If we tried to make universities examine non-students, the easiest way for the universities to cheat would be to teach literal passwords to their students, and then fail everyone who doesn’t know the password. Then they could demonstrate that even in a fair competition only their students are able to pass the exams.
With some cleverness you could insert arbitrary passwords even into hard sciences, for example by asking “what was Einstein’s most important contribution to physics?” Even if you knew everything about physics, and everything about Einstein, it wouldn’t help you figure out what was his most important contribution in the teacher’s opinion. (Could be any of them. Could even be something meta.)
Or you could take a set of arbitrary details (something so specific that it is virtually impossible for a human to memorize all things in the same category of relevance) and keep repeating the selected details to your students every year. Ask those details in exams every year; then ask them again on the final exam.
And with soft sciences… basically everything already is like this. (Or am I wrong? There is a way to test this empirically: take students from a few universities and make them take exams at a different university that teaches nominally the same subject; preferably in a different country.)
Note this would be illegal (under the term that requires you to provide all resources specifically relating to the exam as opposed to the subject in general to external students).
It would also cause students to appeal, and the statistics would be obvious enough that the appeals committee would investigate, ask for the mark scheme, and would quickly find on the students side because the paper clearly contains arbitrary details designed to do this.
Note there’s a lot of things that are like this in law, where people could in theory cheat, possibly even within the letter of the law, but they don’t because the courts throw the book at them when they do.
If we tried to make universities examine non-students, the easiest way for the universities to cheat would be to teach literal passwords to their students, and then fail everyone who doesn’t know the password. Then they could demonstrate that even in a fair competition only their students are able to pass the exams.
With some cleverness you could insert arbitrary passwords even into hard sciences, for example by asking “what was Einstein’s most important contribution to physics?” Even if you knew everything about physics, and everything about Einstein, it wouldn’t help you figure out what was his most important contribution in the teacher’s opinion. (Could be any of them. Could even be something meta.)
Or you could take a set of arbitrary details (something so specific that it is virtually impossible for a human to memorize all things in the same category of relevance) and keep repeating the selected details to your students every year. Ask those details in exams every year; then ask them again on the final exam.
And with soft sciences… basically everything already is like this. (Or am I wrong? There is a way to test this empirically: take students from a few universities and make them take exams at a different university that teaches nominally the same subject; preferably in a different country.)
Note this would be illegal (under the term that requires you to provide all resources specifically relating to the exam as opposed to the subject in general to external students).
It would also cause students to appeal, and the statistics would be obvious enough that the appeals committee would investigate, ask for the mark scheme, and would quickly find on the students side because the paper clearly contains arbitrary details designed to do this.
Note there’s a lot of things that are like this in law, where people could in theory cheat, possibly even within the letter of the law, but they don’t because the courts throw the book at them when they do.