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Salient. Victoria University of Wellington Student's Newspaper. Volume 31, Number 3. March 19 1968

cheating

cheating

More difficult is the claim, made by a member of staff, that students can buy moderately good essays at Weir House. This can only be checked effectively by supplementing essays with other methods of assessment. And, as Paul Dressel writes:

"The most important step in prevention of cheating ... is to provide challenging courses and fair examinations. Insistence on memorisation of a large number of dates, locations, formulas, and other such isolated bits of information may be resented; many students consider this kind of learning a waste of time. Once convinced that the course requirements are unrealistic or unreasonable, even the able student may find justification for circumventing them."

The essay is widely used at Victoria — perhaps too widely, since it demands a great deal of time, and by itself constitutes only an inadequate and unreliable sample of the student's knowledge. The short-answer or multiple-choice tests, commonly known as "objective tests," are an essential supplement, and deserve to be used much more frequently.

Objective tests are often criticised on the grounds that they require only superficial knowledge of simple facts; but this is in fact true only of those which are poorly constructed. Writing adequate items requires a specialised skill, a great deal of time, and a willingness to experiment. This is offset by the fact that objective tests are easy to administer and to score. The time that is saved in marking, however, must be spent in test-construction if these tests are to have any validity.