Is it time to reassess student assessment?

Taking the 'Ethics for Computer Scientists' examination from 'sit at wobbly desks in a hall' to an online 24-hour 'takeaway' examination has vastly improved the quality of the examination process - the good answers are a joy to read, and somewhat surprisingly, there are more less good answers from those who have missed the point or just written any old thing without evidence of much thought. Discrimination between students is better when they are released from the fetters of feats of pure memory, it seems. And I can read the answers! No more taking several attempts at a sentence to figure out what the words in it actually are! Computer scientists rarely use pens in everyday life and it shows! I don't want to haul them back into an exam hall.

Exams should not be the only, or even the majority, component of assessment. Anyone can have an off-day that ruins their entire life thereafter. However ditching them altogether reminds me of the schoolboy howler book answer I once read in the geography section where a pupil once answered 'Where would you find the Andes?' with 'On Google Earth'. Well OK, yes, you could say, who needs atlases, or even world knowledge, when we have all these Internet tools? Until the power/Web goes down, and we have to fall back on our own head knowledge. Rather like holidaymakers who have no idea which continent Mykonos is on, or where the 'country of Africa' is (sic), or how to drive from Norwich to York. Because their Satnav always directs them. At worst, this sort of mentality, across all subjects, leaves us very vulnerable to a cyber-catastrophe, from foreign attack to solar flare to nuclear war to some other apocalypse. Keep exams at ca. 30-40% of assessment. And maybe don't cap resits at 40%.