[HN Gopher] EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
___________________________________________________________________
EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
Author : oxylibrium
Score : 572 points
Date : 2021-04-22 04:13 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eff.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eff.org)
| Nextgrid wrote:
| His GoFundMe if you want to contribute:
| https://www.gofundme.com/f/stand-against-proctorio
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| I feel like this comment should be at the top - for anyone who
| feels strongly about this issue and didn't spot this link
| further down in his Twitter thread.
|
| Have an upvote.
| areactnativedev wrote:
| Totally agree
| davesque wrote:
| Just donated. Thanks for this.
| djoldman wrote:
| EFF: "...The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a
| lawsuit today against Proctorio Inc. on behalf of college
| student _Erik Johnson_... "
|
| GoFundMe page: "...My name is _Ian Linkletter_... wired over
| $50,000 to Arvay Finlay, LLP, doubling my legal defense fund.
| John Trueman is joined by Cathie Boies Parker, Q.C., and Mark
| Underhill... "
|
| Different lawsuits?
| rubatuga wrote:
| I think @dang did a faulty merge between two different, but
| related articles. This was the original article it was from:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26900217
| dang wrote:
| Yikes - I didn't realize there were two distinct lawsuits.
| I guess I foolishly assumed that they would only shoot
| themselves in one foot?
|
| I'm not sure what to do now that these threads have gotten
| blended so thoroughly. Will figure something out.
| bo1024 wrote:
| As someone else said, this originally linked to a tweet by
| linketter, who is being sued by proctorio. Similar but
| different scenarios
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Am I wrong to think Proctorio is a rubbish name.
|
| I keep thinking 'Proctology'.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| What a bunch of fuckheads. Donated.
|
| Btw how does the system work in Canada, after he wins this, will
| he be able to sue for damages and strip Proctorio clean or what?
| jtsiskin wrote:
| Does anyone have a link to the tweets and shared videos?
| trhway wrote:
| s/Proctorio/Scientology/g would work just fine in the story
| https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/22/21526792/proctorio-onlin...
|
| Of course there are a lot of creepy software and sleezy
| businesses around. That is not the issue. The issue is the
| university administrators - the MBA style morons who overtook the
| universities - who subject their students to such a crap
| software. On the other side one can argue that that is really
| preparing students for the real life - after all they are going
| to come to the industry and will be subjected by the MBA style
| morons in the management there to the crap like Jira, Scrum,
| Slack (how being forced to constantly broadcast your status and
| be immediately responsive is that much different from
| Proctorio?), etc.
| xtracto wrote:
| Proctorio did a sort of IAMA two years ago in reddit:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/augdmo/ask_proctorio_a...
|
| As a technologist I've worked in "online bullet loans", payments
| and other controversial verticals but for the life of me , I
| would never work in such a dirty business (as Proctorio). I'd
| rather tell people I work in porn-tech (where people are
| literally f*d) than this asinine proctoring systems.
|
| Just... no.
| jkelleyrtp wrote:
| I personally believe education should just move forward into a
| world where cheating is impossible. Hands-on schools like Olin
| College of Engineering make it practically impossible to cheat...
| because you actually have to build something! Sure, plagiarism is
| still an issue, but that's much easier to control for than
| monitoring students while they take a test.
| arp242 wrote:
| I don't disagree, but the issue here is one of scale and costs.
| Testing is just _easy_ , cheap, and very ingrained to boot. A
| single teacher can teach dozens or hundreds of students.
|
| Olin charges $55,612/year tuition fees alone; the total costs
| are estimated at $79,024/year[1]. This is a lot higher than a
| lot of other "normal" universities[2], and even seems higher
| than most "top universities"[3].
|
| I'm sure it's great if you can afford it, but most can't.
|
| [1]: https://www.olin.edu/admission/costs/cost-of-attendance/
|
| [2]: https://uscollegeinternational.com/2019/10/03/cheap-
| engineer...
|
| [3]: https://studyabroad.careers360.com/articles/engineering-
| in-u...
| jkelleyrtp wrote:
| Olin provides a 50% scholarship for everyone and does really
| well at financial aid. I currently go here :). In the
| beginning of the school's lifetime, everyone had a 100%
| scholarship. It's a common tactic for schools to say their
| college is the same price as MIT/Harvard but not actually
| cost that much.
|
| Plus, many schools are moving towards a co-op/hand
| son/project-based model, even public ones. University of
| Waterloo is such an example, and many state schools I know
| are also transitioning into a project-based model. It's not
| that more expensive than testing - especially given the fact
| that everyone has a computer, 3d printers and workshops are
| relatively cheap, and most undergrad projects aren't that
| expensive.
|
| Students tend to get internships, pay for their school, and
| move into high paying jobs immediately out of school because
| how much experience they have, even if they have to give up
| some theoretical basis. That being said, Olin generates many
| grad-school students that do well at research.
| arp242 wrote:
| Another lawsuit: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-sues-
| proctorio-behalf...
|
| tl;dr: someone examined a bit of the JavaScript code. Proctorio
| DMCA'd it.
| Trias11 wrote:
| How's universities are not yet part of class action lawsuit for
| gross abuse of privacy, students rights and segregation due to
| the personal characteristics?
| fxtentacle wrote:
| In case you don't know who Proctorio is:
|
| (like me)
|
| Apparently it's a supervision software that students are forced
| to install on their private computer and (as expected) it'll do
| its worst to invade your privacy and flag "suspicious" things,
| based on which the university might punish you.
|
| "Suspicious" here means wearing glasses [3] or looking around in
| the room or blinking too much [4] or having eye and/or skin
| colors [1] that are difficult for AI to track or reading
| questions out aloud [2]. Because everyone knows that a good
| student is white, sits in a bright room, and will continuously
| stare at his/her PC screen while thinking about a difficult math
| problem, I guess. WTF?
|
| I am so glad that this kind of abuse was not yet common when I
| was in university. I love sitting in the (dark) basement, it
| helps me concentrate. And I tend to close my eyes a lot because
| it helps me visualize the problem. I'm sure this kind of
| misguided software would have failed me.
|
| And the worst part is: Bugs in this software will fail students
| in the real world. [4]
|
| So it is crucially important that this type of software receives
| a lot of scrutiny to make sure it works as planned. But it seems
| that Proctorio is suing this guy for doing exactly that:
| Documenting how the software is supposed to work by linking to
| Proctorio's YouTube videos.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/uhreeb/status/1303139738065481728
|
| [2] https://www.insider.com/viral-tiktok-student-fails-exam-
| afte...
|
| [3] https://proctorio.com/frequently-asked-questions
|
| [4]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/UBC/comments/g2ub05/god_kicked_out_...
| christophilus wrote:
| Ah. Prictorio: education spyware just like Socrates used to
| impose on his pupils.
|
| Seriously, the day my university required this would be the
| last day they received a dime from me. And I'd be getting a
| refund for the current semester.
| kelnos wrote:
| From your Insider link:
|
| > _LSU student body president Stone Cox said that the fees,
| which could come out to $300, were prohibitive for students._
|
| What the hell? Not only are universities mandating students
| infect their systems with malware, but they're making the
| students pay for the privilege? That's ridiculous.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| If you think this is bad, I've been sent online coding tests
| that do the same thing after applying for positions. They
| require you to keep your camera on and record you as you
| complete the tests.
|
| Thankfully, it's a good filter for deciding which employers I
| don't want to work for. I can only imagine what it's like
| working for a company that trusts their employees that little.
| bregma wrote:
| Here I was assuming it was a proctological mod for Factorio
| that modifies how inserters work. Reality is infinitely worse.
| Guthur wrote:
| It's actually very disappointing that this whole monitoring
| system was deemed necessary to begin with. How screwed is the
| system that anyone one would believe this level of intrusion
| should be part of the education process.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > How screwed is the system that anyone one would believe
| this level of intrusion should be part of the education
| process.
|
| It's all a _lot_ of smoke grenades to cover for:
|
| - an education system/process that at its core is not about
| actual learning but "bulimia learning" aka memorizing the
| facts the profs deemed relevant for the exam and forgetting
| them the very second the exam is over to make space for new
| useless stuff that will be forgotten just the same way.
|
| - an employment system that has "optimized" to needing as-
| standardized-as-possible papers that certify potential
| employees of having skill X so that hiring managers can
| easily separate between candidates that are "worth it" on
| paper without having to waste time on "unworthy" candidates -
| something that _obviously_ fails as it chucks out a lot of
| the people that aren 't built for bulimia learning but can't
| prove that (unlike an awful lot of the "certified" people)
| they actually know what they're doing
|
| - "education" institutions that are more interested in
| getting grant money and income from student tuition rather
| than on training actually talented students
|
| - and as a root cause of all of that: employers believing
| they need "university graduates" when the good old German-
| style apprenticeship system works just fine... with the side
| effect that apprenticeships cost the employer actual money
| for years for training the apprentice, whereas with
| university the _students and their parents_ pay the bill for,
| sometimes, the rest of their lives
|
| Education and employment is in _dire_ need of reforms.
| Universities should be serving only those who are actually
| interested in science, companies should _pay_ for educating
| the workforce they need instead of forcing generations of
| young people to take on unsustainable debts, and schools
| should be reformed to actually provide stuff people are going
| to _use_ in their later career.
| buran77 wrote:
| It's just another tool to internalize the discrimination. As
| long as nobody hits both them and their clients hard, holding
| them responsible for building the tool as such, for choosing
| it, or for continuing to use it _knowing_ the issues, there
| 's no incentive for anyone to do better.
|
| Think of it another way. If you knowingly contract a member
| of the KKK to do your hiring, you can't pretend not to know
| why people of color don't get hired in your company.
|
| Proctorio's issue may be more subtle than the "in your face"
| example I gave above but they're there and whoever contracts
| them does so with full awareness of them.
|
| P.S. Because I'm sure the wave of downvotes is less about
| people supporting racism and more about ignorance, let me
| further support my point about such tech with real life
| examples:
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5gxg3/proctorio-is-using-
| ra...
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/28/22254631/university-of-
| il...
|
| https://twitter.com/uhreeb/status/1303139738065481728
|
| https://twitter.com/cmg/status/1304593597338185730
| mkl wrote:
| When you've seen exam-sitting-for-hire in action, you believe
| it. Most students are honest and genuinely want to learn, and
| the few that are dishonest cause everyone to be subjected to
| this. It sucks for everyone, students and staff.
| lstepnio wrote:
| I think you would be surprised on the high percentage of
| students that will cheat, given the opportunity with as low
| risk profile such as remote learning.
| m-ee wrote:
| My university had an honor system, proctors were
| explicitly not allowed in the room during the test except
| to make announcements. Worked well enough as far as I
| know. Cheating was dealt with harshly when reported.
| xoudini wrote:
| I'm not familiar with the software in question, but I'm
| quite sure it'd still be possible to have someone else to
| sit your exam. For instance, you could have an external
| webcam pointed at yourself, and have someone else in front
| of your computer writing the actual exam. Maybe even mirror
| the display so that you can see what your accomplice is
| doing.
| splix wrote:
| I had experience having an exam with the proctorio. And I
| see many ways how it can be cheated, at least
| technically. They also say they monitor your head and
| eyes movements, which is supposed to show something
| unnatural if you're cheating. Though I'm not sure it's
| really possible, and maybe just a security theater.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Most people don't smuggle drugs in their rectums, but the
| few that do cause everyone to be subjected to random rectal
| cavity searches?
| necovek wrote:
| Which does not make tracking everyone a solution to the
| problem of cheating in exams.
|
| Higher level education is largely voluntary, and it's up to
| the person taking it up to decide what they gain from it.
| If they are only in it for a diploma, they'd get there one
| way or another.
|
| To me, focusing on finding "cheaters" makes education a
| competition. I never felt cheaters got anything over me in
| my studies, and I never felt like I've got a lesser grade
| because of them. Does that happen in cases where you've
| seen "exam-sitting-for-hire" in action?
|
| Even if you normalize your grading scale based on the
| students taking the exam right then, if your claim that
| "most students are honest" is true (and I believe it is),
| that should not affect any non-cheater significantly
| (unless you've got a small, non-representative group, but
| then normalizing grades is unfair to begin with).
|
| So my question is: who are we trying to solve the problem
| for? What is the expected outcome, knowing that there will
| always be people who "cheat" their way through life too?
