THE Presbyterian Ladies’ College, Croydon, Sydney, is a girls’ school.

Students there are allowed to “phone a friend” and use the internet and i-Pods during exams.

The school is giving the assessment method a trial run with year 9 English students and plans to expand it to all subjects by the end of the year.

But is it cheating? No. It’s allowed.

English teacher, Dierdre Coleman, dean of students in years 7 to 9, is co-ordinating the pilot. Says she:

“In terms of preparing them for the world, we need to redefine our attitudes towards traditional ideas of ‘cheating’,” Ms Coleman said. “Unless the students have a conceptual understanding of the topic or what they are working on, they can’t access bits and pieces of information to support them in a task effectively.

“In their working lives they will never need to carry enormous amounts of information around in their heads. What they will need to do is access information from all their sources quickly and they will need to check the reliability of their information.”

Unless their computers break and a student needs to recall to mind facts and theories that can help them or another person out in an instant.

Exams don’t test everything? But they are good for something. No?

source

Posted: 20th, August 2008 | In: Strange But True. Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0