Essay no. 2: What if exams could be done cooperatively?

I was once told that a degree is meant to give you a system/method to face problems, not a pile of information. During our degree, we have been told once and again about the importance of cooperative learning and group work. Let’s imagine a teacher chose to assess cooperative learning and working skills in an exam.

At the beginning of the term, this teacher might ask his/her students to write an essay, using conditionals, answering to this question: “Imagine that on the day of the exam, a teacher let you use your notes, books and even the Internet to answer a set of questions, offered the opportunity to either take it the usual way (i.e. individually) or do it cooperatively, and gave you 15 minutes to discuss and decide among all classmates. What would be your proposal to your classmates, taking into account that the teacher asked you to come up with a solution that would enable to assess both cooperative skills and individual learning accomplished on the contents of the unit?”

Later on, on the day of the exam, the teacher would actually put that into practice. Maybe the students would choose to do it in cooperation, split into small groups to outline the main ideas that the answer to each question should contain, then discuss them in the large group, and afterwards take some time to write the answers individually.

But, then again, I wonder if any of this could ever happen around here.