n a wireless age where students can access the Internet from their cellphones and PDAs, schools have been wrestling with how to stem the tide of high-tech cheating. Now, some educators say they have the answer: Change the rules and make it legal. In doing so, they’re permitting all kinds of behavior that had been considered off-limits just a few years ago.
The move reflects a broader debate about what skills are necessary in today’s world-and how schools should teach them.
The old rules still reign in most places, but an increasing number of schools are adjusting them. This includes not only letting students use the Internet during tests, but in the most extreme cases, allowing them to text-message notes or beam each other definitions on vocabulary drills. Schools say they in no way consider this cheating because they’re explicitly changing the rules to allow it.
How the World Works
Students at Cincinnati Country Day can take their laptops into some tests and search online Cliffs Notes. At Ensign Intermediate School in Newport Beach, Calif., seventh-graders look at each other’s hand-held computers to get answers on science drills. And in San Diego high schoolers can surf the Web during English exams.
The same logic is being applied even when laptops aren’t in the classroom. In Philadelphia, school officials are considering letting students retake tests, even if it gives them an opportunity to go home and Google topics they saw on the first test. “What we’ve got to teach kids are the tools to access that information,” says Gregory Thornton, the school district’s chief academic officer.
The changes-and the debate they’re prompting-are similar to the upheaval caused when calculators became available in the early 1970s. Back then, teachers grappled with letting students use the new machines or requiring long lines of division by hand. Though initially banned, calculators were eventually embraced in classrooms and, since 1994, have even been allowed in the SAT.
Of course, open-book exams have long been a fixture at some schools. But access to the Internet provides a far larger trove of information than simply having a textbook nearby. And the degree of collaboration that technology is allowing flies in the face of some established teaching methods.
At High Tech High International, a charter school in San Diego, students in Ross Roemer’s 10th-grade humanities class are allowed to scan the Internet during some tests; recently, they looked up what scholars had written about Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” while they were writing their essay exams.
Mr. Roemer says students’ essays are better informed when they can compare their ideas with what others have written. But he acknowledges that traditionally, an approach like this would be against the rules.
“You’d have to rip up their test and call their parents,” he says. But at this school, which is funded partly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he says there’s no sense fighting technology: “You can’t ignore it. You have to embrace it.”
Karen Waples says she’s teaching her students the skills to work with others in an era of information sharing. The AP government teacher at Cherry Creek High School outside Denver has students team up on some of their exams-even when they’re multiple-choice.