With Google it has gotten really easy to get through University of Stockholm’s distance courses on dinosaurs, volcanoes and earthquakes. 1291 students have passed these courses in the last few years.
Through the website Antagning.se people have all year been able to apply to courses late and immediately get accepted to a number of courses within the field of Geology, which are given from the Department of Geological Sciences at University of Stockholm. During the last two years, 1291 students have passed the three courses “Dinosaurs – their development and extinction”, “Volcanoes of the world”, “Earthquakes”. Only 5 percent of the students who have completed their assignments have failed. This is a strong deviation from the average rate in Sweden. According to Högskoleverket‘s (The Swedish National Agency for Higher Education) overview from 2011, 56 percent of the distance courses are approved in Sweden.
The courses are entirely given and taken at a distance, and the lecture material is provided in .pdf-format. But in order to pass theses courses, the student don’t even have to open these files.
Lundagård has revised the course “Volcanoes of the world“. Google made it possible to retrieve previous exams and answers, and thus, to pass the first specific element of the course without opening the lecture material.
The fact that Geology courses from University of Stockholm are easily earned university credits has been a know fact for a long time on the Internet. For instance, these are courses are being discussed on the Internet forum, Flashback. The users post messages such as: “it’s really an abomination that they entitle you to financial aid from CSN”, “Paleontology is a classic when it comes to summer courses, the key to the answers has been circulating freely” and “if you work efficiently, it should take you less than two days to finish the dinosaur course.”
The last question on the final exam of the volcano course was: “Taking into account what you have learned on this course, in which volcanic environment would you choose to reside? Motivate your answer.”
The answer: “Close to a dangerous volcano due to GRAND death wish”, which was granted 1,5 out of 5. In the finishing essay, which required “a maximum of 5 pages including pictures and text, Wikipedia was referred to as one of the sources, and pictures were freely copied without any reference. This did also pass.
Course coordinator, Elin Tollefsen, was one of the teachers doing the examining on these three courses during the fall semester of 2012, and she marked the current exam above.
“What? Oh! That sounds strange, it must have been a mistake, says Elin Tollefsen.”
She says that such answer should never pass.
“It’s impossible. If I marked this exam, I have made a mistake, and we all make mistakes”, says Tollefsen.
On the course “Dinosaurs – their development and extinction”, one student has used “certain aspects of the development of the international trade” to analyze the dinosaurs’ potential development in modern time and passed. For instance, the student referred to his imagination and “experience from previous studies” as his sources. Since the start in spring of 2012, the exams on the course “Earthquakes“, have always been identical and the participants have three attempts to pass each exam.
Also read: The department: We simply weren’t very smart
Lundagård keeps revising – Share your experiences with us here.
Text: Dennis Jörnmark Callstam and Simon Fridolfsson
Translation: Maximilian Aleman Tennell
