Exams with web access

[Ketlane]

Interested by a talk at BETT today. In Denmark and in Norway there have been pilot experiments where school exams have allowed the students full web access. Is this the way forward in the long run? Connected Test-Taking: Is It Cheating? | Powerful Learning Practice

[synaesthesia]

On one hand that depends what the exam was, and even then I would be adamant that it would be on a whitelist of allowed sites. I can't think of a single other application in the current curriculum that would make it appropriate to have full access.

[Ketlane]

Interesting - I have been looking into this a bit more. The cultural (or political?) differences between countries' attitude to web filtering isn't something that had occurred to me until I read this: http://www.icicte.org/Proceedings2012/Papers/10-3-Moyle.pdf which surprised me by stating that Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands don't filter web content at all. Worth a read, I think! The presenter at BETT, Ann Michaelsen, explained that her classes (secondary school, she teaches English) had 1:1 laptop access and had access to social media throughout the lesson.

If exams were to be set which allowed internet access, the big question is about the style of question. The old factual recall question, so easy to test and to mark, becomes near-useless and the replacement questions would be able to test higher skills. And we have had open-book exams for some time, and exams where annotated set texts are brought in to the room.