The Clueless generation candidates

Exam cheating is up: various gadgets are being smuggled into exam rooms to give performance-enhancing boosts to test scores.

Mobile phones, Blackberrys and iPods are all being pressed into service in the cause of getting better grades.

But why penalise creative use of technology? Why not provide laptops, mobiles and the like to everyone -- like educators do in Finland -- to assess candidates' abilities to analyse, argue points of view and write coherently, rather than distill the exam experience down to an exercise of memory.

The internet instantly makes available more knowledge than any one person can ever know; we are all relative dunces in the digital age. Only Google can be a polymath. Communication of ideas, not parroting of the facts, is the real transferable skill for the 21st-century marketplace.