| mkl wrote:
| When your institution's reputation is at risk, you want
| to prevent it. Honest students don't get a lesser grade;
| that's not the problem. If the cheaters want to cheat
| their way through life, that's their problem. My problem
| is to make sure the rest of my students end up with a
| well-respected degree. I.e. the problem is being solved
| for the honest students, the ones I want to spend my time
| on.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| In many courses, the grades are curved, so cheaters might
| really make the grades of honest students worse.
|
| While I am against these surveillance software, making
| sure that tests are fair is very hard, especially since
| everything is online now thanks to COVID.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| I switched to online exams this year, no zoom, no special
| software, no checks at all. Grades were as usual. A
| couple of students cheated and were detected, all the
| others were very honest to the point that I wouldn't be
| myself if I were in their place. It can work, but you
| need to expect people to look up things.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| One of my colleagues had an online exam. The exam was
| uploaded to chegg within minutes, by multiple people.
| Unfortunately, the tests were personalized, so the people
| could be identified.
|
| I think cheating is quite common in the undergrad years,
| but gets less later.
| raegis wrote:
| How did you get access to Chegg? I thought of buying a
| subscription to check for cheaters, but there were
| complaints on the net about Chegg charging credit cards
| on canceled accounts.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| I didn't, my colleague did. Not sure how. He asked them
| to took down the tests, and they did. Withing a couple of
| days though. Answers to questions are up within minutes!
| mkl wrote:
| Not in my experience. I don't think there are enough
| cheaters to shift the curve (the noise from year to year
| is much more significant), and despite what you'd expect,
| the people hired to do others' assessments aren't
| necessarily very good at it!
| derivagral wrote:
| A top 10 MBA program my partner went through had several
| people cheating in the program. I'll give you some
| anecdotal notes. Some cheaters get discovered and "outed"
| (esp those the group didn't like) when they brag during
| parties, some never gave up enough evidence to make an
| accusation official, others would talk about hiring CPAs
| for accounting exams/projects. Many in the class were
| concerned on whether normal study groups counted as
| cheating, as defined by the honor code!
|
| A sibling program at the university exposed a cheating
| ring of ~15-20 people, and I think many were surprised
| that the result was to simply zero their grades for that
| class instead of more severe action.
|
| /e I mention incidents and sizes since these programs are
| not thousands of students but tens or hundreds.
| necovek wrote:
| What kind of an MBA program is it where students worry if
| normal study groups are ok?
|
| It sounds like the definition of cheating was very broad
| there.
| necovek wrote:
| That's what I meant with "normalized grades": I wasn't
| familiar with the term "curved grades", but I covered
| that point with why I don't think that's a problem.
| teachingassist wrote:
| > I.e. the problem is being solved for the honest
| students, the ones I want to spend my time on.
|
| As the original commenter notes, here the problem is
| being solved for "well-behaved" students, in a way which
| is easy enough for dishonest students to bypass and
| present themselves as well-behaved.
| necovek wrote:
| I get what you are getting at, but I'd rephrase it as
| "cheaters should remain a minority". When we phrase it
| like that, a number of other solutions might pop up to
| discourage cheaters from enrolling in the first place
| (eg. lots of custom projects through which students learn
| anyway, potentially invalidating the need for a final
| exam too).
|
| And suddenly, privacy invasion gets off the table quickly
| (as soon as you are not aiming for 100% non-cheaters, the
| cost becomes obviously too high for everybody else).
|
| As far as reputation, I'd rather see schools focus on the
| successful students, which is somewhat done with all
| those research-paper-grading systems (not a perfect
| system by any means because of gamification, but at least
| idea in the right direction), but mostly done with
| bragging about scientific break-throughts to come out of
| their students and staff.
|
| Still, what is the purpose of a reputation or "well-
| respected degree"? The goal should be knowledge and
| applicability of that knowledge to actual problems in
| life (known as "jobs"): it's not like anyone accepts any
| graduate without interviewing them first, which is to say
| that nobody trusts _any_ school to have done a proper job
| of evaluating them. Most of those schools don 't trust
| themselves, so they hold interviews for post-graduate
| studies too! :D
|
| Nobody looks at the "lemons" coming out of a school to
| consider it a bad school (I am sure you can find plenty
| from "top" universities too), but on the successful ones.
| Do the successful ones change with more cheaters at all?
| (Sure, there is a turning point, but catching all of them
| is meaningless)
| mkl wrote:
| Well, people aren't born cheaters or not, they choose to
| cheat as a result of circumstances [1]. Opportunity is
| one factor. Another is perceived unfairness about what
| they're asked to do. Our institution becomes better as
| our students do, when they don't feel the need to cheat.
| Avoiding opportunities to cheat and unfairness incentives
| is key to doing that. Invigilation software, the same
| test for online students as local students, and plenty of
| online tutor help are three approaches we're using for
| remote assessments. A small, brief reduction in privacy
| comparable to their online tutorials is proving perfectly
| acceptable to students. Unfortunately custom projects and
| the like won't work for teaching fundamental maths
| skills.
|
| [1] There's quite a bit of research on this. Bretag is a
| key author.
| necovek wrote:
| Thanks for the references! I am simplifying a bit to get
| my point across: I am well aware that nobody is a born
| cheater, and that the fear of getting caught stops many
| from cheating too.
|
| > Unfortunately custom projects and the like won't work
| for teaching fundamental maths skills.
|
| I am not sure I agree. One of the projects I did for my
| projective geometry class was to do an inverse of a
| projected drawing (in AutoCAD) and save a 3D .obj file.
| In differential equations course, I was given a project
| to prove a theorem that is generally missing from the
| school books (or usually given as an exercise). You can
| also let people devise proofs in a closed system of
| axioms and a few theorems.
|
| It is a hard and different type of work, but I am certain
| you can both teach and get to know students with
| theoretical math projects. If they get someone else to do
| it for them, yet they are able to present it in front of
| the class (online) convincingly, they have likely
| understood the concepts, which is what teaching is all
| about.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Realistically, if all existing diplomas were invalidated
| and the entire system of diploma-granting were to be
| stripped away from educational institutions, an
| equivalent would quickly be re-established by the free
| market - and it would probably resemble Proctorio.
|
| > So my question is: who are we trying to solve the
| problem for? What is the expected outcome, knowing that
| there will always be people who "cheat" their way through
| life too?
|
| For one thing, all the harm that incompetent
| professionals can cause - and in a moddern society, the
| scope of that is not inconsiderable - in fact, Proctorio
| is probably an example.
|
| Let's not lose focus on the real problem here, which is
| Proctorio being an aggressive vendor of garbage.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Is there a correlation between having a degree and
| competence? Because my experience is that there very much
| isn't.
|
| I would go so far as to say that the information age has
| made educational material so widely and easily available
| that the only value universities provide is signaling and
| wealth/class filtering.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Could engineers that cheated their way through college
| have developed microprocessors? Built bridges and
| skyscrapers? Achieved space travel?
|
| Perhaps there is value in knowing someone has been able
| to work in a team setting and complete given tasks.
| necovek wrote:
| They certainly could. For instance, many of the still
| surviving bridges in Europe were built way before
| university degrees in architecture. I'll consider them
| cheaters because they didn't even attend a University! ;)
|
| But there is another way to look at it: can _all_ non-
| cheating students build bridges, design microprocessors
| or design rockets? I can give you an affirmative _no_.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| > if all existing diplomas were invalidated and the
| entire system of diploma-granting were to be stripped
| away from educational institutions, an equivalent would
| quickly be re-established by the free market - and it
| would probably resemble Proctorio.
|
| coming soon to a tech interview near you.
| revicon wrote:
| Higher level education is largely voluntary, and it's up
| to the person taking it up to decide what they gain
| from it. If they are only in it for a diploma,
| they'd get there one way or another.
|
| Employers definitely use grades as a mechanism to
| determine who gets an internship or a full time position
| upon graduation, especially in the legal industry. The
| idea that cheaters aren't a big deal breaks down once
| grades have real world consequences.
| necovek wrote:
| I've never once been asked about my grades, nor asked to
| provide proof of my graduation in getting a software
| engineering job.
|
| Then again, I have a hard time envisioning what would
| someone cheat about in a legal exam, other than not
| memorizing the things, but that's to me just a signal
| that the content is badly presented (instead, put
| students in a pretend courtroom in a case that covers the
| study material, and they'll have to learn it, and learn
| to apply it).
|
| But even if we accept it as so, it is not an argument to
| be so vigilant in catching cheaters majoring in other
| subjects.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| While I despise software like this and how high-stakes
| and petty it can be, keep in mind that it's in the
| institution's interests to not only provide a quality
| education, but to defend the value of their brand.
|
| You might have worked very hard for a diploma from
| University X, but if it was found that University X was
| handing out diplomas like candy to other students that
| were not as academically rigorous, it weakens the value
| of your diploma.
| Angostura wrote:
| It's not even the value of their brand - it's the value
| of all students' diplomas
| hhjinks wrote:
| Universities don't give a shit about that. And they
| shouldn't. A lot of diplomas are worthless, but that
| doesn't make the education worthless.
| evrydayhustling wrote:
| Yes. This is a problem for universities to solve, with
| the money they get from constantly expanding tuitions.
| This is one of many places in which a problem is cheap to
| "solve" if you are ok being racist/ablist/generally not
| adapting the variations in your customer base.
|
| Handing over the solution for the problem to a software
| company shouldn't be an accountability shield for the
| Universities. Impacted students should sue the
| universities, and then they should sue the software
| company.
| christophilus wrote:
| Requiring distopian spyware doesn't weaken your brand. It
| destroys it. For most of history, reputable universities
| built their brand just fine without any software at all.
| michaelt wrote:
| For most of history, in-person exams were possible.
| granshaw wrote:
| Unless every other university also implements it, then
| it's just par for the course
| devenblake wrote:
| Totally agree. I personally chose not to go to college
| (I'm graduating HS this year) because of things like
| Proctorio and Zoom becoming more common.
| distances wrote:
| Honestly, it's fine to not choose higher education but
| IMHO use of surveillance methods should affect where you
| apply, not whether you apply.
| wheelinsupial wrote:
| It's possible that some institutions are dictating
| blanket use of software, but where I am studying that's
| not the case.
|
| It's basically up to the instructor on how to run the
| class.
|
| Some require proctorio, some are on Zoom with lots of TAs
| to watch the screen, some issue an exam on your own time
| where the browser monitors what you do / visit, and
| others just offer take home projects.
| dnautics wrote:
| No but it's very reasonable to wait a year before
| applying so that you don't pay out the nose for zoom
| classes (there are things like socialization and
| connections that make a super expensive college worth it)
| [deleted]
| necovek wrote:
| Ideally though, I've worked very hard to get certain
| knowledge. Diploma is a nice side-effect that's supposed
| to be a shorthand proof of it, but most companies in eg.
| software engineering would test candidates anyway, which
| is where knowledge helps, a degree, not so much.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| The role of universities is to provide education not to
| police students. People put in place reasonable means to
| detect cheating (proctorio isn't) and then it's students
| responsibility to learn. They're adults and should value
| what they get. If they don't, they're missing an
| opportunity.
| warlog wrote:
| It doesn't seem to suck for higher admin types...they treat
| the student like a customer and therefore never expel them
| for cheating. System is broken because of incentives (of
| course).
| vanviegen wrote:
| I don't like proctorio, but in situations where it is really
| necessary for students to demonstrate a certain level of
| knowledge (think: medicine), I just don't see a reasonable
| alternative to online proctoring, given the circumstances.
|
| Why would you say that this is evidence of a 'screwed'
| system?
| Cerium wrote:
| Not the parent, but I say that this is evidence of a poor
| system because authenticity of learning is obvious to a
| good professor. My best professors would always have a
| feeling of what ideas or strategies I would employ to solve
| their problems - if someone else did my project or wrote my
| paper it would be completely obvious.
|
| Any of these anti-cheating systems are trying to cut costs
| by enabling weaker teacher-student interactions.
| nradov wrote:
| Higher education is already quite expensive. It would be
| great to have highly qualified professors spend more time
| directly interacting with students, but who will pay for
| those extra professors?
| christophilus wrote:
| It's hard to see it in any other light. You could always
| have online exams happen in front of an online board-- take
| the human interaction we've always used and just move it
| online.
