Cheating on a standardized test isn’t exactly unheard of, especially when competition is tough and the stakes are high. (Otherwise, who cares?) Recently, a student in Bangkok used a watch-phone capable of receiving text messages to take university entrance exams, which resulted in a variety of watches with similar capabilities being banned from test sites. The educational establishment is (so far) unwavering in its insistence that students learn and commit material to memory prior to taking exams. A chink in that armor appeared with the approval of using calculators on tests. An argument can be made, however, that open-book or open-source (as in electronics) testing should be considered for the future.
A student who has mastered and memorized a body of knowledge has indisputable advantage over another who has to search for that same information, but it’s a sign of the times that fewer students, and more importantly, fewer businesses, believe that it’s worthwhile to possess information except in the rarefied instance of test taking. In the real world, looking something up and problem solving on the fly is challenging the notion that acquired knowledge and skill give people better (read: more efficient) job performance.
I’ve yet to see any substantial evidence that the Google effect or the Wiki effect — the outsourcing of memory, in short — has significantly diminished the value of traversing a large body of knowledge to be prepared for adult life, be it the level of a high school diploma or an advanced university degree. However, it’s clear that the communications age and its technologies have placed at our fingertips amazing information resources that many of us consult daily. Ironically, that has inadvertently cheapened the value of expertise in many walks of life, as most anyone with a few functioning brain cells can easily acquire the information to handle most of life’s tasks and quite a few job requirements. Our attitudes toward what constitutes cheating have been similarly degraded as the obvious utility of all types of workaround sweep aside ethical considerations. It remains to be seen whether educators, who themselves are known to indulge in cheats of one sort or another, can uphold the value of learning the traditional way. If it were left to business, we’d all be cheating.
Creative Destruction 