Open Book Exam Courses

[irnbru]

Hi sirjake,

I've been thinking about your original post since it first went up. The issues regarding PF and EC's courses have been dealt with by others and, I think, put to bed.

The topic of open book testing in general has also been addressed.

Which leaves us returning to look at the non-proctored courses available online, such as FEMA and Straighterline.

Any course which requires the submission of written work is open to potential plagiarism abuse. This applies to the complete spectrum of submission, from high school essays to master's and doctorate theses. There is no difference in this respect between scheduled courses taken at a bricks and mortar institution or through distance-learning.

For this reason, courses such as Straighterline's English Composition or Brigham Young University's Public Speaking (submission of recorded speeches) are traditional and accepted.

I don't have and will never have any experience with FEMA so can't comment.

Having just completed Straighterline's Macroeconomics course, I understand your position. However, while the source of the assessment material is a primary provider for educational institutions worldwide and thus freely available, there are several mitigating factors.

Firstly, if every other university uses this material, that automatically guarantees syllabus acceptance.

Secondly, and I think this is key, Straighterline utilises a format of continuous assessment. There are 19 graded exams of 40 questions, plus two additional exams of 60 questions, all of which are timed. Relative to other courses, this is a vast amount of graded material.

Consequently, while it might be possible to have someone else use an account to answer the questions on behalf of someone else, this would be highly impractical. I think that in terms of the work required, this is at least equivalent to having someone else write an essay or paper for submission but vastly more involved and thus difficult to achieve.

In addition, while an individual may sit using google or the recommended text to research answers, such activity is not identical to doing so in a CLEP test. Remember, a CLEP test might take 90 minutes. From my own experience, I took approximately 40 minutes to work through each graded test. And there are a lot of tests.

What this means, is that a student is consistently involved in working through the syllabus material. This is a good definition of continuous assessment. I believe this is probably one of the strongest reasons why this format of assessment was approved by ACE for credit recommendation.

Again, while this method is open to certain kinds of abuse, the approach taken is such that it is clearly a risk which is manageable by both ACE and colleges.