alt Hacker NewsWhy are people promoting the idea that exams are not written or given in person anymore? I graduated relatively recently and maybe had 1 take home exam during my entire education. Every other exam was proctored in person and written. The professor who made the take home exam also made it much more difficult than a normal exam so I would not really say it was easier than a normal in person test.
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Take home exams were very common when I was in school, which was before you could get answers on the internet. After internet answer and cheating sites came along, a professor would have to either not care and let cheating run rampant, or struggle to constantly make unique new kinds of take home questions somehow. AI has basically killed that option too.
Did you by any chance graduate before the COVID-19 pandemic?
I loved take home exams because they allowed me to study before hand but not have the insane pressure and condensed studying required for exams in the classroom. Even though they were normally much harder and longer, I liked them. I felt I learned much more through them because I could take the time to understand concepts I had missed without feeling the time pressure of in-person exams.
It's a shame that humans find a way to cheat ourselves out of things that benefit us by over "optimizing" the wrong things.
Things have changed drastically since COVID-19, at least in the US. Tons of schools and universities shifted to online systems, and never abandoned the systems they built up when it was time to go back to school.
I graduated in 2020, so I've only gotten to see the changes secondhand through friends and family who are teachers, and through my sibling who graduated a few years after me. But the difference is staggering.