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7 minutes ago, scottsdad said:

Exactly - they are at home doing it all online. 

Every hearing this morning, the students said the same thing. "I saw the exam paper, then googled the question..." Seemed genuinely amazed at the suggestion that the exam was not there to assess their googling and paraphrasing skills, but their knowledge and understanding. 

Back to the exam hall next year and anyone with a smartphone in the hall will be booted out. 

I've got a certain amount of sympathy for them, back in the pre-internet dark ages I had one exam where we were allowed to take books and journal articles with us to research our answers. It's a much more real life test than expecting people to rote learn everything, you still have to prove you understand the subject matter to make a coherent argument. Although I can see it's a small jump to plagiarism.

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It's been interesting to see how instructors tried to cope with testing people without being able to keep an eye on them. Being given a minute and a half to answer each question on a paper is certainly the most nerve-wracking examination I've ever had to take, despite being pretty confident in my knowledge going in.

We've probably all had times during tests where the brain just switches off and it's taken a few minutes to get back on track again. Bit of a problem when that's a big slice of your time limit!  :shutup

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An Objective Structured Clinical Exam (OSCE) is in person and is basically a set of medical/clinical scenarious that students move around. There's usually about 12 stations and usually each station is about 7 minutes. Each station is graded. Students must pass a mininum number of stations to pass, with the individual station marks going towards the overall grade.

Each station usually has a simulated patient (actor) and the assesor (who must be a qualified doctor or relevant professional, as in relevant to the station, of a certain grade).

Given how many students are in a year usually (probably between 170-230), not all students can complete the OSCE at the same time, as there needs to be room to set up the stations. Most medical schools have an area that has simulated wards and rooms for this. Therefore OSCEs are usually done over a day in an AM or PM session (or possibly more depending on student numbers). There are usually two parts as well, with the second part done on a different day.

As such, if you do the first session, you know the stations and can tell your mates. Some schools sequester their students from the first run until the second start, meaning they sit in a room and aren't allowed to use their phones (there will be a staff member or two watching them).

Sounds like at Oxford some students have either told their pals what the stations are or have somehow found out in advance. The stations are obviously prepared in advance and only staff members know, so hard to see how the students could get this unless a staff member was also in on it (not out of the question I suppose).

The assessors can usually tell if students are suspiciously well prepared, especially when it's a lot of them.

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Reading about students cheating reminds me of a guy in my year (we’ll call him Duszeg) who took an old-fashioned 30cm wooden ruler into his English finals, on which he’d inscribed, in tiny font using a pen with no ink, hundreds of lines of Shakespearean quotations, which by turning the ruler in a particular way made the text visible against the light, but which otherwise resembled a perfectly ordinary ruler.

#simplertimes #thosewerethedays

 

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13 minutes ago, Duszek said:

took an old-fashioned 30cm wooden ruler into his English finals, on which he’d inscribed, in tiny font using a pen with no ink, hundreds of lines of Shakespearean quotations,

Was the set text Measure for Measure?

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49 minutes ago, Duszek said:

Reading about students cheating reminds me of a guy in my year (we’ll call him Duszeg) who took an old-fashioned 30cm wooden ruler into his English finals, on which he’d inscribed, in tiny font using a pen with no ink, hundreds of lines of Shakespearean quotations, which by turning the ruler in a particular way made the text visible against the light, but which otherwise resembled a perfectly ordinary ruler.

#simplertimes #thosewerethedays

 

Best one I ever saw was a guy who'd re-created a label for his flavoured water that he'd been allowed to bring with really fabtastic attention to detail and had replaced the ingredients list on the side with a list or answers in the same small font where the ingredients would have been.

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58 minutes ago, Duszek said:

Reading about students cheating reminds me of a guy in my year (we’ll call him Duszeg) who took an old-fashioned 30cm wooden ruler into his English finals, on which he’d inscribed, in tiny font using a pen with no ink, hundreds of lines of Shakespearean quotations, which by turning the ruler in a particular way made the text visible against the light, but which otherwise resembled a perfectly ordinary ruler.

#simplertimes #thosewerethedays

 

I did similar, though not as sophisticated, just on tiny bits of paper. The concentration involved meant I remembered it all anyway which I should have taken as a life lesson, but didn't.

Edited by welshbairn
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16 hours ago, scottsdad said:

Exactly - they are at home doing it all online. 

Every hearing this morning, the students said the same thing. "I saw the exam paper, then googled the question..." Seemed genuinely amazed at the suggestion that the exam was not there to assess their googling and paraphrasing skills, but their knowledge and understanding. 

The solution to this is to set an open-book exam paper that requires application of knowledge/understanding to case studies (or critical analysis). Any course/assessment body that continues to treat its exam like a quick-fire pub quiz or memory test deserves all the plagiarism cases it gets. 

Aware that you're likely not personally responsible for setting the assessment, but that's the real problem. 

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32 minutes ago, virginton said:

The solution to this is to set an open-book exam paper that requires application of knowledge/understanding to case studies (or critical analysis). Any course/assessment body that continues to treat its exam like a quick-fire pub quiz or memory test deserves all the plagiarism cases it gets. 

Aware that you're likely not personally responsible for setting the assessment, but that's the real problem. 

Absolutely right. 

Some exam papers just call for students to cut and paste from course materials. The first open book exams in 2020 were a car crash for that very reason.  Most exam setters have learned, some have not. 

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Looking forward to starting Aberdeen Uni on 12th Sep.

Hoping I've got no classes/lectures on the Friday 23rd. Not a good look to be dodging class on the first week of teaching. 

Off to Groningen for the weekend. Bad planning but can't be helped.

Edited by Suspect Device
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On 11/08/2022 at 07:43, virginton said:

The solution to this is to set an open-book exam paper that requires application of knowledge/understanding to case studies (or critical analysis). Any course/assessment body that continues to treat its exam like a quick-fire pub quiz or memory test deserves all the plagiarism cases it gets. 

Aware that you're likely not personally responsible for setting the assessment, but that's the real problem. 

Not a solution in the end. You can give students individualised examination questions and they’ll still go on to Google to cheat. Nowadays googling “write my essay”, “homework help” or similar. Online solutions turnaround is remarkably fast and well within an examination timeframe.

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Never venture in the hi brow threads but here goes.

Was seeing a girl in Dundee around '93 and she went to Abertay and took me out to the Union a few times (cheap drink), which was ok, but not my seen at the time.

One evening we went, must have been Friday.  

If nobody knows the Union, it's up to or 3 flights of stairs and you walk in with a long bar to the left dance floor to the right, seating further on.  

We stayed had our drinks to excess, I may have taken a E or 2, can't remember (probably did).  Directly across from the bar, there was a wee shelf that you could put your glass, this shelf had a brass poll (railing) that ran the full length of the shelf about 30m.

I noticed the bolts on the brass railing we loose, so took them all of manually at different segment, for it all fall on the floor, other side of the drinks, to the crash and bouncer running around as if there was a earthquake happening.  Not a sole knew what I was up to.

After party we had a few toffs in the house (her friends), they are all wildly laughing and giggle about the destructing that happened.

 I pulled out my jacket pocket every nut and bold from the railing, must have been about 30 in total. I was their friend for about 5min until I started spats on the electric cooker.

 

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6 hours ago, Suspect Device said:

Not sure if I am going to Aberdeen uni. Still awaiting confirmation even though I have achieved the results that my conditional offer required.

I assumed that I'd be told today but.....

still-waiting-where-are-you.gif

 

Give it time, it’s a busy period for feckless admissions staff.

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