|
| Proctorio reflects the cost cutting, hyper systemization of
| education, which is a trend that-- every time I see it--
| seems to be antithetical to actual education.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| In a room, I can make sure that there is no other person
| there, that there is no big monitor with solutions,
| notes, whatever. I can also not see whether the students
| has another browser open with one of the cheat-websites
| where one of his faster colleagues has already uploaded
| the solution. I'm luckily in a field where we can do
| open-book exams without too much problems, which makes
| the "hidden notes" a non-issue, but one wants to be sure
| that it's actually the student who solves the problem.
| That is much easier in a class room.
| elliekelly wrote:
| If someone can use hidden notes or google to get the
| answers then the exam isn't testing for knowledge or
| subject-matter understanding.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| While it doesn't test for understanding, it absolutely
| tests for knowledge. Take the medical profession. There
| are many easily googlable facts a student has to know
| without google. For example a list of symptoms for a
| diagnosis (or better: possible diagnoses for a list of
| symptoms). It's not the only thing, but it's part of the
| education.
|
| Or in physics (my field), I do want a student to know
| U=RI. Not google it. Not look it up. I also want them to
| be able to transform it to U/R=I.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| In the past, we solved this problem by not having online
| proctoring, we had exams in front of a board. Maybe if the
| necessity of such demonstrations is paramount, doing them
| online is not the correct answer.
| koonsolo wrote:
| I guess this is a consequence of the Covid pandemic,
| where such a thing is not allowed at the moment.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| The software - problematic as it is - is older than the
| pandemic. Also, maybe if you cannot reliably proctor
| exams, the solution should not be to use a highly-
| invasive, potentially problem-causing software, but to
| cancel the exams and the academic year until the pandemic
| is over. After all, if you cannot give exams, students
| also were not able to take part in studies to the same
| extend as before (e.g. library and/or lab access would
| probably be limited)
| vanviegen wrote:
| The software is indeed older than Covid, but its common
| usage by widely respected schools is not.
|
| So your preferred solution would be to just stop all
| education for the duration of the pandemic? Although
| online education sucks, I'm not sure if most students
| would agree with you.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| In all fairness, as we agree that the education
| experience (and the education?) does not come up to the
| pre-covid standard, I can see employers discriminating
| against students who graduated under these circumstances.
| Students should have an incentive of that not happening,
| and thus welcome a gap year.
| leetcrew wrote:
| cheating was absolutely rampant when I was in college getting
| my CS degree. and that was with tests taken in person with
| the professor in the room! I'm sure students are even more
| brazen when all assignments are done at home.
|
| I think at the very least, all exams ought to be designed as
| "open book" with a time limit. that at least eliminates the
| issue of students using unauthorized resources. I'm not sure
| what can be done about students who collaborate on exams or
| go so far as to hire someone to take it for them. perhaps a
| few students could be randomly selected for each assessment
| to explain a few over their answers over zoom?
| ModernMech wrote:
| Since the pandemic began, I've been giving my CS students
| take home exams, and the results have been so great. They
| are open everything, including the internet, and the
| students have 4-5 days to work on the exam, which is a
| project. I just don't have the ability to police 150-200
| students as to whether they are cheating. So I assume they
| will cheat, and give them a cheating-resistant exam.
| Instead of asking knowledge-based questions they can look
| up, I've moved to analysis and synthesis type questions, as
| well as more substantial projects.
|
| Pre-pandemic I would give them a paper exam in which they
| had to read and identify bugs, or write code by hand. This
| was the tradition. Now they actually use their tools to the
| best of their ability, and I get to see what they are
| capable of.
|
| You might think this testing paradigm would result in
| everyone getting 100%, but that's just not what I've seen.
| The distribution of grades the last exam was normal with a
| mean of 80%, pretty much in line with what I get during a
| typical semester. As we transition back to a classroom
| environment, I don't expect to move back to paper-based CS
| exams. They are just wrong on so many levels.
| munificent wrote:
| _> The distribution of grades the last exam was normal
| with a mean of 80%, pretty much in line with what I get
| during a typical semester._
|
| The distribution is one thing, but grade correlation with
| other statistics might be more revealing. In particular,
| how do you know that wealthier students aren't hiring
| people to take the exam for them?
| ModernMech wrote:
| I think one thing I can't protect against is students
| completely faking their identities. Meaning if I expect
| Matt Smith, and Matt Smith has hired John Doe to interact
| with me all semester, I can't detect that, because I
| don't really know who Matt Smith is. But Matt Smith would
| have to know that John Doe will be available to
| impersonate him for the next 3 years because they will be
| taking several courses with me. If Matt Smith is rich
| enough to hire a double to essentially go through college
| for him, then good on Matt Smith for being independently
| wealthy I guess.
|
| The other thing I do is I don't make exams so weighty. If
| you ace the exam but you don't do well on the
| assignments, you're not getting an A in the course. So
| the hypothetical wealthy cheater will have to keep their
| body double on retainer for the semester.
|
| But I will say that the students who earn an "A" are ones
| I interact with fairly regularly. "A" students typically
| come to class, ask questions, engage with the
| assignments, start their assignments early, etc. And
| before anyone accuses me of playing favorites, I don't do
| any grading, and grading is anonymized. But I can easily
| predict the "A" students just by their work ethic. The
| idea of the brilliant student who doesn't come to class
| and effortlessly breezes through the exam is as far as I
| can tell after teaching thousands of students a myth. At
| least at my university. Maybe all of those kids go to
| MIT.
| LegitShady wrote:
| You sound like a good teacher. My experience at
| university was that the good teachers were a minority.
| Most would do their research and the minimum for
| teaching.
| ModernMech wrote:
| I'm teaching faculty, so I don't do research. Research
| faculty are right to prioritize their research -- they
| are incentivized to do so by administration. Their tenure
| is predicated almost 100% on their research output and
| the grant money they bring in. Teaching ability is an
| afterthought when it comes to tenure and promotion. It
| doesn't make them bad people or bad at their job, it's
| just that their job isn't really teaching according to
| basically every signal sent their way by the admin.
| LegitShady wrote:
| I understand the incentives, but teaching is part of
| their job even if they need to do research, and from the
| student perspective they are bad professors. If all I
| needed was to learn it from the book/youtube/internet and
| take tests, there would be no need for professors and
| they wouldn't exist.
|
| I've had professors that did more damage by 'teaching' (I
| use that term loosely) than if they had just said 'learn
| it from the book/online and show up for
| labs/tests/exams'. Mostly it was because they had no idea
| how teaching worked.
|
| It's a very faculty-centric view because from a student's
| perspective, the teaching is 99% of the school. Very few
| will go on to research. They come to school to learn and
| earn a degree. If the University cannot provide good
| teachers, they are not a good university. If a professor
| cannot teach, they are not a good professor. That isn't a
| moral judgement, its just the subjective judgement from
| the other side of the school-desk.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Kinda disagree, doing a bad job of teaching isn't OK
| regardless of whether it's incentivized by your job. You
| have moral responsibilities too, like putting in a good
| effort for people who are relying on you.
| oxylibrium wrote:
| I think conversations about cheating are missing the forest
| for the trees - or the learning for the degree.
|
| I maintain that cheating is almost always a pedagogical
| problem first, and a trust problem second.
|
| Cheating becomes a convenient solution to a problem when
| you're dealing with a course with inadequate teaching, a
| difficult learning curve, or a lack of motivation for
| students to do their work to the best of their ability
| themselves, or a nonsensical curriculum. Fixing cheating
| doesn't involve surveillance - it instead involves removing
| the incentive structure that exists for cheating in the
| first place. This may involve rethinking grading, or course
| material, or assignments; but is certainly not impossible.
|
| We act surprised when students "cheat" in CS exams that's
| expected to be done with only pen and paper - nearly any
| real workplace will give you an option of a text editor or
| IDE of your choice. So give them an IDE! Give them the API
| documentation! Don't create an incentive to test the waters
| to fix the broken rules of assignments.
|
| Another relevant area of work is ungrading, or self-graded
| courses in general - when you remove the friction that
| grades cause in the feedback loop of learning; learning
| becomes an organic process for everyone involved. There's a
| lot of interesting pedagogical research, and just "cheating
| is rampant" doesn't scratch the surface of "but why is it?"
|
| In addition, cheating is a game. Every second you spend
| drumming up cheating in front of your students is another
| second they think about trying to get away with cheating
| you. If you tell students they're not to be trusted, they
| will not give you any reasons to trust them; in many cases
| it's as simple as that.
|
| A combination of good pedagogical design, and building a
| relationship of mutual trust with your students, is
| certainly more fruitful than creating an academic police
| state (of which Proctorio is only one part of). There will
| always be people slipping through the cracks, but there are
| other safeguards in the world to catch them too.
|
| Another important thing is that conversations about
| cheating always assume a very specific framing of higher
| education - that they exist primarily as a gatekeeper or
| arbiter of who-knows-what; the university also has the
| purpose of providing an environment for learning. And in
| many cases, cheating is just a result of a failure to
| provide that environment.
|
| In addition, if the primary beneficiary of university
| degrees are the employers (or the people who care about the
| who-knows-what stamp), then why do students foot the bill
| for tuition? If you choose to accept this framing of
| universities primarily as arbiters, isn't access to a
| degree just a head tax to enter the skilled labor market?
| lostcolony wrote:
| With a CS degree a better solution is make it project
| based. Even if someone uses code found somewhere, just
| changing it up to not be obvious, that's not that different
| than actual industry, AND means they had to understand it
| at some level. And that's for stuff they -can- search for
| (such as 'implement a data structure/algorithm').
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| There's software to detect copy-pasted code or
| plagiarized (it analyses the syntax tree so renaming the
| variables and changing indentation won't fool it!).
|
| The best however, is a 1:1 code review with a TA or Prof.
| Randomly jumping to files, reading the code and asking
| questions about it. Extremely hard to copy a codebase and
| learn it well enough you can explain it but really easy
| to do if you wrote it yourself.
| oxylibrium wrote:
| There's always going to be software to defeat those
| tools! I've done my fair share of experimentation with
| source-to-source transformations; you can do things like
| substitute for/while loops, change conditions around,
| inline/outline various constants and variable
| declarations...
|
| The sky's the limit when you think about it really.
| leetcrew wrote:
| I have to wonder how well that analysis code works in
| practice. for a lot of intro-level (and some mid-level)
| course assignments, there's only one or two
| straightforward ways to write the code. sometimes these
| assignments are just pasting together sample code from
| the powerpoint with a couple tweaks. I was a TA for a few
| of these courses, and the correct solutions tended to be
| very similar. I was only sure students were cheating when
| they made several of the same mistakes.
|
| re the 1:1s with TA/professor, I agree. if you can
| explain code that you didn't even write, you might be
| even more deserving of that A.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| It's completely useless for intro courses. But in my
| experience, intro courses are completely bimodal for CS:
| some students just get it and some just don't.
|
| Sure the later can copy their assignments. But once
| they'll hit a non-trivial assignment or a code review in
| a more advance class they won't be able to fake it
| anymore. You are just delaying their transfer to another
| major. And that gives the CS department one extra course
| they can collect tuition from and justify hiring TAs
| for...
| lostcolony wrote:
| 100%. We had similar software when I was a TA, and I just
| ignored it and left it to the professor to deal with. I
| found a few cases of obvious plagiarism though, for the
| exact same reason you mention, too - the same mistakes.
| nradov wrote:
| Sure projects are generally better than exams. But
| cheating on projects and papers is also rampant. Students
| just pay someone else to do the work.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Which presumably is why a lot of mine also included demos
| followed by questions about the implementation.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Here's my solution to this:
|
| 1) Version control all assignments. I force them to make
| periodic commits throughout the week. If they want to
| copy a project wholesale, they have to do so in a way
| that takes a lot of time and effort.
|
| 2) Comparing bytecode. If they change the names of
| variables, comments, spacing, etc. these superficial
| differences will be lost in compilation.
|
| 3) Oral explanations. Now that everyone has guaranteed
| access to screen recording software, I force my students
| to record an explanation of their work. They go through
| their code line by line and explain it to me. I can tell
| very quickly when a student is explaining code they
| haven't written. If they are explaining code they haven't
| written to a satisfactory degree, then they've at least
| demonstrated they've learned something.
|
| 4) Remove incentives to cheat. Give them all the
| resources they need and more than enough time. Provide
| easily accessible venues like chatrooms and forums where
| they can ask questions anonymously. Provide opportunities
| to improve prior poor grades so they feel like failure is
| okay.
|
| This doesn't eliminate cheating 100%, but from my
| experience it does seem to cause cheaters to fail, as
| their cheating does not pass for acceptable work. The
| students who earn an A come to see me during office hours
| and I know they are doing the work. I would say very
| rarely does someone earn an A who is not on my radar as
| being an obvious high-performing student. If a student is
| cheating and earning an F or D, I can't say I care much
| about that.
|
| Notice none of these methods involve an invasive
| surveillance regime. I don't require cameras on at all
| time, 360 degree views of work areas to prove no one is
| helping, software to monitor tabs and processes... all
| this is completely futile. The students hate it and it
| incentivizes them to find ways to thwart it. They feel
| justified in doing so. I saw one post that advocated
| running a high speed fan to drown out typing noises,
| wearing reflective glasses in a dark room to foil eye
| tracking software, putting Vaseline on the camera... all
| to what end? To cheat on a psych exam? It's an arms race
| that's not worth fighting. The solution here is to adapt
| teaching methods with new technologies and testing
| methods.
