Derek Thompson

If you want to fix that, if you want to fix this weapon of mass distraction followed by this weapon of mass cheating—

You have to solve it directly.

Take the phones out of the classrooms, put them in pouches, run that experiment, certainly, to see if it works.

And then when it comes to testing knowledge, you just have to move out of the modes of testing knowledge that can be cheated toward modes of testing knowledge that can't be cheated.

So one thing that can't be cheated is something a little bit more like the Oxford model, where most of the grade is dependent on in-class oral exams.

You have this

uh, system or culture of, you know, you take the history class, you learn about the Habsburg Empire, rather than write an essay about the Habsburg Empire, I'm much more likely just ask Jack to be T to write it for you.

You get up in front of the class and talk about the Habsburg Empire and talk about the Holy Roman Empire and people ask you questions and you defend and prove your intelligence to the classroom, to the teacher.

So it's a little bit like my wife just finished her PhD in clinical psychology.

At the end of a PhD, what's the verb that we use to describe the end of a PhD?

You defend your dissertation.

You get up in front of a group of experts and you don't just give them the paper and say, read it and then give me my degree.

You defend it.

They ask you questions.

They say, what about this methodology?

What about figure number one?

And you say, oh, well, here's where I did the methodology and here's why figure one looks the way it does.

You prove in real time

that you are the author of that paper, that you understand the work that you did.

And I just think that more education, if we really want to get around the cheating epidemic, probably has to slurp in this Oxford model or this dissertation model because it's much harder to cheat in an oral exam.