Taking an "app" into an exam?

Should you be able to download "Grammarly" on to your mobile phone and then take the phone into the examination room to sit your English Literature exam?

I would have thought not but that is just what some students in this state did - and they were allowed to do it. We are being told "it is the ideas which are important, not the spelling or the grammar".  

I disagree, particularly as not all students had access to "Grammarly". If you are doing an English Literature paper then your ability to spell and use correct grammar should be part of the examination. An examiner should be able to see that the student has the capacity to spell and construct a sentence. Those things are part of being able to express an idea. 

I am not saying students should be perfect spellers or always use the correct grammar.  I am not a perfect speller and my grammar leaves something to be desired. Perhaps I should use Grammarly too but surely using it in an examination is something else?

When I was at law school we were taught to write what were called "examination summaries". They were really a sort of precis of what we had been taught in each subject. We were encouraged to put down the rules which applied to certain concepts and the cases we could cite in an answer to a question.

We were told about this in our first year. There was a day devoted to this and other essentials - such as how to use the law library. Now much of what we did then is done rather differently. Computers have changed the way students learn the law just as much as they have changed every other area of learning.

At the time though I could see other students, usually much younger students, struggling with the idea of examination summaries. I talked this over with my tutor and even told her, "I have never used one in an exam. I write them, but I don't use them."

She told me that was the way it should be. Students should not even have the time to look at anything like that once an exam had started. I thought about this a good deal. At the end of my first year, after the exams were over and I had done far better than I had dared to hope, I took it on myself to write something for the following year's intake. I did it because I was asked to help give a group of international students some extra help with the very precise language the law often needs.

I passed the paper I had written over to my first year tutor and asked if it would be all right to provide it to the group I was going to help. What happened was unexpected. I was asked if everyone could use it. All the new students were given a copy. Students in later years could have a copy if they asked for it. The university went on using it for many years after I left. I was contacted twice and asked if they could update small parts of it. It was passed on to other students in other places as well.  All this was unexpected and I have simply felt grateful that other students were able to benefit from something I had to learn. I was able to learn a lot by writing it.

But knowing how to write an examination summary that might help them was not something that would do the learning for them. Not all the suggestions in it would help all students. They still had to do the work. They had to be able to solve the problems with which they were presented. They had to understand the concepts and know how to apply the case law.

If we consider "Grammarly" as the "how to write a summary - or how to write the English language" in this current setting then I think it is possible to see that having the program available is really not appropriate. Certainly if they do have it then all students should have it - and most did not.  A well prepared student should not have time to consult such a thing. An able student should not need it.