Major exams are the bane of many a student's life. They represent a one-off chance to scribble months or years of learning onto paper, and can make or break future career prospects. The trouble is that taking an exam at a time rigidly set by the academic calendar has never been an ideal way to determine competence—they may come at the right time for some lucky students, but not for many others.
Perhaps it doesn't have to be that way. As teaching begins to move online, we no longer need to wait until the end of a course to perform assessments. Instead, computer software can assess understanding during the learning process itself by analyzing a student's every mouse click and keystroke. So could we finally be able to get rid of the dreaded final exam?
A better option is a system that allows students to advance at their own pace when they have mastered the material, says Julia Freeland, an education researcher. This is called competency-based learning, and it requires tailoring the educational program in a different way for each student. This is clearly something that teachers in a busy classroom may struggle to do. If course material is offered online, though, with the student's input analyzed automatically by computer software, students can be assessed individually—even to the point that the software can identify when a given student is likely to perform to their full potential on an exam.
Competency-based learning software is now being used both in high schools and in colleges across the US, says Freeland. The Virtual Learning Academy Charter School in the state of New Hampshire is one prominent high school example.
The idea behind the software is relatively straightforward. It takes information about the student's activity on course website—the pages they have visited and whether the student has verified that they have read a passage of text or watched a video, for instance—and combines it with data on the student’s performance on informal tests and quizzes to establish in real time how well the student understands a concept. When that understanding reaches a predetermined level, the student is challenged with new concepts, or offered the opportunity to take a formal exam. Since this form of competency-based learning approach was introduced in some classes at Arizona State University, pass rates have reportedly increased. And Philip Regier, the dean of the university’s online arm, says there are now plans for doing “an entire degree adaptively”.
Some firms push the technology further. Their artificial intelligence software analyses the data collected to constantly tweak the way it presents new information to the individual. Within a few weeks, claim their makers, these algorithms can even identify what time of the day a student is most receptive to lessons in a given subject.
1.It can be learned from Paragraph 1 that （ ）.
2.Which of the following is TRUE about “competency-based learning”?
3.The Virtual Learning Academy Charter School is mentioned in the passage to （ ）.
4.What is “the idea behind the software” in Paragraph 5?
5.To which of the following statements would the author most likely agree?
