Phone a friend in exams

Anna Patty Education Editor, The Age, August 20, 2008 - 10:31AM

A Sydney girls' school is redefining the concept of cheating by allowing students to "phone a friend" and use the Internet and i-Pods during exams. Presbyterian Ladies' College at Croydon 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. An English teacher, Dierdre Coleman, who is dean of students in years 7 to 9, is co-ordinating the pilot which she believes has the potential to change the way the Higher School Certificate examinations are run. The Board of Studies is looking at ways it could incorporate the use of computers in the exams. Ms Coleman said her students were being encouraged to access information from the Internet, their mobile phones and podcasts played on mp3s as part of a series of 40-minute tasks. But to discourage plagiarism, they are required to cite all sources they use.

"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."

A year 9 PLC student, Emily Waight, said she was apprehensive about the new approach when it was introduced. "I was a bit hesitant because I didn't know how it could help us," she said. "But I don't think it is cheating after having done it twice. It just helps you find information to answer the question appropriately." A fellow student, Annie Achie, aged 15, said she loved the new method. “Phoning a friend really helped," she said. "It was good to have someone else to talk to and brainstorm some ideas with. "I phoned my aunty who is pretty good at English. I asked her about the Olympic Games and whether it was a waste of finances. She gave me the idea that they use the money for infrastructure instead of for China's people. I expanded on that idea."

Ms Coleman said the assessment task was set after students had read Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech and Dickens' book, A Christmas Carol, as studies in persuasive language. "They weren't marked on their information about the Olympic Games but on whether they used persuasive language effectively to make their argument." PLC's headmaster, William McKeith, was inspired to stretch the open-book exam to new technological heights after hearing the views of an international education consultant, Marc Prensky. Mr. Prensky threw out the following challenge to educators in a British Educational Communications and Technology Agency publication: "What if we allowed the use of mobile phones and instant messaging to collect information during exams, redefining such activity from 'cheating' to 'using our tools and including the world in our knowledge base'? "Our kids already see this on television. 'You can use a lifeline to win $1 million,' said one. 'Why not to pass a stupid test?' I have begun advocating the use of open phone tests ... Being able to find and apply the right information becomes more important than having it all in your head."

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