Assessment at a Distance

Assessment at a Distance

1.      […] Keeping with the assessment theme, what about assessment at a distance? Assessment at a Distance o much of what has been written about assessment at a distance is unfortunate. The emphasis seems largely to be on cheating — as in, how do I know my student didn’t pay somebody to take the exam? — and plagarism — how do I keep them from just turning in somebody else’s work. […]

The problem is cheating and how we know when it happens. Well as Phaedrus said, How do we know that they aren’t cheating when they turn in a paper to us in the classroom? Well we know how they write and if they didn’t do it we can tell. We also know how they write as in context of language use and how they state things. This is also how we would know in a distance learning class. When you read someone’s writing and it suddenly changes well it would be obvious. The only way a cheater would be able to beat this would be to have this other person take the class for them from the beginning. If the same person has completed all the work then it would be possible to cheat. But then the  person is cheating his/herself out  of learning anything in the whole course. How sad.

By the way, that does happen. I know of people who get a person to just take the whole online class for them. Usually it’s a wife taking it for her husband or a girlfriend for her guy. I have heard of both of these instances and they were also both taking graduate classes toward the rank one or administration.  Now I am not positive but it has been told. I don’t know how they could do such an unethical thing and be in the education system which I believe to be a respectable profession.  I really don’t think that this is the norm but it does happen.

My view on cheating in a distance class is that I do agree with Phaedrus when he says that he would recognize the change in writing styles. We all do have our own way, which is as individual as we are.