To the Editor:
Re “To
Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery” (“Cheat Sheet” series,
front page, July 6):
The high-tech approach to fighting cheating isn’t necessary, although
the mass-market approach to education does seem to foster it through its
reliance on tests.
A better way to assess students’ knowledge and abilities is for teachers
to converse with them—both during class and during oral examinations.
This was the favored method of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the British
tutorial system and my own graduate training.
My graduate students are required to discuss their projects in class. So
any help a student received isn’t as important as the ability to
discuss the material with me and answer my questions capably. To
succeed, each student must arrive well prepared.
My medical students are more numerous, but their written exams require
them to read and answer questions about previously unseen articles at
one sitting. Tattoos and crib sheets are of limited use if they cannot
analyze what they are reading.
Bart K. Holland
Newark, July 6, 2010
The writer is an associate professor of biostatistics and
epidemiology at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.
To the Editor:
I abandoned a career in teaching in part because I had no desire to be
part of the surveillance state. Universities and their faculties waste
colossal amounts of time and money policing students, when those
resources could be better used on actual teaching.
Want to stop cheating? Redirect the money wasted on technological toys
to hire more professors and dramatically reduce class size. Then
professors will actually know each student and be able to judge whether a
student is capable of writing the work turned in.
David Tallman
Atlanta, July 6, 2010
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 