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| These are awesome tips - thanks for sharing!
|
| Question: if (when) a student hands in an assignment
| without the periodic commits, what happens? How do you
| measure & set expectations for sufficient frequency of
| commits? (i.e., 1 single commit is too few, I assume that
| once a day is enough, but where's the threshold?)
|
| Thanks again for sharing - I'll be thinking about these
| for my own classes!
| ModernMech wrote:
| The first half of the class they are getting used to git
| and version control, so I don't enforce it too closely.
| Generally I decompose the assignments into a number of
| parts, and ask for at least one commit per part. e.g.
| Part 1, lay out your project directories. Part 2, stub
| out your functions. Part 3 implement function a, etc. My
| students are at a level where they need this granularity
| of direction. They get lost easily if assignments are too
| open-ended.
|
| In terms of getting them to follow the commit guidelines,
| I give them a carrot and a stick. The carrot is, if they
| start N number of questions half way to the due date,
| they can get a penalty-free extension if they need more
| time to complete the assignment. This is to incentivize
| students to start early. I've found one of the biggest
| indicators of successful students is that they start
| assignments early. Students who start their assignment on
| the due date usually run into blocking issues (software
| not configured properly, computer not working right,
| network is down) that would be trivially overcome if they
| had started a day or two earlier. Students who have this
| habit quickly correct within an assignment or two.
|
| The stick is by the midterm, I start requiring it more
| strictly by subtracting points for not following the
| guidelines. I think of it like a math assignment; if all
| you provide on a math exam is the solution, you'll get
| little to no credit for that. Showing your process is
| part of the work in math, and I treat it the same way in
| my classes.
| nradov wrote:
| It's great that you run your courses that way and I'm
| sure your students benefit from the experience. But is it
| really scalable for lower division courses at public
| universities with high student to instructor ratios?
| ModernMech wrote:
| I've used this technique over 3 semesters so far, with a
| total of 500 students. My team is myself, a TA, and 10-15
| undergraduate graders. I try to triage grading with
| automated tests and a bunch of tools to give me an
| overview of how students are doing their work (looking at
| the first and last commit, commit frequency, etc.). The
| most work is in assessing the oral assignments, but I
| actually like doing those the most - I get to hear from
| my students in their own voice, which is nice during this
| isolated pandemic.
|
| I think it could possibly scale to larger classes as long
| as the grading team scales with it. I'm not sure how
| public universities handle their grader allocations.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| #1 just encourages people to make BS commits throughout
| the week to pad the numbers.
|
| Not everyone does projects over time, not everyone
| commits all the time. I don't like committing in progress
| work and I usually do work in big chunks with large
| breaks in between, especially for solo projects where I
| don't have to share code regularly with others.
|
| Based on your criteria, I'd likely be considered a
| "possible cheater" just for having a different style.
| ModernMech wrote:
| The way I explain this requirements to my student is that
| the proof-of-work is just as important to me as the end
| result. It's like in math class: you don't just write the
| answer, you need to show your work. Your commit history
| is not distinct from the assignment, it is _part of_ the
| assignment.
|
| Regardless though, my students usually are at a point
| where they don't _have_ a commit style. They come to my
| class with no knowledge of git or version control -- I
| have to teach it to them.
|
| Secondly, labeling you a possible cheater doesn't condemn
| you to anything, it just puts you on a shortlist of
| assignments to examine more closely.
|
| Thirdly, this style of committing has helped more than a
| few students out when their computers die mid assignment
| and they need to move to another computer. It also allow
| me to help them with their assignments. When they come to
| me for questions, the first thing I ask is "have you
| pushed everything to your repo?" Instead of trying to
| debug over a virtual desktop connection, I can run their
| code locally and get to the cause much quicker in my own
| environment. It really works out well for everyone
| involved.
| 4ec0755f5522 wrote:
| This is for a class. How a student prefers to make their
| commits is not really important. If you are taking a
| class and the requirement for credit is doing commits of
| in-progress work you commit the in-progress work.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Not going to comment on the listed steps (that sounds
| like a pain to grade), but I will totally echo your
| comment about knowing how well someone is doing.
|
| Every semester, students fell into the same buckets. -
| Those I rarely saw who nailed everything (and were
| getting an A or a high B because they understood the
| material), - Those I saw constantly who were going to get
| an A or a B (because they sometimes didn't understand
| things from class, or when they did, wanted to make sure;
| or for a few, understood it all, but knew the importance
| of showing they cared about the material to the professor
| and TAs) - Those I saw constantly who were going to get a
| C or a B (they rarely understood from class, but were
| willing to put in the work to try to) - Those I never saw
| who were going to fail (they didn't show up to anything).
|
| It was pretty much invariably this latter group that got
| caught cheating. That's not to say the other groups
| didn't, but they at least got working code, did really
| well on the exams (pre-COVID, proctored in person), and
| in conversation were able to show they understood, so I'm
| a lot less concerned about them.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Projects also need to change dramatically year after year
| or else people will just get the project from the year
| prior.
| lostcolony wrote:
| They can change slightly (even if someone gets the
| project from a prior year and modifies it a bit, that
| still requires understanding), or they can be open ended
| enough to be obvious if someone directly cheats (i.e.,
| the 'create a game for the Game Boy Advance' project I
| had)
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| This is the answer.
|
| No one wants to hear this answer because it means actual
| work for the teaching staff (compared to, say, automated
| scoring of multiple-choice tests), but it is, in fact,
| the answer.
| professoretc wrote:
| > actual work for the teaching staff
|
| It's not just "actual work", writing high quality tests
| and projects and then grading them is multiple full-time
| jobs worth of work. It's equivalent to interviewing 100
| job candidates every week, forever.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Speaking as someone who TAed a couple years: I much
| preferred grading projects to tests.
|
| Projects they had to demo, and they had a published
| rubric. While it was possible sometimes to play to the
| rubric, it still meant there was very little work to
| figure out a grade.
|
| Tests, on the other hand, I had to dig in, understand
| what they were trying to do, figure out if it worked, and
| award partial credit. I guess the prof could have done
| multiple choice to make grading easy, but that has all
| kinds of problems with actually testing anything.
| munificent wrote:
| _> actual work for the teaching staff _
|
| Actual work for the already incredibly underpaid, over-
| worked teaching staff. As the money dries up in
| university funding, teachers are stretched thinner and
| thinner. That forces them to rely more on automated
| testing instead of having the time to actually know more
| about their students' performance. That in turn makes it
| easier for students to cheat.
|
| The economics (as usual) are perverting the system. The
| individual participants are merely suffering from the
| perserve incentives of the system.
| leetcrew wrote:
| more likely, have TAs write the variations while paying
| them the state minimum wage. arguably a feature if that
| means you need to hire TAs. a lot of students need work-
| study as part of their financial aid package.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Your answer indicates you don't really understand the
| intent nor desires of university profs. It's not to be
| the best version of the teachers you had in grade school.
| We can argue if this is THE best approach, but it is how
| the system is set up.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Indeed. I think people here are underestimating the volume
| of cheating in school.
|
| It isn't a minority. It is an overwhelming majority if they
| think they can get away with it.
|
| https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2017/02/cheating_in_college
| _...
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-academic-
| cheating-1....
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Caltech has a strong culture of academic honesty and
| take-home exams.
|
| Maybe some institutions are simply selecting their
| students wrong?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > I think people here are underestimating the volume of
| cheating in school.
|
| Not defending Protorio here, but I didn't really
| understand how rampant cheating was, either, until I
| became friends with someone who works at a University.
|
| Growing up, my friends and I would never dream of
| cheating and would fear the consequences of getting
| caught, so the entire concept feels foreign. We also grew
| up in the era of in-person classes, before cellular
| phones were common.
|
| Some of the cheating stories I hear from my friends in
| University are mind-blowing. Everything from (college)
| students thinking the proctor won't notice them using
| their cellular phone during tests, to people trying to
| hire test-takers who show up with fake IDs. They had to
| start giving proctors photos of each student because
| checking IDs wasn't enough any more.
|
| The situation is much more complicated than it sounds. As
| soon as one person gets away with cheating, it becomes a
| cheating arms race as even the good students feel the
| need to cheat to keep up. If an entire institution
| becomes notorious for rampant cheating, the value of
| every graduate's degree goes down.
|
| Obviously the Proctorio solution is terrible, which is
| why I expect we'll see Universities push to return to in-
| person classes sooner rather than later while keeping
| remote as a 2nd class option.
| kbenson wrote:
| We can't stress the importance of school and how it will
| affect the rest of their life, and then not expect them
| to do _whatever it takes_ to make sure they do well
| there. For some, it might be a matter of making sure they
| have an excellent record, for others, it might a case of
| keeping them in the system at all if they didn 't get
| there though merit, or feel like they can't keep up
| enough to stick around. I imagine the latter might by
| even more of an issue for large big name schools, of the
| type you often hear that one of the real reasons to go is
| the connections you make.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > We can't stress the importance of school and how it
| will affect the rest of their life, and then not expect
| them to do whatever it takes to make sure they do well
| there.
|
| That's basically what happened here: The school expected
| students to cheat and looked for solutions to address it.
|
| I think it's very important that universities have very
| significant consequences when students are caught
| cheating. Cheaters don't generally start by hiring people
| to write their papers and take tests for them. They test
| the waters with little cheats here and there, pushing the
| boundaries over time.
|
| If Universities made examples out of students who were
| 100% confirmed cheating beyond reasonable doubt, the
| amount of cheating would decline significantly. Instead,
| we're stuck with this game of half-baked anti-cheating
| systems which some students approach as game.
| jandrese wrote:
| > If Universities made examples out of students who were
| 100% confirmed cheating beyond reasonable doubt, the
| amount of cheating would decline significantly. Instead,
| we're stuck with this game of half-baked anti-cheating
| systems which some students approach as game.
|
| When I went to school they made a big deal out of the
| student ethics board, and if you were caught cheating you
| were brought before it. It was implied that you would be
| kicked out of school and your cheating conviction would
| be appended to any other school's request for your
| transcript.
|
| I don't know how prevalent cheating was at the school.
| kbenson wrote:
| > If Universities made examples out of students who were
| 100% confirmed cheating beyond reasonable doubt, the
| amount of cheating would decline significantly.
|
| I don't think that actually follows. As I understand it,
| many universities and zero tolerance plagiarism and
| cheating policies. The problem is, when you have no
| middle ground and your policy is extreme, you leave
| yourself very few options in the cases where you don't
| want to or can't easily expel the student. If your policy
| is expulsion for cheating, then not doing so and
| providing a lesser punishment is seen as favoritism if
| the student has resources, or is used as ammunition for
| their own case by students with resources if offered to a
| deserving student otherwise.
|
| I think the actual solution is well defined, less
| flexible, but not overly harsh punishments. Any student
| caught cheating or plagiarizing is not expelled, but
| immediately either fails the class or drops two letter
| grades (and a second time in the same class would be
| failing the class no matter what if the more lenient
| option was chosen initially).
|
| With extreme consequences teachers are going to be
| hesitant to report small and borderline cases, because
| the consequences are so large. Make the consequences
| manageable for the single occurrences but problematic if
| they keep happening, and you'll correctly catch those
| serial cheaters _and_ those occasional ones that are
| better off just taking the hit (and maybe dropping and
| retrying the class) instead of letting them slide because
| the punishment is disproportionate to the crime.
|
| Think of it this way, if the crime for stealing a candy
| bar was life in prison, would you call attention to the
| person next to you that you just saw steal a candy bar?
| Does the store attendant actually call the police, or
| just take the candy bar back and tell the person to
| leave? What if the person is rich, and it actually causes
| you problems to turn them in, because it's worth it to
| them to make sure they don't suffer that major negative
| consequence be exerting their influence? If the
| punishment is seen as disproportionate to the crime,
| people will make their own decisions to avoid what they
| see as a problem with the system, and it also means that
| people with resources are more likely to exert those
| resources to avoid those problems, to the detriment of
| those around them (and they'll mostly get away with it,
| because who wants to die on the hill of making sure
| someone is punished for something so inconsequential?).
