Students at Cambridge University have criticized proposals to give them five hours to do a three-hour test, saying that it is not enough time.
Since the Covid epidemic, college students taking English courses have taken examinations online. They were given a whole day to do a paper while having access to literature and the internet.
Dons now want to shorten the time frame for submitting scripts to five hours, which has incensed students, who feel misled.
However, they are still being given two hours more than they would have had before Covid, and can still take advantage of the ‘open-book, open-web’ policy. Students with disabilities can also ask for extra time.
Faculty chiefs say they want to shorten the deadline for the sake of student welfare, following reports that some undergraduates were spending the full 24 hours working on their answers.
But there has been opposition to the suggestions, particularly because dons had told freshmen who began their courses the previous year that they would take tests in the same style for the duration of their three-year degree.
One second-year student remarked, “I am quite concerned and feel misled by this plan.” For the course of our degree, the faculty guaranteed 24-hour tests last year. It is significantly more detrimental to purported “student welfare” to change this during our final year, when examinations are most important, than to continue 24-hour tests. memoriesThe capacity of pupils to create high-quality research is significantly more crucial to evaluate than their ability to recall lines of text.
But Professor Alan Smithers, director of the centre for education and employment research at Buckingham University, said: ‘I don’t know what these students are complaining about. These arrangements are pretty lax.
‘Inevitably during Covid there were some adjustments to exams but the only way to ensure fairness is for candidates to take timed papers, under invigilated conditions in an exam hall. Otherwise there is no way of guaranteeing that it is the student’s fingers on the keyboard – they can call in help from any direction. There is nothing to stop them doing the equivalent of ‘phone a friend’.’
Cambridge University confirmed the faculty has decided on the five-hour option for 2023’s exams for third years. ‘This was the preferred option in a survey,’ a spokesman said. ‘The pandemic has opened up a number of options for more innovative ways of examining students.’
For other papers next year and in 2024, the English faculty is proposing a return to the three-hour invigilated exams that were used before the pandemic.
The faculty also said it may ‘explore the possibility’ of watering down the traditional exam by allowing students to refer to notes in the exam hall and even take in their own laptops.