Students Looking For Easy A Target Online Courses, Where Cheating Is Easier

An anonymous reader writes "As online courses become mainstream, some students are finding they are often easy to game. A group of clever students at one public university describe how they used a Google Doc during on open-book test for a new kind of 'cloud cheating.'" Instead of "cloud" all the time, can't we switch it up with "on the internet"?

Udacity and Pearson VUE

[skedar]

This won't be an issue for long, because online classes (I have in mind Udacity and MITx) were not designed to have online exams in the first place. They said from the beginning that exams will be held in test centers under surveillance. It is not implemented yet, as MITx is currently a prototype, but we are getting there. Udacity just partnered with Pearson VUE [blogspot.fr] to hold exams in their test centers. Pearson VUE has about 4000 test centers in 170 countries.
It will most likely still be possible to take online exams, but the certificate earned for completion will have much less weight than a certificate earned by taking exams in a test center.

Re:education is the problem

[russotto]

The solution is not to come up with ways to stop the students from cheating, the solution is to come up with ways to make education interactive and enjoyable therefore minimizing the desire to cheat on a test (test in themselves is a band-aid solution to this very problem)

As long as there are real consequences for grades, it's important to stop students from cheating. Doing otherwise is not fair to the students who do not cheat, and at worst makes you a sucker if you don't cheat.