Test fun and games.

Today, I wrote my first test for my C++ class for the University of the Gambia. Mainly it’s things taken straight from the book but I’m really interested in seeing how well these guys are getting it. Seeing the difference between them and other I students I’ve worked with here is really a trip. These guys are much more like normal college kids than I thought was possible in the Gambia. UTG has only been around since 1999 and the CS program has only been around since 2004 so it’s even more fun to be a part of it.

The real trick is trying to figure out how to print out 25-50 copies of the test. Printing resources are a little…short…around here. We shall see. The other trick is creating different versions of the test. See, Cheating is a really big issue in this country. Probably more so than in America. It’s not that the kids are necessarily worse students or anything like that it’s really just a different culture an attitude toward learning. I think it has to do with expectations they had in grade school and limited resources. I had one student turn in an assignment that was nearly line by line the same as another and she tried to explain to me they worked on it together, that of course it’s going to be the same because they only had one computer. They did change some comments so I doubt they really thought that it was 100% ok but they really thought this was a good argument. I can’t imagine using this argument in the states to a professor. It’s just not something that would cross any ones mind.

To combat it in homework I’ve introduced the guys to MOSS (http://moss.stanford.edu/) which goes pretty hard as far as copy detection on turned in work goes. Tests, of course, are a different matter. One of the other volunteers made a different version with different questions for every single person in her class. I don’t think i’m ready to go that far yet. I did, however, create 5 tests with the questions randomized. You’d think there would be a nice simple program that you could enter questions in and all that but I couldn’t really find one. Not a free one anyway. I just ended up sticking them in a spread sheat and randomizing it. Fun.

We’ll see how this test goes…