of every "semester" when doing my finals.
Open Book Exam Courses - sirjake - 08-06-2010
BrandeX Wrote:Yes and no, they are open-book AND proctored at PFC. Plus they are timed, so if you don't know anything and are trying to look up the answers during your proctored test while the timer is ticking, you will likely fail all of your final exams imo. I typically go right to the max time limit at the end of every "semester" when doing my finals.
So there is at least one proctored test (I.e., not just you on your computer at home) at least once during every course? How many are there? Or are you saying that some courses are proctored and some are open-book?
Open Book Exam Courses - LawSchool2011 - 08-06-2010
I audited an entire semester of law school night classes this past year and every test/exam I was allowed to participate in was open book. Half of them were open-book and take home.
I think you should contact the American Bar Association and complain to them that the professors at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, Boyd School of Law are promoting cheating in their own classrooms.
Also, I think you should make it your personal quest to destroy the Prior Learning Assessment method of gaining credit at regionally accredited institutions. Obviously, anyone could "fake" a PLA portfolio and receive credit for something they don't know by having someone else put their portfolio together and pose as the student during phone interviews.
Most law schools do not care how you got your credits, as long as they are regionally accredited. They care about the LSAT exam. Believe me, I know.
Like they say: "If it ain't broke, don't try fix it."
Open Book Exam Courses - Yenisei - 08-06-2010
Every open book exam I have ever taken (and this includes ones for a couple of upper level undergraduate economics courses at a B & M school) were harder than proctored exams.
Open Book Exam Courses - cjzande - 08-06-2010
I attended B&M schools from '88-'92. (UF and Holy Cross.) I can right now think of 5 different classes I had that used "open-book" testing.* There may have been more that I'm simply not remembering at the moment.
We recently saw a story in the news about a group of people getting arrested in California (I believe) because of a scam they ran where people paid other people to show up to proctored exams on campus and take their tests for them. Does this mean cheating is too easy and every student who ever took a proctored exam should have his credentials invalidated? Cheaters are everywhere. If you want to go on a crusade against them, have at. Just make sure they are actually cheating.
I'm going to assume by the way you felt it necessary to say, "Bring it!" more than once, OP, that you are simply spoiling for a fight, but while you may have a valid concern, your nuclear solution to it is over-the-top and rather insulting to many people here who are working extremely hard. You are, in essence, saying you want us all to write gosh-knows-who and demand that many people lose their credentials and are stripped of their degrees because they MIGHT have cheated or they MAY not have learned enough to satisfy YOU.
You may want to rethink that stance after you've calmed down some.
*One exam in particular? Was on the ENTIRE Bible. A 90-minute exam on the Bible, asking extremely detailed questions. More than half the class failed. If you didn't know the Bible quite well, it didn't matter that you were able to consult it. There simply wasn't enough time to spend per question to pass it without having done extensive studying beforehand. You are assuming all open-book tests are "too easy" and therefore invalid or worthless. You have no way to truly determine if that is true. As the previous poster stated, I had several open-book tests that were much more difficult than the non-open book ones.
Open Book Exam Courses - BrandeX - 08-07-2010
sirjake Wrote:So there is at least one proctored test (I.e., not just you on your computer at home) at least once during every course? How many are there? Or are you saying that some courses are proctored and some are open-book?Correct, these are pencil and paper proctored, timed exams.
The final exam for each course, the "unit exams" are open-book on computer.
All of my courses except for English Comp (which was all essays), and Art Appreciation had proctored final exams.
Open Book Exam Courses - sirjake - 08-07-2010
To LawSchool2011:
One at a time here... I'll answer the others in due course.
Counselor: were these open-book exams multiple choice or did they require written responses? There's a world of difference between the two. Or did this possibly only make up a portion of their grade whereas their grade was made up in large part by either written responses or a normal final? I suspect that this is apples to oranges.
You're looking toward law school, so I'll give you a conditional statement: IF they were multiple choice tests, AND your entire grade was made up of these tests alone (or a very large percentage), AND they reused these exams for virtually every class (like they do with these online courses I'm referencing), THEN I would say that that is not making a good faith effort to make sure the students are learning the required material. AND, if I were a graduate of the school or even a student who had not graduated yet, I would speak to the administration about the issue because in my opinion that would be lowering the value of my degree. I can't see how such a circumstance would not lend itself to cheating (especially to a group of people as hell-bent on getting good grades as LS students). I seriously doubt that virtually any of that is the case, so I probably would feel safe about the integrity of my degree. In the courses I'm referring to, every bit of your grade or ability to pass is made up by open book exams that are relatively easy to cheat. PFC classes may not fall into this since they reportedly do require at least one proctored exam.
