"In Denmark, the government has taken the bold step of allowing pupils full access to the internet during their final school year exams."Now that's eAssessment! For some time pupils in Denmark have been able to choose whether to handwrite answers or type them on a computer. I suppose it could be argued that this is just a logical extension. The article says that on the morning of the exam, the students are helped to set up "their laptops". It is not clear whether they are the student's own laptops or if it just means the laptops they will use. The opportunity to use your own machine, with the software etc. set up just the way you like it would be an interesting.
Clearly, allowing Internet access changes the nature of what you assess. For example, the article notes, "The teachers also think the nature of the questions make it harder to cheat in exams. Students are no longer required to regurgitate facts and figures. Instead the emphasis is on their ability to sift through and analyse information ."
There is a Have Your Say page linked to this article and the responses are fairly polarised. I find the number of people posting comments such as, "An even better way to ensure success would be to give them the examination answers already, that way nobody has to fail and feel upset." slightly depressing. Is that really what people think is happening or is it trolls at work? In the response page there is a clear school of thought that believes memorising and recalling facts is the only thing that assessment can do and that any deviation from that undermines and devalues examinations. And why is there an assumption that changing what is assessed and how it is assessed is about dumbing down? Analysis and synthesis are much higher order skills than factual recall.
What are your thoughts? Good thing? Bad thing? What kind of change would that bring to the kinds of exams we set and the way we teach if a system like that was introduced here?
Posts
Visitors
