Exam Instructions

Apparently my current set of rules for exams is not thorough enough, guessing from the five exams out of 28  that I failed this weekend.  The instructions read:

Because this is a take-home exam, books may be used.  However, plagiarism rules still apply.  Should you copy phrases out of the book, you MUST put them within quotation marks and footnote the source.  The easier solution is simply to write everything in your own words – overusing quotations will be detrimental to your grade.  (I want to know you understand the material, not that you know where to find it in a book.) 

Answers must be in essay form.  (lists, flowcharts, interpretive dances, etc. will not be accepted)  You must tell me what questions you are answering, and you must answer the questions asked.  Please do not invent questions.

Plagiarism is, of course, defined in quite some detail in the syllabus.  But apparently not clearly enough.  So I propose the following rewriting:

Because this is a take-home exam, books may be used.  However, plagiarism rules still apply. 

1. Should you copy phrases out of the book, a magazine, the Internet, teh Internets, my lecture notes, another student's exam, or any other source of information, you MUST put them within quotation marks and cite the source. 
2. If you seriously footnote another student's exam, I will still fail you.
3. Invisible quotation marks do not count.
4. Citation must allow me to reference the quoted material
5. For a textbook, last name and page number is sufficient.
6. For other books, name, title, and page number are required.
7. For websites, you must give a specific web page address.  http://www.wikipedia.com is not sufficient.
8. Neither is "Google.com."
9. Under no circumstances is "Smith" an appropriate citation.
10. Extensive quoting will be detrimental to your grade.
11. Copying a webpage, putting quotes around it, and telling me where to find it will still be failed.
12. Copying the textbook section, putting quotes around it, and telling me where to find it will still be failed.
13. If you copy and paste text from a website and retain the formatting and/or internal links, don't ask how I figured it out.
14. Changing a couple words does not make it not a quote.
15. If you paraphrase a web page, you will fail. 
16. If you paraphrase a web page and manage to misrepresent its facts, you will be verbally slapped...and then failed.
17. "I didn't know where else to get my information" will not be accepted as an excuse.
18. Essay exams should be written like essays.
19. Exams must be written in a dialect of English that a 30-something year old, educated American can understand.  (Snoop Dog will fail my course.)
20. Answer the question asked. 
21. Do not answer questions from the review that are not on the exam.  You will fail.
22. Do not invent questions.  You will fail.
23. The Pirate Code does not apply to exams:  questions are NOT "more like guidelines than actual rules."  This means that when I ask about religious diversity in Colonial America, the essay should be primarily about religion, diversity (that means more than one), the colonial period (not the Civil War), and the geographic area of 1776 America (Canada is not in America.  Neither is Spain).
24. Do not proselytize through your exam.  You will be graded down for going off topic.
25. Do not accuse me of working black magic against the class in your exam.  You will be graded down for presenting opinion instead of fact.
26. Comparing your topic to an episode of Pinky and the Brain will not affect your grade one way or the other.
27. Confusing Pinky and Brain might.

Comments

[Daniel]

Thank God I didn't have to deal with you and your overt, blatant quality bias when I was a student...

[Anna Haynes]

Does ghostwriting count as plagiarism?

[Max Little]

All good points! Maybe I'm too old, but seriously, just copying whole chunks from a resource is passing off, not original writing! You get points for inventiveness and originality, showing your understanding, rather than copying. It's the curse of Ctrl-C/V.

[DeweyS]

Semi-seriously, perhaps instead of taking the responsibility for defining all the things they can't do we should simplify the instructions and place the responsibility on them:

"Convince me that you understand this material. Note: I reserve the right to discuss the results with you."

[Nightwind]

Dewey: Thought about it. However, some of my students take the class online. it would be very difficult to discuss their understanding over the internet, as they would still have plenty of time to look stuff up. I suppose I could do it over the phone, but that would still be problematic.

[Daniel]

Not to take this too far afield from what are, after all, some very clever exam instructions, but the point is that we're in the middle of a significant period of cultural evolution in which rules and norms and institutions are all struggling to catch up to technological changes.

Cultural/social changes brought about by technology are nothing new (car, phone, etc.), but the scale and pace of the changes wrought by the expansion of information technology are just beyond the expectations of most institutions. In other words, we've got a culture that's based, in part, on certain expectations about rates of stable change, and we can't really expect it to willingly drop those expectations. Meanwhile, the actual changes are advancing at this new pace, which means we're all of us grinding away with outdated rules that don't scale to the new capabilities.

I don't know how to realistically manage this in education. And from an institutional standpoint, the general response is always management for the lowest common denominator, which means that policies will be set not for Web-savvy people like Catherine, but for the most technophobic member of the faculty.