Re: Would like to find study group for computer science comprehensive exams.

In article <ffnn4i$h3b$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Patricia Shanahan <pats@xxxxxxx> wrote:
The algorithms class I took ended with a take-home test. I think there
had been some effort to avoid questions that had easy-to-find answers,
but we were told to consult only our lecture notes and the course textbook.

I've had take-home tests like this too. They *can* work, but I think only
under certain conditions. For example, there could be an honor code, such
as the one at my undergraduate institution, where (as far as I can tell)
the honor code worked worked reasonably well. Alternatively, the grade
for the course can be essentially meaningless. Most of my graduate courses
were like this; an "A" was the default grade, and nobody cared what grades
you got---all that mattered was passing oral exams and writing a good
dissertation. If the grade doesn't matter anyway, then there's little
incentive to cheat.

In general, though, cheating is a serious problem with take-home exams.
One might shrug off the cheaters as people who will eventually get what's
coming to them, except for the fact that they hurt the honest students in
the class if the class is graded on a curve. It's easy, if you're an honest
student, to underestimate how prevalent cheating is, but every systematic
study I've seen has demonstrated that cheating is very widespread.
--
Tim Chow tchow-at-alum-dot-mit-dot-edu
The range of our projectiles---even ... the artillery---however great, will
never exceed four of those miles of which as many thousand separate us from
the center of the earth. ---Galileo, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
.

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