This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
orally defending essays
Nice to see. Does require small class sizes and ample office hours. Also kinda rough on kids with speaking issues, heavy accents, etc. But that's trade offs for you.
Government monitoring of computers
Sigh
More heavy handed government surveillance. Somehow it's never enough
Yeah, thats pretty much my exact read also. I'm glad there was at least SOMETHING other than surveillance though :/
FWIW this monitoring is only during the written exams (relies on installation of a specific software, that you can just remove again), and it's the school doing the monitoring not the government.
Edit: they also encourage schools to give pupils better conditions and more time for making written assignment at school where there can be both help and supervision, instead of at home.
In the professional certification world, computer monitoring during exams has been standard since they started offering exams on your own computer. I was wondering how long it'd take for that to make its way into public education.
Danish here: This isn't exactly a foreign concept. All of my project exams in University had a written part (ranging from 50-150 pages), sometimes a technical part, and then an oral part where we defended the report. That's one per semester.
Defending an essay would likely not take more than 15min, 3-4 hours was enough to probe a group of 7 to figure out who should get what grade based on contribution (or lack thereof if they just rode the other's coattails). 5min to present the essay with a short summary, 5min for questions to probe the student, and 5 minutes for buffer.
I could even see this be used as a combined written/oral exam where you get a grade for both in a language class. If the essay is shit but your oral articulation in the foreign language is excellent then you could get top grade orally while failing on the written exam part. That means no actual loss of time.
The hard part is that most grades in our version of high school (gymnasium) are based on the teacher's observations of your abilities in class. It is only some classes that are randomly selected for a end-of-year exam to save time. This idea about defending an essay wouldn't work in the rest of the classes.
That's just a good thing overall assuming appropriate accessibility measures.
It isn't, actually. Those "essays" have questionable pedagogical results and now they will become an even bigger hassle for students.
Citation needed.
Oh damn. I guess we just can't have nice things.
