d by dy

Responding to a question on whether graphing calculators would be permitted in a midterm exam, the Sloan Professor teaching my class expressed his concerns of an arms race but ultimately relented:

Well, this is MIT. In Austria, we have an honor code that asks everyone to cheat and that asks everyone to help others to cheat. I’ve cheated in some spectacular ways—when I was a student. The solution there is to make exams so long that you have no time to finish it, let alone cheat. Cheating takes time.

Long exams remind me of T., but there the problem is not cheating. Professors enjoy making exams memorable for students. The only exception is Professor Dmitrevsky. Constantly decrying the decline of the Western educational system, he finds most students nowadays too stupid to write a proper, challenging exam.

Feed for this entry. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.