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Consequences?
|
| A friend of mine copied an assignment to the point that
| he even included the other person's name in the code.
|
| He got 100% and a note telling him not to copy again.
| quercusa wrote:
| It was eye-opening for me to see how much culture affects
| the perception and even the understanding of the concept
| of cheating. People from some non-Western cultures,
| honestly AFAICT, cannot understand why they should not
| 'help out' a cousin or older student or a military
| superior.
| silexia wrote:
| Maybe we should stop endlessly pushing and insisting on
| degrees...
|
| Maybe skills tests in an interview process is not such a
| bad thing.
|
| As an employer, I don't care what piece of paper you have
| from what school. I only care about how well you can do
| the job I need to be done.
| smolder wrote:
| I don't think you want a doctor without a degree, and
| there are many similarly difficult professions with a lot
| of impact.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| Yes and no. Doctors go to (effectively) trade school
| after undergrad, and it's actually that degree you care
| about. Does anyone care where they went to undergrad?
| rjsw wrote:
| Maybe in the US. Medical education in the UK starts at
| the undergraduate level, there is no pre-med.
| [deleted]
| batch12 wrote:
| I agree, but got mine later in life because not everyone
| does and I didn't want not being in the club to block
| some opportunities.
| msla wrote:
| > Maybe skills tests in an interview process is not such
| a bad thing.
|
| I'm fine with this in theory, but lots and lots of places
| bungle it so badly that they're no longer testing
| programming skills, they're testing rote regurgitation of
| memorized code under pressure. If your job legitimately
| requires that, for everyone's sake get out of the
| industry.
| neura wrote:
| Is the implication here that seeing that they have a
| degree is better than what "lots and lots of places" do?
|
| Personally, I think a degree doesn't say much about a
| person's ability to do what is required in the job.
|
| Maybe we should just get better at giving skill tests in
| interviews.
| msla wrote:
| > Is the implication here that seeing that they have a
| degree is better than what "lots and lots of places" do?
|
| Testing whether they can remember a specific leetcode
| question is worse than checking for a degree.
|
| Is that controversial?
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Exactly this. I've given many chances to people that
| didn't have the paper and almost of all of them have
| risen to prove not only are they just as smart and
| capable, but that working in technology was a
| passion/hobby. I don't care about paper at all, it
| doesn't hurt and I value education, but it's never been a
| deciding factor when it comes to hiring.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> As an employer, I don't care what piece of paper you
| have from what school. I only care about how well you can
| do the job I need to be done.
|
| To be blunt, duh. I agree degrees are very imperfect &
| crude indicators of what you're try to measure, but what
| is your alternative? I'm getting DoS levels of
| applications blasted at me, how do I filter to an
| effective level that removes the same cheating mechanics
| mentioned here?
| rincebrain wrote:
| While I was at university for computer science, I often
| found many "senior" students (both graduate and
| undergraduate) who were truly astonishingly unversed in
| the most basic things (I think my "favorite" was the time
| I did a group project involving a student who had had an
| internship working in the kernel at Sun the prior summer
| and he turned in his portion of the project (in C) with
| code like "[...] char* foo = ""; foo += "bar"; [...]")...
|
| ...and yet I never thought to wonder how they managed to
| keep passing exams.
| mindslight wrote:
| At the university level, there is really no excuse for
| closed book tests. Quality tests focus on how well students
| _understand_ the material, and have questions that are
| complex enough that attempting to learn the material while
| taking the test is infeasible.
| jandrese wrote:
| This seems so insane to me. This isn't high school, you're
| going to be expected to actually use the stuff you are
| learning in just a couple of years when you're in the real
| world. Nobody is going to code for you after you've
| graduated and gotten the job. For that matter, how are you
| going to pass an interview if you don't know the material?
|
| Or are they cheating at the "take these courses to become a
| more rounded person" stuff, like the insect biology courses
| for the CS students?
|
| Still, you're paying a fuckton of money to supposedly learn
| stuff in college. Cheating your way through is a huge
| waste.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| Is this the responsibility of teaching staff? They're not
| the police. in the end it's students responsibility to
| study, exams are just a way to make them understand that
| should. If they cheat they lose an opportunity to learn.
| They'll pay the consequences later, at work.
| ticviking wrote:
| Their employer will pay the consequence later.
|
| The university will pay repetitional consequences for
| claiming that the student learned particular things which
| they clearly didn't.
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| >looking around in the room or blinking too much
|
| >And I tend to close my eyes a lot because it helps me
| visualize the problem
|
| Nvidia has added eye-correction feature to it's Maxine
| platform(SDK with set of ML features for video conferencing) it
| can correct our eyes in real-time to show that we're looking at
| the camera even when we didn't. When I first saw it's demo the
| first thing which came to my mind was these proctoring
| tools[1]. It's a matter of time before all major video
| conferencing tools add these features or 3rd party
| plugins/hacks which enable it.
|
| I'm not against these proctoring tools, Especially since there
| are not many options during lockdowns but considering what's at
| stake they deserve all the scrutiny they can get and if a
| company threatens with lawsuits for genuine criticisms it tells
| a lot about their business practice; Sadly this seems to be
| very common in the e-education sector(Checkout unicorns
| claiming to have placed 10 year old in Google after taking
| their 'coding' class and the retribution faced by activists for
| showcasing the lies).
|
| [1]https://twitter.com/heavyinfo/status/1381831802315177989
| reaperducer wrote:
| _It 's a matter of time before all major video conferencing
| tools add these features or 3rd party plugins/hacks which
| enable it._
|
| Apple demonstrated this in Facetime about a year ago, but I
| don't know what happened to it. I don't use Facetime, so I
| can't confirm it was ever implemented. But clearly it's on
| big tech's radar.
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| I see, thanks for sharing. I don't do any video calls
| either (or any real-time comm) I suspected that this
| feature might be already in some video conferencing
| software considering there seems to be a need gap for eye-
| correction features.
| liminalsunset wrote:
| For what it's worth, at the school this happened at, UBC,
| Proctorio is now effectively banned, along with other similar
| "algorithmic" proctoring tools, and exams are no longer allowed
| to use it with some exceptions.
|
| They've moved to Lockdown Browser without the recording, and to
| Zoom proctoring. In my opinion, neither are particularly
| effective measures against cheating, and I'm sure they are
| trivially bypassable.
|
| The effect of these tools being phased out is that exams now
| must be harder or less student friendly. Typical practice in
| some of my courses has been to not allow students to go back to
| answered questions, while giving large amounts of questions
| with insufficient time. The exams are scaled, but I can imagine
| people doing worse in this kind of stress.
| maweki wrote:
| I think zoom proctoring in combination with some increases in
| communication overhead are quite practical. We recently did
| this.
|
| Giving students different exams (selections of slightly and
| subtly different tasks from a task pool), not showing task
| names, and mixing up the order of tasks for each student
| seems to work quite nicely.
|
| The increased overhead to communicate which exact answer they
| need, finding out which other student has the exact same
| task, etc., has worked really well for us. Of course, you
| have to have it in a way where they do not have much time
| left over to shoulder this overhead.
|
| Edit: So students are going from "What's the answer for 5" to
| sharing the topic of the task, the task description (there
| may be a negation hidden in there), and the constants and
| other students needing to compare. Maybe they aren't even at
| this task-type in their exam yet, as the order is mixed.
|
| Edit2: We weren't really watching the video stream. It was
| just to discourage students actually sitting side-by-side,
| which would decrease the communication overhead drastically.
| soperj wrote:
| This is silly. Make the exams open book and then the only
| thing you really need to worry about is the correct student
| taking the exam. If you're testing based on memorization of
| things in this day in age, then the course is useless.
| smiths1999 wrote:
| I teach at the university level and this is what I have
| done with my exams. Everything is open book and in my
| experience there is no difference in the average exam score
| between open book online and closed (or open) book in
| person. It is also way easier for me to not have to worry
| about who is cheating and where everyone is looking (I also
| don't like the idea of forcing students to turn on their
| webcams).
| checkyoursudo wrote:
| I finished up the coursework for my masters degree at the
| start of the pandemic. My university was quite flexible
| for how instructors would examine us, given how sudden
| everything had to change.
|
| One of my courses, which only had about 8 students and
| two instructors, decided to do an oral examination, which
| ended up being basically a very in-depth, one on one
| conversation about the course material and based on the
| expectations set in the syllabus (so, no surprises).
|
| While obviously not practical for large rosters, this was
| by far the best exam format that I have ever done in my
| many, many years of schooling. I'm sure not everyone
| would prefer it, but the students unanimously agreed to
| try it (wouldn't have done it that way otherwise), and it
| was just so great. It was not at all like an oral thesis
| defense, which was what I was a little worried about.
| ska wrote:
| > decided to do an oral examination,
|
| This really is the best case, but as you note it was 8
| students so quite manageable.
|
| It requires a little skill on the part of the examiner,
| but you can quickly find out how much material the
| student knows with much higher accuracy than other exam
| formats, in my opinion.
|
| One of the skills needed is to be able to make it
| conversational-feeling and reduce the anxiety of
| students. You can often tell when a student mostly knows
| what is going on but has misstated or misremembered
| something, and guide them around the place they got
| stuck.
| lutorm wrote:
| Orals have a lot of advantages, but they also make it
| very easy for unconscious bias to come into play, in that
| all the criteria for grading are soft.
| ska wrote:
| Good point, this is also one of the aspects of skill.
| There are techniques you can use effectively to mitigate
| this.
|
| One unfortunate thing is that poorly done, orals can be
| very uneven.
| da_chicken wrote:
| There already is unconscious bias. You can see the
| student's name, their penmanship, their writing style,
| you likely know who they are, etc. An oral exam just
| changes things by changing the bias to accent,
| inflection, annunciation, skin tone, dress, etc.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| When I was an engineering student at the university of
| Naples, all my courses were examined both with a written
| exam and an oral one. No exception, no matter how many
| students. It was hard for us and the teachers but, boy,
| you had to really study that stuff! Since then I've
| become an academic myself and have been teaching in
| several countries. I have never found the same level of
| rigor in any place I've been.
| robaato wrote:
| I remember friends in the '80s studying law in Turin
| always having orals - as you say "they had to know their
| stuff"!
| dmitrygr wrote:
| This is how exams are in Russian universities. You walk
| in. The table has a number of small paper cards on it
| face down with topics the course covered. You pick one at
| random, flip it over, and that is the question you need
| to answer. Since you do not know up front which you'll
| pick, you need to know all the material. Since you only
| need to answer one question, professor time is saved and
| exam throughput can be quite high.
|
| Professors are also given quite a lot of flexibility in
| their grading. My mother had a fun story about a
| professor she had in college - a professor of a really
| hard math class who wanted to save on exam time. He
| announced "exam will be hard. Anyone willing to settle
| for a D, bring your report cards forward, I will mark
| them D and you can leave. No exam.". Some people came
| forward, got their Ds marked, and left. Once the door
| closed, he said "Anyone willing to accept a C, please
| come forward". Some did. After the door closed there, he
| announced to the remaining smiling students expecting
| easy As/Bs: "I'll see you all for the exam tomorrow 8
| am".
|
| No way this could happen in USA.
| buran77 wrote:
| > My mother had a fun story about a professor
|
| I've heard that story many decades ago in the form of a
| joke. It may have started from a professor who genuinely
| didn't care about failing students but did care about
| identifying the best.
| pjmorris wrote:
| > and it was just so great.
|
| I'm delighted to hear that it went so well, and I am a
| believer in the idea. I have seen, from time to time,
| oral thesis defenses become rather tense and difficult,
| and think that things go better in proportion to the
| preparation of both student and examiner. Any general
| observations about what worked, for those contemplating
| giving exams in this fashion?