Also, law school is in and of itself different because you have to pass a major exam at the end. You don't have that at any of the above schools. You have to prove your knowledge there or you're, well, screwed. If you mess around because you can get by with good grades by cheating, you'll have a rude awakening at the bar (again, not that I think you can actually cheat in LS and get good grades).
PLA is, again, apples to oranges. It is far, far easier to falsify something that has that much original work required than a multiple-choice test. To pull off cheating on it would require a much higher level of sophistication. There is no comparison.
And I know something about getting into law school--I've done it. I was admitted with good scholarships to two top 25 schools. They do care more about your LSAT score, true, but they also care that your degree is legitimate. What I am trying to do is to keep my degree (and yours, should you get one) legitimate so that you have the opportunity to use the great equalizer (a standardized test) to get in. If our degrees start to lose favor in the public eye, how quickly do you think law schools will start paying attention? Rather fast, I'd wager. Further, it doesn't take much. If you take two students who both score well on the LSAT, but one has a "normal" degree and one has a degree with a higher level of suspicion, and their soft factors are similar, who do you think they're going to take?
Good luck to you on your law school quest. It's an interesting game.
Open Book Exam Courses - sirjake - 08-07-2010
Yenisei Wrote:Every open book exam I have ever taken (and this includes ones for a couple of upper level undergraduate economics courses at a B & M school) were harder than proctored exams.
Right, but if it's more difficult, that would be categorically different than what I am referring to. I've taken difficult open book exams at B&M schools as well. They were always only a relatively small portion of the grade *or* were the type of test that rendered cheating rather obvious (written answers, etc).
If these really were harder than standard courses, or they had a way to make sure that students aren't consistently cheating on them, I wouldn't care. My impression thus far, though, is that these are *lowering* the bar rather than raising it or keeping it on par.
In essence, these are courses that lack any sort of good faith verification. That's all I'm saying. Lacking such, they are prone to abuse and those who are ethical and won't abuse them are the ones who will suffer.
Open Book Exam Courses - peace123 - 08-07-2010
sirjake Wrote:This might ruffle some feathers. I'm OK with that. Bring it.
I think that every single one of us should write ACE, TESC, Excelsior, and COSC and request that they stop accepting *ANY* course that has zero proctored tests.
None of the (five) courses I took through Excelsior had proctored exams. I think your proposition is pointless with regards to Excelsior, unless they are willing to change how they administer their own exams.
I have no problem with courses that are all open book exams. In this day and age, the ability to know how and where to locate information is a major skill. Often this is as important as actually learning the material.
In regards to Straighterline and Aleks, both have non-proctored exams:
I took Accounting 1 through Straighterline , to replace an accounting course from over 20 years ago. I had 20 other credits in accounting (many at the upper level) as well as years of work experience, and I still only scored a B in their course. Just because their exams are open book does not mean they are easy.
With Aleks, I took Intro Stat's to replace a lower level stats course, and let me tell you , this was a rigorous course. There were times I just wanted to give up as it seemed like I was never going to reach a 70% assessment.
Times are changing, mostly due to the ease of availability of information. Gone are the days of having to go to the library, find information in card catalogs, etc... Most schools are now requiring Information Lit courses because the way we obtain information has changed. So it is not surprising to me that the way we test would change also.
If ACE ,the partner colleges, or the college accepting the courses for transfer, have no objection to the open book aspect, then it is not cheating.
In regards to cheating, you will never be able to stop cheating, even with requiring proctored exams. Some people will cheat regardless of where, when or how you test them on the material.
If anyone has a concern with a degree from one of the Big 3 being worthless in the future, then it would probably be best they not get a degree from one of them. It is the job of the colleges accrediting body, to police these colleges and their degrees. I do not believe this falls onto the students. I seriously doubt, a regionally accredited college would accept transfer credits that would jeopardize their RA status. I received my bachelors degree from Excelsior, and I can tell you they take the review of transfer credits, and credits they accept very seriously.