Open Book Exam Courses

[sirjake]

I think some assumptions are being made here. Please tell me what you are understanding as "my point of view" in this situation.

From a course versus ECE exam perspective:

~ With the courses you have a teacher who is grading you over the term of the course work. You are interacting with other students in the course , via discussion board postings, etc. You sign up and complete the course through Excelsior.

~The ECE's you sign up for them through Excelsior but take the exam at a Pearson-Vue center.

In regards to why Excelsior requires such security for ECE and UExcel exams, but does not require proctoring of exam's for their online courses.

If I were to guess it maybe because the courses require interaction between a teacher and student over a period of time. Also I would guess most of the time the people who are taking Excelsior courses are matriculated in one of their degree programs, so they have already obtained personal information on the student and verified their identity.

The ECE's can be taken by anyone, and are administered by another company. Perhaps this is one of the reasons for their security measures.
They may need to have this additional information in their files to comply with accreditation standards (RA, ACE or both).

Sorry to drop of the face of the discussion. After work from 7am-3:30pm yesterday, I was at a wedding till almost 10, then church this morning.

Back at it.

Reading this and the previous post makes me realize that I should have been a little more clear in my original post. I did not clarify that I do *not* see multiple-choice examinations as the only acceptable form of making sure a student has learned something. As my response to the law school dude above indicates, when a course has other requirements than just examinations upon which your grade is based that are difficult to fake, it's not apples-to-apples with what I was referring to. My impression from what you guys were saying was that Excelsior essentially tested with open book examinations and that's what your grade is made up of--basically in isolation. I was saying that if that were the case, why aren't they requiring that the examinations be proctored? What was the fundamental difference if THAT were the case?

Anyway, I have no problem with something like the described Excelsior classes (if that matters to anyone). That's why I expressed surprise and said I would have to look into it further when I thought they were essentially open-book, unproctored and nothing else: I expected higher standards from Excelsior. The type of verification that they are doing does indeed seem to cover their bases, again, as I would expect from Excelsior. You can't look at that prima facia and say, "that's lacking." Given that PFC apparently requires a proctored final, I don't think you can say on the face of it that they are lacking either.

I think that you CAN do that with Straighterline and FEMA. I've taken courses from both of those and know what's involved. Your entire grade is made up of unproctored open-book examinations. You don't have a teacher--just an "advisor" who is almost completely uninvolved. You can easily cheat through both if you want, and even if you don't cheat, you can get through it without learning virtually anything if you want to. That's the type of credit that I want to see eliminated or at least harshly restrained (perhaps to free electives or something). I think that type of credit could ultimately harm our degrees.

What set this off for me was reading somewhere that PFC courses were open book and unproctored, then seeing the aforementioned thread about getting that credit over to TESC. Having it in mind that it was unproctored, I saw this as a terrible thing. These aren't just free electives that don't matter much, but major portions of a business degree. I don't want major portions of a valuable degree to be easy to cheat or fake (for reasons I've obviously already expressed).

And yes, Peace123, I certainly do see your point of view on this. I agree with you. These EC courses do have open-book exams and are not automatically illegitimate. I should have been more circumspect and detailed in my explanation of what I see as being problematic. My apologies.