| soperj wrote:
| Thank you! I'm sure it takes more work to make an open
| book exam, but it's definitely to the benefit of your
| students.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| If you can't see them, doesn't that open up the
| possibility of students taking the exam together?
| professoretc wrote:
| I give regular online exams without any protoring
| software, pure honor system. I have three students who
| live together who consistently turn in identical work.
| What I don't understand is why the keep doing it, when I
| keep giving them 0s for copying.
| LegitShady wrote:
| Uncontrollable stupidity apparently. Where I went to
| school you would have been called to the Dean on the
| first event and perhaps out on academic probation if they
| didn't like your answers. Second time would have been
| academic suspension
|
| Crazy stuff.
| unanswered wrote:
| Presumably they have some kind of recourse as to their
| grades.
| milkytron wrote:
| How did you find out they live together?
| SirSourdough wrote:
| Not every university / university class is big. Most
| likely explanation is that they simply said they live
| together.
| milkytron wrote:
| Ah, that'd make sense. I would just think that they
| wouldn't mention it if they planned on cheating lol.
| [deleted]
| kiba wrote:
| Understanding always aid memories and memories are
| important to mastering anything.
|
| Brute force memorization, however, are subject to decays
| and constant forgetting. It is astonishingly difficult to
| memorize a bunch of meaningless numbers unless you taken
| the time to do a mnemonic for it.
| earth_walker wrote:
| This. Our engineering exams were all open book and tested
| understanding rather than rote memorization. If you didn't
| understand the material well there was no amount of
| googling that could help you.
| anticristi wrote:
| Our university physics teacher allowed us to bring one-page
| self-made cheat sheet. By the time you compressed the
| essence of a whole course into a one-pager, you were pretty
| much done learning. :))
| vincent-manis wrote:
| I always permitted/encouraged this when I taught (I'm
| retired now). Every once in a while, we'd find some
| enterprising student selling pre-made cheat sheets, which
| were of course of little value to the purchaser.
| shadowfox wrote:
| I can imagine that! In my university, we insisted on
| having the sheets be handwritten, which (at least) acted
| as a dampner.
| quasse wrote:
| This was common in my engineering school too. I enjoyed
| creating the cheat-sheets more than any other form of
| studying, because what better way of learning three
| chapters of thermodynamics than having to distill them
| into 10 lines of text on a notecard.
| cmckn wrote:
| I still have a couple of the cheat sheets my study group
| compiled -- they're so fun to look back on. One for
| Computer Organization is almost unintelligible to me now;
| we were so proud of the density of that sucker.
| mousepilot wrote:
| did your instructor also allow a desktop microscope?
| samkater wrote:
| I would add some nuance to this view. For nearly every
| undergraduate course I agree - the ability of knowing where
| to look for resources in a particular subject matter,
| synthesizing the available information to solve a
| reasonably novel problem, and presenting the information in
| a coherent way is a skill/art that should be one of the
| primary goals of the education.
|
| For advanced degrees, though, I'm not so sure. I expect
| someone which a masters or Ph.D. to actually be an expert
| in the subject matter, not just someone who is really good
| at figuring out how to solve problems. A big part of that
| is being able to internalize the information so well they
| you in effect become a resource that could be used by an
| undergraduate student. This internalization goes beyond
| rote memorization, but memorization is a big part of it
| too.
|
| Just a disclaimer, though - I do not have an advanced
| degree, so maybe I expect too much from those who do? A big
| reason why I have no interest in pursuing one is that many
| people with a masters degree I find have little expertise
| to show for it, they could have just as easily learned the
| same information by self-study or being fortunate enough to
| find interesting work. (the hiring landscape is a separate
| topic)
| 101008 wrote:
| My experience with people who are PhD is that they know
| things you expect to memorize just because they use it a
| lot. They learn formulas or whatever not because they
| spend 5 hours memorizing it, but because they needed it
| once, so they looked it up. The second time they needed
| it, they weren't 100% sure, so they looked it up again
| just in case. Every time they search for it, they need it
| less and less and at the end they know it by memory.
| That's how you learn most of the stuff these days and
| that should be for everything. Natural learning. Why
| memorizing things you dont need to know?If you use it
| often enough, you'll end up memorizing it. Same for
| concepts or any type of knowledge.
| twic wrote:
| I can tell you the peak excitation wavelengths of a dozen
| fluorophores. Not because i wrote them on flashcards and
| memorised them, but because i spent four years in a
| darkened room sliding filter cubes around to take
| pictures of slides stained with them!
| politician wrote:
| There's a term for this and several software packages to
| help exploit the effect.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition
| Miraste wrote:
| It depends on the degree. If you're becoming a medical
| doctor you'll have to do a ton of memorization, but in
| other fields doctorates are the least memorization-
| intensive part of your education, because the focus is on
| generation and synthesis, on the assumption that you've
| already learned the rote knowledge. You don't need to
| memorize anything to write a dissertation but that
| doesn't make it easy (and you'll end up memorizing
| everything anyway).
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| > medical doctor you'll have to do a ton of memorisation
|
| Which is a load of dingos kidneys.
|
| Gate keeping.
|
| All the good doctors I've ever been to have a wall of
| reference material _and use it_ , even if only to show
| the patient, but it's there and accessible.
|
| And besides, it's not like practising medical doctors
| don't make _heaps of mistakes_.
|
| The number one cause of complications in a medical
| setting is _medical intervention_ , so it could be argued
| doctors _should be using more reference material_ and not
| relying on their over worked brains.
| why_Mr_Anderson wrote:
| But parent post is arguing that to _become_ a doctor you
| need to memorize ungodly amount of things, which is
| absolutely true. And about that wall of reference
| material .. yeah, it 's usually there to impress
| patients, most of those books were never touched :) (I'm
| from family with too many MDs)
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| It might be true, but I'm arguing it isn't necessarily
| the best.
|
| We need more doctors, if that means changing the culture
| within the profession so they're more inclined to use
| those reference material that would be _good thing_.
| reedjosh wrote:
| Often the tests at this level are difficult enough that
| the need for memorization is implicit.
|
| Open book is also fine in this case because without a
| base of memorized understanding an open book isn't that
| helpful anyway.
| rocqua wrote:
| When I have discussed this, most people I know argued the
| opposite (for Mathematics). The undergrad courses are
| supposed to lay the foundation. Stuff you need so often,
| and stuff you need to recognize when useful, you should
| know it by heart.
|
| At graduate level, there is too much stuff. You know the
| outline, you know where to find stuff. But you don't need
| to know everything exactly. If you forgot one passage
| from a definition, that should not cause a failure.
| Because in 'real Mathematics' you get to look at
| references.
|
| A nice trick for open book is to make it time-infeasible
| to just look up everything. But allow students access to
| the materials incase they have a brainfart.
| ladams wrote:
| I'm a physics grad student, and this is completely wrong.
| The purpose of graduate classes (at least in physics) is
| to teach you how to navigate a the standard reference
| texts. For example, the main thing I learned in my grad
| E&M class was where to find information in Jackson (aka
| "Classical Electrodynamics"). Classical mechanics was a
| mix of Goldsmith and Landau and Lifshitz. Quantum
| mechanics used Sakauri. And statistical mechanics used
| Pathria. Also, referring to these classic texts by author
| is very common, much moreso than by title.
| [deleted]
| flashgordon wrote:
| Just as a counter example. I have 2 "advanced" degrees -
| in engineering and in management (btw I did _NOT_ do them
| because I was smart - but rather because I was curious
| and had a lot of time on my hand. I definitely struggled
| in both of them - though really really enjoyed them
| both). I am not what you call a model test-taker. I got
| barely passing marks in all my exams and yet my
| "assignments" I was consistently a high scorer in (sadly
| assignments at the time only accounted for atmost 20% of
| your grade with 80% being what you can cram-and-dump in
| an exam).
|
| I still cannot "remember" how to perform a discrete-
| wavelet-transform from memory (my honor's thesis) but i
| found myself digging into it a couple of months ago (just
| fiddling on pet projects). An hour on googling got me on
| the track. Point is there is _so_ much even those with
| advanced degrees have to know and having to retain it all
| in memory all the time is both infeasible and wasteful.
| Yet expecting kids /young adults to do this is truly
| hypocritical and disingenuous.
| barefeg wrote:
| 1. PhDs don't "do exams". You can't cheat your way to
| publishing original research (exceptions of course) and
| have external expert researchers review it and accepted
| on a reputable journal. Given that that's a requisite for
| obtaining your degree, there's no point on a final exam.
| Most defenses nowadays are partly ceremonial (exceptions
| of course). Both the material and your ability to do
| research has been checked months before by your advisors
| and graduation committee.
|
| 2. Master's degree courses follow all kinds of schemas
| for examination. From oral exams, to in person no extra
| material allowed, to open book, and take home. Being on
| both sides (taking the exams and creating them) I can say
| that it really doesn't matter if you allow people to take
| the exam home and collaborate among each other. These
| types of exams are designed to really test a deep
| understanding and ability of the material. There have
| been exam questions where an entire class of >20 students
| are not able to solve it. People that are really good are
| able to have a shot at it and maybe make some progress,
| and that differentiates the good from the exceptional.
|
| 3. Nowadays undergraduate degrees are a commodity so it
| feels they need to make sure only the good students get
| one. But in the end it doesn't really matter, since most
| employers (exceptions of course) will want to see how
| much value the candidate add, which does not correlate
| with having a degree or good grades
| lutorm wrote:
| _You can't cheat your way to publishing original
| research_
|
| Of course you can, making up results is a time-honored
| tradition!
|
| It does take a certain amount of skill to do it
| believably, though.... ;-)
| ska wrote:
| This is why PhD's typically have comprehensive exams. It
| varies (a lot!) by university and even department, but
| panel led oral exams are pretty common. At some places
| they are even open to the public (no pressure). These are
| distinct from a thesis defence, which happens at the end
| of your degree; they are likely to happen about a year in
| and are meant to ensure you have a solid background.
|
| Overall I think an oral exam run by a skilled examiner is
| the best of all worlds, but it isn't practical for a
| section of 500 undergraduate students. It's quite doable
| for a seminar or manageable up to say 10-15 students,
| becomes difficult after that.
| g_p wrote:
| As you say, different departments and institutions have
| different approaches, but I'd definitely emphasise that
| outside of Europe (where I've seen more ceremonial
| "exams"), there are still robust and vigorous "final"
| oral viva exams used.
|
| In some European universities, the outcome is such a
| foregone conclusion that the candidate's family is laying
| out the buffet, peeling the cling film off the plates,
| and unboxing the champagne bottles as the "defense"
| begins.
|
| In the UK however, I've never seen this. It's generally a
| small room with candidate, an internal examiner, an
| external examiner from another university who is an
| expert in the field, and a convenor to record the minutes
| of the examination. The outcome is by far from a foregone
| conclusion.
|
| A good student who is an expert in their field, is well-
| read and up to date on their work and the surrounding
| literature will perform well and have little to fear.
| Someone who hasn't written their own thesis, or didn't
| really have an understanding of the area, and thus isn't
| really an expert, will have a very unpleasant time, and
| will likely be failed, or be sent away with major
| corrections to be completed to the satisfaction of the
| examiners, possibly including a full oral re-examination.
| gspr wrote:
| > This is why PhD's typically have comprehensive exams.
|
| America is leaking again.
| MereInterest wrote:
| The US frequently merges the masters and PhD programs
| into a single 4-7 year program, rather than a 2-year
| masters followed by 2-5 year PhD program. The
| comprehensive exams for PhDs are typically at the end of
| the first two years, and cover material similar to that
| of a masters.
|
| The two are pretty much equivalent, but with different
| names.
| ska wrote:
| > America is leaking again.
|
| Ok, from a terminology point of view that's fair - it
| isn't the same everywhere by any means.
|
| However, most if not all of the graduate programs I know
| if internationally have something roughly equivalent,
| whether they are comps or prelims or qualifying or
| whatever.
|
| The basic idea is that a department (and university,
| generally) has an interest in maintaining the quality of
| their programs, and one way to do that is to make sure
| that your students never leave with glaring holes in
| their background. The best way to do this is some sort of
| comprehensive evaluation, and the time to do it is at or
| near the beginning of a program - otherwise there is no
| time to address deficiencies.
