APRIL 5 ― I recall DAP politician Tony Pua saying many years ago that instead of asking students what year Melaka fell to the Portuguese, students should be asked if it was inevitable that the city fell to the Europeans.
I’m of the view that if we look deeper into the nature of the question, it could provide a bridge for students to better navigate the transition from secondary school to college.
Let me explain.
Today a student finishing her SPM exam and entering college may face something of a culture shock. Why?
Well, in primary and secondary school, the key assessment item is the closed book exam taken (usually) within two to three hours in some scary-looking examination hall sometimes the size of a theatre.
As everyone knows, these sorts of assessments lend themselves towards memorisation as the key technique of mastery; since all that matters (especially in Science, History, Geography, etc.) is that you get the answers correct, then the mere reproduction of said answers becomes primary.
For things like Maths, though, it’s usually practise practise prastice.
But ay there’s the rub.
Because once a student enters college she’ll encounter at least two huge changes (apart from, uh, the doing away with the uniform).
One, many assessments are in the form of written assignments whose word count can hit a few thousand.
Two, these assignments are to be written in soft-copy i.e. suddenly the use of the Internet, and thus Artificial Intelligence chatbots, jumps to the fore.
In my experience, not all students are able to cope well with these changes. The newfound “freedom” of being permitted to browse the Web to obtain information for one’s assignments (or at least do so on a level usually not adopted in secondary school) can be quite daunting.
Not every student can resist the temptation of copying and pasting whole paragraphs from websites which, ooh! answer the lecturer’s question more or less directly.
Many students lack the research skills to search out valid sources of information (as opposed to some random blog), often taking in the first page of Google results without question.
Most students are unable to paraphrase what they find online and transfer their own words onto the assignment answer sheets. In a similar vein, I should comment that writing in one’s own voice today is practically a lost art.
Now for the bad news.
With ChatGPT a Level 2 temptation can become full-blown Level 10. Because suddenly the student realises that a five-thousand word assignment can be completed within minutes with the help of an AI “friend” (even better if the lecturer doesn’t bother to check for AI detection cum cheating).
Hence, the conversion is complete. In Form 5, a student had to stress her hand and reading skills just to produce a 500-word essay; in Year 1 of college she can get everything down with fewer than six clicks.
Who can resist such a paradisiacal turn of events?
Open book exams to the rescue?
I don’t know how the education community plans to address this issue, this huge leap in assessment culture, but I’d like to propose the open book exam as a potential mediator.
Even before the dawn of AI., open book exams have had a reputation for controversy, impracticality and more or less being an “affront” to the time-tested culture of closed book assessments.
You can get a feel of what I mean by simply asking any Form 3-5 teacher if he or she has considered open book exams; I can bet you there’s a sense of the concept being quasi-anathema, especially in formal Malaysian education.
But I believe if a student is gradually exposed to the practice of being able to consult references and texts for an examination, this will result in a few benefits.
First, the obsession with memorisation will hopefully fade. When the textbook is available in front of you, the need to memorise large chunks of factual information disappears.
And here’s where the magic hopefully happens.
If a student can no longer rely on memorisation (because it would be simply silly to do so), this would mean that students will have to rely on different cognitive skills. Like what? Like analysis, argumentation, discussion, imagination, creativity and so on.
Note that with open book examinations, the assessment questions themselves have to change. You can’t ask the kind of question whose answer is given with just a turn of the page (check out Tony Pua’s question above).
Alas, if the assessment questions have to change, then — like night follows day — the nature of teaching will also need to be rethought.
Students will need to be masters of thinking, not just memorising. They need to be good at exploration, not merely regurgitation. They will need to understand how to search for, manipulate and organise the best kind of information, not merely reproduce the very same pages everyone else already knows.
An open book exam, in other words, is the forerunner of Web-based (or, today, AI-assisted) learning.
So why are many of our schools still shying away from implementing them?
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
