Yes, test taking in the era of online courses is just like being in a classroom with a professor on exam day. Only the person quoted in my headline forgot to fill in the online anti-cheating picture:
Having a camera watch you;
having software track all of your mouse clicks;
having eye-tracking devices follow all of your eye movements;
having someone fingerprint you; and
having to answer a series of personal questions before you can begin writing.
And the good news is that as cheating becomes big business (there are now firms that will simply take entire courses for you; I gotta believe there’s money to be made in faking the work of the online professor, so she fills up her semester’s roster of courses while snorkeling in Cancun — I remind you that I can already outsource all my grading), anti-cheating technologies continue to evolve. We’ve rigged up the eye and the hand… surely our authentication techniques can become more … intimate. I mean, not just in the sense of asking probing questions, but… probing other body parts…
And yes, it’s really impossible to detect any difference – though this does rather smack of Big Brother – between this 1984 scenario and the totalitarian nightmare I lay on my students at the end of every semester, while I sit in the front of the room during the time that they write their final exam…
Although… here’s one difference! Students are permitted to approach me in all my Stalinist splendor — IF THEY DARE — and ask how to spell words or ask to be reminded of the full names of characters or whatever… And I guess it’s that whole he loved Big Brother thing, because they DO approach me… THEY DO NOT SEEM TO FEAR THE CRUSHING REPRESSION I AM CAPABLE OF UNLEASHING UPON THEM …
Yes, there’s no doubting it. Getting your body rigged up, getting fingerprinted, getting tracked, and getting surveilled by a camera inches from your mug is not only an ideal scenario for the act of independent thought that constitutes education, but is in fact superior to face to face. Game, set, and match.
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And why would our students complain? After all, this is their world:
I called Kevin Haggerty, a criminologist at the University of Alberta, to learn about “surveillance creep,” the gradual expansion of the zone of scrutiny. We started, he explained, by electronically tracking the dangerous and the vulnerable — inmates, terrorists, Alzheimer’s patients, pets, and our own children — and we’ve wound up putting radio-frequency chips in students’ and employees’ IDs. Haggerty and I didn’t discuss the pernicious activities of the National Security Agency, which evolved over the same period of time, but the scariest endpoint of surveillance creep, it seems to me, will have been reached when the government’s yottabyte farms no longer strike us as sinister or illegal.
And there’s another, possibly even more insidious, consequence of eavesdropping on our offspring. It sends the message that nothing and no one is to be trusted: not them, not us, and especially not the rest of the world. This is no way to live, but it is a way to destroy the bonds of mutual toleration that our children will need to keep our democracy limping along.