That's one of the biggest reasons why online degrees are suspect.

Of course cheating has always occurred in bricks and mortar schools, too, but it's supposed to be harder. For STEM courses, exams usually make up the majority of the grade, and are held in proctored halls. At the best schools, cheaters who are caught are dealt with harshly; usually they fail the course (which goes on the official transscript) and sometimes they are expelled.

more tests need to be open book / open Google.

Why should people who can cram but don't know what they are doing get better marks then people who know what they are doing but are not good at craning.

What the point of craning command line flags when you don't want why you want to use them that way vs say looking at MSDN / look at the build in help ECT?

When I started university we had Calculus, among other things, during our first year. You were allowed to bring anything you wanted into the exam room: books, notes, a computer. This was because, unless you had studied hard and done lots of exercises, there was no way you would pass the exam. That's how you test people, not with tech bingo or a/b/c/d answer questions.

--

Sundar Pichai is the utter asshole whose incompetence has resulted in the shutdown of Google's Atlanta office.

ha ha ha ha ha
I know you are being sarcastic, but two of the best motivated people in my lab have on degree. One has a HS diploma, the other a GED. The one w/ the diploma is a senior technician, worked up from the bottom over 12 years and outperforms the recent grad engineers at most of the work (similar job profiles between Sr. tech and Jr. engineer). The GED tech has been with the company for about a year and is starting the working from the bottom up. Both of these guys are way better at their jobs and motivated compared to the average BS degree holder.

Realistically this is a rare trait in people, but I'll take one of these guys any day over the average degreed person.
-nB

I see where the GP was going. It's better to ask more complex questions where it tests the person understands concepts than that they can memorize. Problem is that it means the grader has to do more work when grading

yes we need more tech / vol / apprenticeships when the test is on the job and it's about doing the job for real and not in class room with no books or other reference books.

If they can pass the test using only google, then they're certainly what in the eyes of that test passes for a good programmer. Of course, one might question the reliability and usefulness of a test that can be passed using only google, but the test was as useless before as it would pass 'crammers' who may have as little understanding of the subject as the 'googler'.

I suspect that a lot of complaints about 'internet assisted' cheating are partly due to the educators getting caught with easy but low value methods of testing and assessment.

Done properly, an open book test is a lot harder than a closed book test. On most of the ones I've taken, you needed a good grasp of the material or you were doomed.

The problem described with the students cheating could be solved very easily by not releasing the test scores until all students have submitted their answers. This is a setting on most learning management systems.

Open book tests are terribly difficult. When I took my legal courses they were all open book, my POA(provincial offences) tests? All open book, same with traffic law, again all open book. The very best of all these tests are written by instructors who know their material and write their own questions based on the material that they've taught through the year.

That means you not only need the book, but you need to understand it, and have attended the classes to make it through the exam. People think they sweat bullets on a 80 page exam? Hah. Try 13 pages, where it's all open book and you're required to break down a full construct question that's worth 10% of the exam mark.

I think you got the GP wrong.

His point is, if I understand him correctly, and I do agree in this point with him, that it becomes more and more obsolete to have a mass of facts in your brains without the ability to apply them. It gets easier and faster every day to look things like that up. What's heaps harder and rarer is the ability to solve problems.

My profs at the university, and I still thank them for that, preferred the latter. I'd have a hard time thinking of any (but pure basic) tests that weren't open book, "bring whatever materials you want" tests. In general, anything but interactive material (read: sending the test to someone else and have him come up with the answers) was pretty much ok. You were actually expected to use your notes and books, because they didn't test what you could stuff into your head, they were much more interested in you showing that you understood what they taught and that you could demonstrate that you can apply it to "real life" problems. The test question were not "solve this equation" but rather "you're facing this problem", with the test being more to come up with a solution rather than actually solving it.

I distinctly remember a math test that I thought I bombed only to find out my prof gave me an B, despite not having finished a single sample. His argument was that I demonstrated I know what approach was necessary, that I showed I did understand how to use the rules required and he expected that I can punch buttons on a calculator when I dare to study CS and am about to graduate, if I couldn't, I probably wouldn't have survived the entry level programming classes.

And that's basically what counts. Today I am often tasked to screen applicants and I throw similar things at them, only to be surprised how many cannot come up with a solution. And interestingly enough, the ones that usually ace my "real life problems" are the ones without a "relevant" degree.

Bullseye! Can someone hand that guy an insightful mod?

That's exactly what's wrong with our schools (and to a lesser degree even universities). It's simply easier for teachers and educators to come up with cram tests, preferably multiple-choice so they can far easier check the right answers, than to think up some kind of realistic problem and then evaluate the students' solutions, which will invariably differ slightly from one to the next due to them having different, but probably equally valid, approaches. Hell, it might even expose that the teacher knows less of a subject than his student (which isn't as far fetched as it may seem, especially in a field like CS where new developments often render your knowledge obsolete in few years).

It's simple laziness on the side of the teacher, and so we're stuck with tests that favor those who are able to hoover up information like a sponge, pour it out in the test and instantly forget it. I know a few people of that quality. They were doing quite well in school, but out in the reality, they're usually quite useless.

Cheating is a byproduct of a failed education system. Instead of driving students to learn, we drive them to show the world they can succeed; Students cheat because they don't want to take time to learn a subject, and why is that?

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)

Again we have large institutions forcing a solution that is against the very nature of the people they are overseeing.

An example, ok.

One standard question I use a lot when filling programmer positions for our bug hunting crew is to take a few common entries from our bug report list and ask them "where'd you look for the bug". That usually already gives me a pretty good idea what kind of "thinking" I have in front of me. What I do NOT want to hear is some kind of apology (like "I don't know the code, so I can't say anything specific..."), I know he doesn't know, and that's sadly often exactly the problem he will face, but I still want an answer. You get tossed into this bug, how do you handle it?

Here I like to hear that he is checking the headers so he gets an idea what libraries are used, checks if the libraries are outdated, checks the lib known bugs... or whatever else he'd do, hell, nearly anything is fine. I want to know if he has some kind of general approach to bug hunting. What I don't like to hear is useless ass-covering tactics, some kind of apology or trying to find someone to blame, like finding out who wrote the code 3 years ago. Even if he finds him, that guy certainly won't remember a thing about it.

It's worse when I hire someone for my department directly, we get to face very unique situations daily. Security can be tricky at times, because your problems are not only technology but also very personally, both with personnel security issues as well as secrecy. What I want to see in general in an applicant is whether he has a plan. Whether he can come up with an idea that will solve the problem or at least find the source of it, whether he has "common sense" and whether he knows how people work. That's something that is oddly not taught at any kind of university: People are generally lazy and will gladly cut corners. For some odd reason, everyone with zero "real life" experience will assume that people work according to spec. Hint: They don't.

It worked pretty well for some guy named Albert Einstein.

"Never memorize something that you can look up. --Albert Einstein

Then again, cheating is still cheating.

So that you don't sound illiterate when you post on slashdot.

That has already been tried and people game those systems too. There's no substitute for a company specific knowledge, training or apprenticeship program because no third party cares more about finding and training qualified employees than the company doing the hiring.