| twic wrote:
| No UK PhD programme has exams like this, that i have
| heard of.
| ska wrote:
| Oh, good point, the UK programs I know of are notably
| ligher in this regard (and PhD shorter) though they do
| generally require a 1st class honors (honours, i guess!)
| degree in subject, which includes "tripos" which is
| roughly equivalent. So in some ways a higher bar for
| undergrad matched with a lower bar for grad.
|
| At least that's the theory - I don't know if in practice
| it holds up; most of the grad students and later I knew
| from that system came from oxbridge which has a number of
| quirks.
| g_p wrote:
| The difference I tend to see is that the outcome of the
| UK viva (oral) examination is far less of a foregone
| conclusion, and can still be quite traditional in that
| students are expected to be able to have a broad and
| well-informed discussion about their wider field and the
| context of their work. The thinking is that they will (if
| meritous of a PhD) have a certain level of expertise, and
| thus be able to have a discussion with their external
| examiner (a distinguished and recognised expert) as a
| peer.
|
| My experience of it was that if you are genuinely
| knowledgeable and approaching being an expert in your
| field, it is an enjoyable experience, and just like
| having a (longer than usual, but not uncomfortably long)
| conversation with someone about a topic that you both
| share a deep interest in. There is nothing to worry
| about, as you can have a nice discussion about an
| interesting topic, and share interesting ideas etc.
|
| I'm not sure if it's a lower bar for grad as such - I
| think it's got fewer "formal" requirements, and far more
| informal requirements. The most common way to "fail" is
| to simply not submit the thesis.
| g_p wrote:
| Some UK programmes differ in that there isn't the same
| formal concept of "candidacy" like you see in other
| places. The end-of-first-year review is often a written
| report, sometimes with a "mini-viva".
|
| The common factor among all UK PhDs I know of is that
| there is a rigorous viva at the end, where the outcome
| for the sudent is not a foregone conclusion. Despite the
| shorter overall duration of the PhD (~3 to 4 years
| typically), the oral examination can (rightly) cover
| material far beyond the scope of your thesis - if you are
| an expert in your field, you will be able to have a
| knowledgeable and informed discussion as a peer with your
| external examiner, who will be a recognised expert in the
| field. I'm definitely a big believer in the importance of
| being able to have a well-informed discussion around the
| area of your work, and actually found the whole viva
| process very enjoyable and cordial - a nice chat about
| the wider field, my and the examiners' own previous work,
| some debate of the merits of different approaches, and
| then onto a run-through of the thesis, chapter-by-
| chapter, skipping any pages where there were no points
| for discussion or contention.
|
| Unlike European vivas though, there's no family or
| friends, no champagne corks being popped mid-defense, and
| no foregone conclusion of the outcome. I've been at
| European vivas with the family of the candidate preparing
| the celebratory buffet at the back of the auditorium
| while the questioning continues!
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| Well, that's the problem. Someone can read out the question
| and receive results from someone else or be actively
| sharing their screen. It doesn't really matter what kind of
| test you have.
| soperj wrote:
| Honestly, any tests I took that were open book were long
| enough that if you were constantly looking things up
| you'd never finish. Same would occur if you were talking
| to someone and they were having to relay the info.
| Green_man wrote:
| Part of the benefit of open book tests is that it brings
| up the "floor" of resource access, limiting the potential
| differential between honest and cheating students.
| Obviously, this could be negatively compensated for with
| other factors, like having more questions or stingy
| grading.
| touisteur wrote:
| I think part of the idea is to discourage sharing of
| answers... But then you should build open book
| personnalized exams. But then the student might hire
| someone to answer for them. But then why bother everyone
| because of those cheating people...
| davidweir wrote:
| Exactly - assessment methods that are difficult for the
| sake of being difficult benefit nobody. They're only
| marginally more meaningful than FAANG interview questions.
|
| Employers, students and society as a whole have all moved
| on; they want assessment to demonstrate that students can
| do what the course has taught them (known in the jargon as
| "alignment"), not memorise a bunch of facts that they can
| regurgitate on demand.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| I never understood the concept of _cheating_.
|
| If you don't know the answer to a question and you look it
| up, that's not cheating, it's _research_ , or at least
| referring to reference material, which is always permitted
| in real life. Except for some contrived or rare
| circumstances someone will now point out. Even the Apollo
| 11 crew had support.
|
| Any professional in any industry is allowed to say: "I
| don't know" and "I'll get back to you" and "let me look
| that up".
| tzs wrote:
| That only works if the answer _can_ be looked up.
|
| Real life isn't always kind enough to only give problems
| that someone has already solved and published somewhere
| you can find.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| That's only a helpful responds if you believe exams are
| testing for your ability to synthesis novelty, which
| seems absurd to me.
| Xamayon wrote:
| The class should effectively teach you how to make that
| distinction in a given field/topic. If you didn't pay
| attention at all, you won't know what to look for or how
| to figure something out quickly enough to pass. Cheating
| would be most damaging if the actual answers were shared
| or similar attacks on the integrity of the test itself.
|
| Knowing how to find or determine the current correct
| answers yourself is often more useful in the long run
| than memorizing what amounts to trivia. This is
| especially true when it comes to open ended and quickly
| changing fields...
| alasdair_ wrote:
| >Make the exams open book and then the only thing you
| really need to worry about is the correct student taking
| the exam
|
| This doesn't solve the problem of a student having an
| expert sitting off camera, feeding the student the answers.
| officeplant wrote:
| By far this is my favorite part of working in the fire &
| safety industry. Open book exams for certifications just
| show that you know how to apply the knowledge within the
| code books. All it requires is that I remember a handful of
| section numbers relevant to areas of the code.
| senectus1 wrote:
| wtf.
|
| this is some serious 1984 type shit.
| Sosh101 wrote:
| This is the kind of thing used by companies with terrible
| management. I hope universities that rely on these extreme
| tools come to realize how badly it reflects on them.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| My last uni used this and I had another major complaint: I had
| to show my drivers license to the person in the call center in
| India every time! None of my questions about what kind of
| privacy controls existed could be answered... and being a linux
| only person, it was a major pita to either get them to
| understand I don't have windows or to not give me a hard time
| if I was using a VM because who tf trusts that software? (the
| grwat irony being this school constantly touted its
| cybersecurity degree programs)
| lolinder wrote:
| I had to use Proctorio for a stats class that I took, and two
| or three times per test it asked me to lift my laptop up and
| rotate it so that it could see the entire room. The worst part
| was that when I was done the button to return to the test never
| showed up. Each time this happened, I had to contact customer
| support to get them to unlock my screen.
|
| The distraction this posed had a measurable impact on my scores
| on these tests.
| aaron695 wrote:
| > or having eye and/or skin colors [1]
|
| Yet you could only link to one example for a totally different
| program ExamSoft.
|
| They had a thick dark beard above a dark shirt and dark glasses
| with reflections (on a much lighter skin tone). They also look
| like they have a second eyebrow due to the lighting on their
| eye lid and glasses.
|
| It could be their head shape tied to their race I guess, but
| you have a sample of one from a different program which we know
| nothing about what it's doing.
|
| > "or reading questions out aloud [2]" > "I am so glad that
| this kind of abuse was not yet common when I was in university.
| I love sitting in the (dark) basement, it helps me
| concentrate."
|
| Compared to going to exam rooms full of people with noise and
| lighting outside of any control? When were students allowed to
| read out loud in the 'old' days?
|
| We are in a pandemic, millions are dying, I don't get this
| attitude, what's the alternative? not do exams? I know I
| cheated, I know most other people at uni cheated with the old
| system which was hard to cheat at. Hell yes we would all cheat
| more if the new system allowed us to.
|
| The videos in question are still on Youtube under Proctorio
| Reuploads for what it's worth.
| hackerrrnews wrote:
| My favourite Hacker News game to play is to count all the
| hoops people will go through to deny the fact that maybe,
| just maybe, race can be a factor in people's experiences.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| As a remote accredited degree candidate (pre-pandemic so I did
| it before it was cool) the only alternative to Proctorio was
| finding an actual proctor in my area who was subject to
| approval by my university and who I would have to pay to sit
| and watch over me. Every exam was a multi-week hassle that I
| had to coordinate with the added stress of last minute
| cancellations. I much prefer Proctorio. Yeah, it's intrusive
| for about 2 hours but then you can close it and go on with your
| life. Not really a big deal.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Except the fucked up cases op linked and then some. Sure as
| long as it always works for you it's great and you can just
| ignore these to avoid uncomfortable thoughts, but once you're
| affected I bet it turns into a whole different story and
| suddenly you turn into one of these hysterical tinfoil hats
| yourself.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Maybe we need an honest to God religion forbidding the use of
| non-free software, and then we too can play the religion card.
| Class orders you to install Proctorio? "Sorry, that's against
| my religion." Fail the class? It's because they required me to
| sin against my religious beliefs and I would not.
|
| Of course, like all religions, not all members will follow the
| beliefs all the time. At least that's what I tell myself while
| sinning with a non-free video game I installed. Many a pastor
| has molested children, but the courts still recognize those
| religions. So when the founder of this religion is caught duel-
| booting Windows, we'll just remember that the religion is
| divine, even if the people aren't.
| bombcar wrote:
| It already exists: https://stallman.org/saint.html and if
| people can get Jedi recognized you should be able to get that
| recognized (but the courts basically look at do you really
| act like you believe).
| HillRat wrote:
| I suspect there's a strong case that universities are violating
| ADA and state equal-access laws if they're using proctoring
| software that unfairly penalizes individuals with glasses, to
| say nothing of the issues raised by the potential of racially-
| biased AI. A few class action suits against state university
| systems might well be warranted.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Not defending Proctorio, but: As I understand it, the
| software results aren't directly used to penalize students.
| It just flags the situation for review by an actual human if
| the software doesn't have high confidence that the student is
| looking at the screen most of the time.
|
| That doesn't mean there isn't a violation here, of course.
| ls612 wrote:
| Yes, that is exactly how it works (I TA for a class which
| uses it). Proctorio flags things it thinks are suspicious,
| and when we look at the video we usually find it was
| something innocuous (pets are a common culprit). We do find
| a few people actually cheating though so it definitely has
| its merits.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| The bigger problem I see is professors that think "Oh well
| it's sophisticated AI, it can't make a mistake" and take
| the results for granted.
|
| In one of the twitter thread I saw a screenshot form a
| professors email where they were mentioning that "X student
| had 100 more eye movements than Y student" and threatened
| to fail the entire class.
|
| That email blew my mind because it seemed like the
| professor just didn't know or didn't care that the software
| was the problem here. And that's the real issue.
| professoretc wrote:
| If the email mentioned particular students by name then
| that in and of itself is a violation (at least in
| California). We're absolutely not supposed to share any
| student performance information with anyone other than
| the student, without permission.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| That's federal. FERPA.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > So it is crucially important that this type of software
| receives a lot of scrutiny to make sure it works as planned.
|
| What's crucially important is that this type of software is
| BANNED. I now have a new question to ask schools when my kid
| applies to one.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| It's not a trivial problem to solve. The amount of cheating
| that goes on at the university level is pretty astounding.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Wow, is that software legal to force upon your students? If you
| tried this in Europe, even with the student explicitly clicking
| "I consent", you would still be facing pretty serious GDPR
| penalties because the student had no other option than to
| accept making their consent invalid.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| It would appear that it's already in use in Europe and has
| win in court.
|
| https://gdprhub.eu/index.php?title=Rb._Amsterdam_-
| _C/13/6846...
|
| > The Amsterdam Court of First Instance rejected the request
| by student representatives and an individual student for a
| preliminary injunction against the use of digital
| surveillance software for exams by a public university. The
| court ruled that measures against covid-19 did not allow for
| a suitable alternative and the processing could therefore be
| based on Article 6(1)(e) GDPR.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| The Netherlands seem to really embrace these platforms. I
| think for example Chromebook based exams have been big
| there for quite some years now while it's almost unheard of
| in Germany.
| Hiopl wrote:
| I don't understand how that passed.
|
| > (e) processing is necessary for the performance of a task
| carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of
| official authority vested in the controller;
|
| What's the point of GDPR if you can side-step it in this
| way?
| antientropic wrote:
| I wouldn't be too sure about those GDPR penalties. Dutch
| universities are also using Proctorio, with the recorded
| footage being sent to the US:
| https://www.volkskrant.nl/columns-opinie/opinie-
| universiteit...
