Take-home exams are tricky to give. There are a few pitfalls with respect to ensuring academic integrity as well as with respect to constructing original problems. But, as is with most things in education, if done correctly, take-home exams can be yet another excellent method for instruction and assessment. Here are my thoughts as well as some tips for the instructor who may be interested in this.

Benefits

I like take-home exams — when I was a student and now as an instructor. A student benefits in at least these three ways:

• Time pressure is somewhat lifted. Rather than having to complete an exam in three hours or less, a student can take their time and think about the problem.
• Provides another opportunity to learn since the problems can be constructed to be challenging.
• Take-home exams also teach a student to research and not just search for the right answer. A well-written take-home exam can help to foster curiosity, because the student will have to entertain “what if I tried this?”

The instructor benefits in at least these two ways:

• He / she can construct a meaningful exam to ask about the various nuances of the subject.
• He / she saves valuable class time by having the exam be take-home. An in-class exam, in effect, steals learning time from the student and teaching time from the instructor.

The Dark Side

Take-home exams in mathematics or computer science can be tricky. With so much information available directly from the internet and with the presence of individuals who will do some or all of the exam for a fee, this makes it difficult for an instructor to properly evaluate his / her students.

It is an ugly side to contend with and this is often one sound argument against take-home exams and for in-class exams. The cheating aspect can be a bit more controlled when there is monitoring.

Glorified Homework?

I tend to think of homework as part skills and drills (can be tedious but not to be neglected despite the rancor and ruckus that some well-meaning instructors would have against such a thing) and part learning the nuances of the subject. In the classes I’ve taught, where I’ve had the policy freedom to do so, I’ve made homework ungraded and non-mandatory. Students are free to do as much as they want and can submit their work for feedback. I don’t expect every student to learn at the same pace nor do I expect every student to always learn all the concepts. I do truly believe that math, among other things, has to marinate in our brains before we really understand what’s going on.

Whenever I’ve run classes in a “no mandatory” homework setting, students have been generally happy to come to class and actually retain a lot of information even after the course has finished. I’ve seen studies that show student achievement (as measured by class exams) suffers when homework is ungraded. I don’t doubt those studies because I think that those instructors’ teaching styles require that students do their homework. I also believe that the “no difference in performance” studies are likely not published because they showed an inconclusive statistical result — which may imply a different type of bias from the researcher (i.e., they wanted to show that doing or not doing homework makes a performance difference).

The way I instruct is, in the edu-jargon, mostly a “flipped” classroom. We do problems, we talk about our problems, we take problems home, etc. All I ask that students do is read the course material / text and practice as much on their own as possible. The only “summative” assessments of knowledge are the exams. In a later post, I will go into a bit more detail about how I would run a course if I had no policy shackles.

Isn’t an in-class exam just glorified homework to be done under time constraint? What do students demonstrate here? Some students certainly demonstrate mastery of material. Other students just demonstrate mastery of memorization. How complex can the exams possibly be if they are to be reasonably doable in a few hours?

I do not believe take-home exams are just glorified homework. Homework can be the standard textbook questions with a few twists. Take-home exams should be anything but canned problems (to within reason).

If a take-home exam looks like more homework, then, yes, this is just glorified homework and the instructor is being lazy. If that were the intent of the exam, then don’t call it that and call it what it is — homework.

How Do You Give A Take-Home Exam?

Any instructor who thinks that ALL students will simply be honest, is a fool. A healthy skepticism is in order. In a class I am teaching now, I will be giving a take-home exam. The students will have 8 full days to work on it. There are two things I do.

The first is this excerpt from my exam preamble, which provides a balancing mechanism against the dark side:

This is a take-home exam. The instructor is not unaware of the possibilities that exist for obtaining exam solutions outside of one’s own abilities. Therefore, the general rules apply:

• You may not collaborate or otherwise work with anyone else either physically or virtually. The work submitted must be your understanding.
• You may use your notes, your course text, and any online tutorials that do not require you to interact with another person. The murkiness about “using online tutorials” is resolved below:
  • Do not submit your exam problems to someone or some agency who will do the exam for you. These people do everyone except themselves a disservice. They harm you because you won’t learn and therefore won’t earn (neither money nor the joy of knowing something). They mock the education process. They benefit by collecting cash because you may not know something. Don’t let this be a pattern for your life. A grade is a grade and over time will mean less and less, but knowledge acquired pays dividends for as long as you retain that knowledge.
  • The instructor reserves the right to ask the student submitting the exam to explain the answers for any or all problems on the exam. If the student is unable to provide a satisfactory answer, then it will be assumed that the work was not done in an earnest manner and as such the problem in question will receive no credit.

I have no hesitation in directly asking students to explain their answers. And here, the old chess adage applies: “The threat is stronger than the execution”. Some may view this as a bit heavy-handed and it may be. But to control a few rotten apples, I don’t think that all students should have to be thrown into the “regurgitate or repent” style of examination.

The second thing I do, is I make the take-home exams tough. And by tough, I don’t mean impossible, but challenging to within reason. That means that I take the time out to think of challenging problems that are not easily internet searchable and are appropriate for the students.

The unscrupulous student can still go and pay someone to do the exam for them, but then they have to contend with the possibility of being asked to explain the answers given.

As a back-up measure, if there is a material disagreement about how the student was assessed, etc., I will gladly create an exam for the student to take as an in-class exam. I can always revert to this. If the student truly learned the material, then they should be able to demonstrate this knowledge.

Some things you can’t just slither through. Solving mathematical problems, writing computer programs, and playing music are three of these things.

What are your thoughts? This is a tricky subject and I don’t have all the answers, so I’d be curious to know what you do and what you think about take-home exams. Success stories? Horror stories?