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Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

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Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you have enough money/lawyers to fight it in court, there really isn't much option. You take the tests, with the software, or you fail.

What would you do in that situation if it were you. I would personally choose to fail and not be apart of a system that does this, but it sounds like you embrace it?

Nobody is suggesting the system is good.

Your question is about the current process though, and the answer is if you really do not have access to a room with internet that you can use for a couple of hours, the best thing you can do is to contact your school and see what arrangements can be made to accommodate you.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess then the point becomes - in the age of computers, what's the value in memorising the quadratic formula without understanding where it comes from? It's much more important to know that there is a quadratic formula, or more fundamentally that every quadratic equation has 0-2 roots (exactly 2 if dealing with complex numbers) and what the different cases loom like (does the parabola touch or intersect the x-axis?…

I don't think it has anything to do with computers. Tests have had formula sheets for decades, the quadratic formula would typically be on there. The importance has always been "how its applied." Tons of people failed classes despite knowing the formula. It has always been about the basic application. I don't think many math tests consisted of "write down the quadratic formula" and that's it.

The point is more that before computers, you could at least make a somewhat reasonable claim that it's useful to know the formula in case you need to solve a quadratic - even if you don't understand the formula.

But nowadays, you can just feed the equation to Wolfram|Alpha (or Sage, or Mathematica, ...), so there is no point in blindly memorising formulas.

And I don't think I've ever had a formula sheet in one of my maths exams in school...

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