Quiz

Hi Tim,

A really great article - I'm sending the link on to lots of people.

I had a recent experience on Moodle which exactly fits what he says. I've been running an English course for several years now consisting almost entirely of Hot Potatoes exercises (note, not quizzes or tests). It's very easy to cheat on them, but also very visible: if it takes me 15 minutes to do an exercise, and I see a student has taken 20 seconds, I know they've "cheated". More important, they can't possibly have learnt much English from what they did.

In fact, until this past year, hardly any of them did. The "students" were adult health professionals training to be Ward Managers - a rather moral bunch of people not inclined to cheat anyway... and also not very computer savvy.

This year, several people did, however. Not of course due to moral degeneration in the nursing profession, but because the course was delivered on a different platform which had overload problems and they kept getting ejected. So naturally, very frustrated after having spent 20 minutes or more on an exercise and apparently "lost" it, they looked for ways to get round the problem. In spite of my assurances that I could see that they'd done such exercises and that was what would count in the final grade (not the HotPot "score"), they were, being part of the culture Alfie Kohn describes, afraid to have a low score. Maybe I'm a softie, but I didn't penalise any of them. I considered it was "our" problem; "we" being the institution proposing the course, not the students'.

Was I wrong?

Cheers,
Glenys

PS Next year I'll tell them about the Firefox addon, Lazarus which saves everything you write in a text editor.