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Fred wrote:I think take home tests are fairly common now. It's a cost saving to the uni. And the funny thing as pointed out a lot of students work with the group think concept and the uni knows that.
I'm wondering if his scholarship is a year by year deal. Yale introduced that many years ago and I believe a number of universities have followed along so it could be they just don't offer to renew his scholarship next year and that's up to the registrar rather than the coach. Puts him in limbo until next Fall, and that's difficult to deal with. He's 21 I believe so he doesn't have many options
Take homes don't provide any cost savings, but pedagogically if used properly they can be a good way to test the student's capacity to understand the course subject matter and synthesize in a way that goes beyond the slap dash, regurgitation that happens in many in-class finals (the dreaded blue books). I do in-class finals but give them the parameters of the questions in advance so that I can raise the bar, but I have colleagues who take homes. I do think it is more of a crapshoot with intro courses, especially if they are mass lecture courses. In those cases, it actually increases the workload of the teacher (or more likely grad assistants; faculty at Harvard would not grade a word produced in an Intro course), whereas you could do scantron for a final and be done grading in much shorter time period. If this Intro to Congress course was known as an easy course it would have had to be b/c the word is out that the expectations aren't that high - as content-wise there is no reason why it would be easier or more difficult than say a Presidency, or Courts class - with lax plagiarism controls. This time, someone caught on, or maybe a new instructor or a grad assistant was more on top of it than previous instructors.
