If the teacher pops a test I know I'm a mess

[austin_dern]

An ominous warning sent by ... I'm not sure who. All e-mails from upper administrative types get forwarded around through so many secretaries it's hard to work up the interest to detangle all the forwardings so I'm left with a stern warning from anonymous people. The warning is that for this final exam season somebody ominously high up will take attendance ... of the people giving and watching over the exams. Apparently too many instructors are not getting to the staging centers a half-hour before the scheduled start of exams.

The watching over of exams is called ``invigilating'', an unfamiliar word which confused and frustrated my first semester. People kept asking me about my invigilating responsibilities, and the best I could figure is it meant I had to watch something; what, though, was kept a mystery until I cornered a T.A. and asked what I was supposed to do and for what. The word is meant to just mean ``proctoring'' the exams.

Invigilating's quite systematic, almost the opposite of the way I've ever done anything. Exam questions have to be reviewed by another instructor and turned in before the end of classes. A half-hour before the exam (don't be early, don't be late) the instructor receives -- in a sealed brown envelope -- just enough copies of the final exam for the registered students and invigilators. We also get exactly three empty booklets per student. We also get a bag of strings, all the same length. This is so that students using several books can tie them together.

Student ID checks are required. Last year they added temperature checks, to guard against SARS. Seats are assigned, and the seating chart is posted outside and inside. There are forms to fill out for any student who wants a bathroom break, or who needs to leave for any reason, and there's a form to report any extraordinary circumstances. There's also a form to report if there are no extraordinary circumstances. Telephones are installed in each venue for the duration of the test so that if any crises arise they can be duly reported. Students may not leave earlier than 30 minutes before the scheduled end of the exam. I don't think they ran things this tight when I took the GREs.

An exam I peeked in on -- I didn't dare enter -- was in the seminar room in the department. Number of invigilators: two. Number of students: One. Everyone involved looked self-conscious. Students get to keep the exam blanks; the booklets are taken back, the forms are turned in, and the graded exams are taken by ... I don't know who, but they take them. I get to keep the bag of eight-centimeter strings, and use them for the obvious purposes.

And in local news a substation short circuit blacked out parts of Singapore around midnight. 2,700 people called the power company hotline, which had two people answering. The company may be fined up to a million dollars for the disruption. The blackout lasted only one hour.

Trivia: The first successful full-scale test of the inflatable gliding wing landing system for Project Gemini was made 30 April 1964, the day after the system was removed from the Project Gemini goals. Source: On The Shoulders of Titans: A History of Project Gemini, Barton C. Hacker and James M. Grimwood. SP-4203.

Currently Reading: One Two Three ... Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science, George Gamow.

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

For a polar opposite case, consider my undergraduate institution. Honesty was expected, and enforced by peer pressure. Because of the honor code, it was not only allowed but expected that professors would leave the room during an exam. In fact, in my whole undergraduate career, I think I had a professor stay for the exam only once. The rest of my exams were unproctored. And yet I was not aware of any cheating; I'm sure it happened, but it certainly wasn't common.

My current school is somewhere in between that and your current institution, in other words, probably squarely average. Exams are proctored by the professor and the TAs (if any), and how much walking up and down the aisle and staring to do is up to the professor. I tend not to do much, as I worry it distracts people. I never really got used to the whole breathing-down-people's-necks thing since it is so antithetical to my own college experience. Cheating is rampant, though, judging from the amount of plagiarism I have uncovered (and how much more I can assume I haven't uncovered). It's tempting to say that trying too hard to prevent cheating encourages people to cheat because they feel untrusted, but I don't think that's it. I think the anonymity of a big school makes people feel more OK about cheating, so a system like they had at my undergrad wouldn't work here.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Though I mostly use final exams as a chance to get ahead on my reading list, I do make an effort to prowl around the room pretty often. That's not so much to ward off cheaters as it is my suspicion people are more likely to ask a question if they see me near them -- the ``disruption'' is smaller and so the courage needed to raise their hands is lower. (Chuckle if you like, but this is essentially the same reason NASA rocket launches have built-in holds in the countdown.)

I suspect that bigger, more anonymous classes are more prone to cheating. In the first case there's simply more opportunity; students are unavoidably crammed closer together so someone who's tempted can look at another paper. And there's greater anonymity, so the risk of being caught and punished for it is lower, and the loyalty to instructor and fellow students is lower. When there are five people in the class and the everyone knows just how one another thinks, it's no longer a faceless crime to cheat.

I remembered the rules about students leaving wrong, incidentally. Students are not allowed to leave during the first hour of the exam; they are also not allowed to leave in the last fifteen minutes. Don't ask me why. Ask the Deanery.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

The enforcement rules do seem a touch severe and formal. But from your past descriptions of Singapore as "An ISO 9000 certified city", that level of formality ought be somewhat expected. My own college exams varied, from take-home finals where I was handed the worksheet and told "This is due Tuesday at 10am. For every two hours it's late, one letter grade is lost." to the more traditionally proctored exams with a teacher distributing, watching, collecting, etc. There was also a 100-question multiple choice scantron final, once, in Rocks For Jocks.. er, Geology 1304.

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, that's true. This is a city with ISO-9000 certification for kindergartens; I suppose it's not really surprising they've found all the ambiguities in giving out exams and have got them closed up.