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| That's one of the reasons I wish more people would run Windows
| 10S or whatever the store only version was called. Or iOS.
|
| Can't install shady third party drivers, can't install stuff
| like that that mess with hypervisors (and anyways, every app
| kind of runs in a sandboxed process anyways) and your app can
| go in the background at anytime!
|
| Don't like it? Roll your own devices.
| m4rtink wrote:
| I really hope this was meant as a sarcasm. There are already
| banking apps and some mobile games (hello Pokemon GO!)
| pushing for trusted computing where the user is not in
| control and only a manufacturer OS image is installed. Not to
| mention game consoles that are like this by default.
|
| We hardly need more entities pushing for this dystopia...
| throw14082020 wrote:
| > In case you don't know who Proctorio is:
|
| Procto-: Anus; (more frequently) rectum;
|
| -torio: radioactive chemical element (in spanish)
|
| Therefore, it is a radioactive anus?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Proctorio sounds like Factorio for assholes.
| fileeditview wrote:
| The whole thing sounds like bad fiction from some dystopia...
| and to make thinks more comical their name could describe a
| rectal examination or something.
|
| I really hope institutions using this rethink and the company
| just dies.. some things should not exist.
| mkl wrote:
| I'm sympathetic to the concerned individual threatened and harmed
| by corporate lawsuits, but I don't think I share the underlying
| concern.
|
| > In Linkletter's view, customers and users were not getting the
| whole story. The software performed all kinds of invasive
| tracking, like watching for "abnormal" eye movements, head
| movements, and other behaviors branded suspicious by the company.
| The invasive tracking and filming were of great concern to
| Linkletter, who was worried about students being penalized
| academically on the basis of Proctorio's analysis.
|
| In an in-person invigilated test environment, the
| invigilator/proctor is watching students carefully for suspicious
| movements and behaviours. We don't call that an invasion of
| privacy. While I don't like commercial proctoring software (I
| have to use some, not Proctorio, for students who can't enter the
| country because of Covid-19), being videoed by a machine while
| you do a test is a) not much different from everyone else in the
| class who's being watched in person (you probably get watched
| less, actually), b) a way to make sure essential academic
| standards are upheld. No one is going to get penalised based on
| some fallible "AI" system; "suspicious" events get reviewed by a
| person and usually aren't suspicious at all.
| cycomanic wrote:
| You make two assertions that are both clearly incorrect. Your
| point a) there clearly is a difference between watched (not
| filmed) in class and a software, filming you, recording audio,
| monitoring everything you type and what your computer is doing
| _in your own home_. Saying there is no difference is akeen to
| stating a police officer watches you in public, so let's
| install cameras in everyone's home. b) you say that nobody will
| be penalised by based on an AI system, despite there being lots
| of reports of exactly that happening (some where even posted a
| bit further up thread).
| sireat wrote:
| I am a lector at a University and would never force my students
| to install something that is so privacy invading as Proctorio
| on student's own computers.
|
| If you absolutely need this type of monitoring it should be
| done at some sort of testing center on cleanly imaged
| computers. I could see it being done for something absolutely
| crucial such as a bar exam.
|
| Proctorio and its ilk should not be used for simple mid-terms
| or even finals. This monitoring software becomes a huge crutch
| to lazy administrators and teachers. I should know I am lazy
| too.
|
| PS While we are on the slippery slope, if Proctorio becomes
| standard we rapidly head to Snow Crash situation where federal
| jobs were heavily monitored. Already many freelancer sites use
| screenrecording software.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| I hope that some security researchers investigate this
| software more closely and at the same time suspect that this
| lawsuit is primarily intended to scare away people from doing
| precisely that.
| oxylibrium wrote:
| "Security researcher" here: Proctorio's "zero-knowledge
| encryption" claims were in name only, pretty much.
|
| TL;DR Canvas and Moodle use incrementing integers for both
| user ID and quiz ID. Proctorio's "zero-knowledge
| encryption" has a shared key derived from the two IDs; they
| store the user ID, so that's effectively a single PIN. With
| their older settings, you can brute force a quiz ID in a
| couple hours at most.
|
| They increased the time cost for the brute force to now
| take days/weeks, but that's still peanuts and the attack
| scales _really_ well, because most exams take place at the
| same time (students start /end at similar times), so once
| you crack the quiz ID for one record, that's tens-hundreds
| of records; and since IDs are just increasing numbers, once
| you find the lower bound, working your way upwards is much
| easier.
|
| They also added an option for universities to use PGP keys
| - but that involves training faculty, or manual setup.
|
| For more details, here's my blog article:
| https://proctor.ninja/wave-rake-proctorio
| christophilus wrote:
| > I could see it being done for something absolutely crucial
| such as a bar exam.
|
| Why? How did we ever produce lawyers in the past without
| Proctorio?
| elliekelly wrote:
| The legal profession's dirty little secret is that the bar
| exam doesn't really matter. It's little more than a rite of
| passage and a good excuse for law firms to wait before
| bringing in the needy newbies before the summer associates
| have left. Cheating on the bar exam would present a serious
| character and fitness issue but not having the requisite
| knowledge to pass the bar exam would not at all impact a
| person's ability to practice law.
| mkl wrote:
| In person exams. In a pandemic, that can be a problem.
| mkl wrote:
| If you have a testing centre you don't need this kind of
| software, and if your students are scattered across the world
| due to Covid-19 travel restrictions, you can't have a testing
| centre for them. I consider invigilation absolutely crucial
| in a professional engineering degree in mid-terms and finals
| (engineers are more likely to hurt more people than lawyers).
| I don't think this kind of software is a crutch for the lazy;
| it's more work to organise and manage than human
| invigilators, and doesn't scale as well.
|
| I don't think it's a slippery slope. We will have
| significantly more local students than remote for the
| foreseeable future, and the local students are invigilated in
| person. We have students wanting to opt into remote study,
| including using this software, but so far if they're local we
| tell them no (except under extreme circumstances).
| sireat wrote:
| We will have to agree to disagree then. The whole term
| invigilation is a bit dystopian.
|
| It is a huge slippery slope because this privacy invasive
| software ends up being used for such mundane things like
| weekly quizzes.
|
| Do you really want to live in the future/present where we
| have to submit ourselves to daily monitoring?
|
| How about adding some monitoring via sensors of performance
| boosting substances?
|
| My answer is that such monitoring software should be only
| used under exceptional circumstances on neutral computers -
| my example was a testing center with insufficient human
| supervision.
| mkl wrote:
| I think you're extrapolating way too far, and hence your
| arguments aren't hitting the mark. The total amount of
| invigilation in the entirety of each course I'm involved
| in is 3-5 hours. This has been the case for many decades.
| This year, for some students, it is aided by software,
| due to the fact that they're unavoidably thousands of
| kilometres away. It is not a slippery slope, and none of
| your dystopian ideas seem like they could result from it.
|
| This kind of software does not monitor computer use
| outside of the test. It monitors the student during the
| test, like a human invigilator (yes, it's recorded, so
| not identical). During the test, the student is only
| working on the test, which is not private or secret. When
| the test is finished, the software exits.
|
| I don't see how you could have the resources for an
| infrequently used testing centre, but not enough to pay
| one person for an hour or two. That is not what this kind
| of software is useful for.
| oxylibrium wrote:
| > During the test, the student is only working on the
| test, which is not private or secret.
|
| You fail to consider the circumstances in which the test
| takes place. Students take the test in their personal
| spaces, and earlier in the thread, you mentioned
| essentially inspecting a student's living space (...angle
| of camera, light, checking environment, etc...) "Checking
| environment" is really just a cold, "process" word for
| inspecting a student's living space.
|
| A student's room can often have private or secret things
| about them. Before you ask, not every student has the
| privilege to use a separate, clean, blank room to take
| tests. A personal space is inevitably going to have
| personal, private things. I've brought this up before; I
| personally know friends who were outed to professors as
| trans because their personal space has things like
| needles - and then you even have stuff like naive
| professors assuming "drugs" when its really just
| medications.
|
| It could be anything else besides that, in fact -
| calendars with things scribbled on them; family photos;
| posters for political organizations; if you look in
| someone's bedroom, you're _inevitably_ going to find out
| things about them that they would rather you not know.
|
| Would you take your students on a tour of your bedroom
| while you're teaching an online class?
|
| EDIT: In addition, there's non-traditional students and
| high risk students, and interruptions in general -
| there's not _only_ a test going on - I've had someone
| from my family interrupted in the middle of an exam
| because someone from the government knocked the door to
| take our temperatures and ensure we're healthy and don't
| have COVID. There's always more things going on, too.
| anovikov wrote:
| But i think it's OK to install the software just on a laptop
| you'd use to take tests, some old laptop, and keep yourself
| free of surveillance otherwise right? If so, i can't see how is
| it a problem: someone absolutely has to be watched while taking
| a test. But if it's during whole education process, then yeah,
| it's ridiculous and worth fighting against.
| daemin wrote:
| For some people "some old laptop" is all they actually have.
| I don't imagine a lot of students have both a desktop, a
| laptop, and "some old laptop" that they can use, so the
| software will get installed on the single computer they use
| (or share) to get their studies done on.
| eythian wrote:
| Not everyone has an old laptop lying around they can use for
| such a purpose.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| _But i think it 's OK to install the software just on a
| laptop you'd use to take tests, some old laptop, and keep
| yourself free of surveillance otherwise right?_
|
| That's a fairly classist assumption that someone has multiple
| devices, including some older piece of junk that's late model
| enough to be useful for test taking but still essentially a
| "throw away." It implicitly means that adequate right to
| privacy is only reserved for wealthy kids and not for anyone
| who only has one computer.
|
| That's not to suggest that I support this assumption even in
| cases where it's true. I'm just trying to point out a common
| blind spot that leads comfortably well-off people to often
| act with callous disregard towards those who have less
| because it isn't a big problem for themselves.
| mkl wrote:
| The software is only running during the test. Most students
| install it on their main laptop, and they don't seem to have
| much problem with that. It runs with elevated privileges (so
| it can make sure it's the only program running), and it's
| proprietary, both of which I have objections to, but unless
| I'm missing something and Proctorio is quite different from
| the software I've used, I don't see much problem with it. In
| Covid-19 times everyone puts up with things they don't like.
| anovikov wrote:
| OK then at all, i can't see the problem. Unless there is a
| reasonable suspicion that it's malware and infects your
| machine with something that still keeps tabs on you when
| it's as if not running.
| em-bee wrote:
| it's pretty unrealistic to expect everyone to have a spare
| laptop around.
| GordonS wrote:
| Assuming you have enough RAM, I guess you could run it in a
| VM.
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| Programs like this usually attempt to detect and forbid
| being run in a VM.
| anfilt wrote:
| It's their personal computer though.
| JDW1023 wrote:
| People can have different expectation of privacy at home versus
| in classroom/testing facility.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| "She then reviewed the flagged sections of the video with her
| university's dean, who she says agreed that her conduct
| throughout the test had been honest. This, however, did not
| resolve the situation. The dean, she explained, said she might
| still need to re-take the exam."
|
| https://www.insider.com/viral-tiktok-student-fails-exam-afte...
| mkl wrote:
| That's the dean's mistake. This kind of software
| categorically does not detect cheating, and cannot be relied
| solely upon; only a staff member can make that decision. For
| example, I had one student using proctoring software whose
| father came into the room during the test, and I as the
| supervising staff member recognised the event for what it was
| and ignored it.
|
| I don't much like such software, but I accept the current
| need for it. The problems people are describing seem to be
| faulty staff behaviour, not software.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| The software will automatically block your screen, meaning
| you cannot finish the exam if it accidentally activates.
|
| "I was on the second question of an exam composed of 45
| questions and I got a black screen. I'm still waiting to
| see what's going to happen as this is my final......... I
| tried to access the exam but was locked out and when i went
| to the exam the chat option wasn't available either. I
| emailed my professor and unfortunately, he wasn't watching
| the exam at the time and couldn't do much to help me out."
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/UBC/comments/g2ub05/god_kicked_out
| _...
| mkl wrote:
| The software sounds faulty. The black screen is terrible
| UX; it should just silently set a bookmark and let the
| student continue.
|
| The overall outcome (and the student's experience and
| stress) is ultimately a staff issue.
|
| The professor should have been on call, and should have
| been able to get the student back into the questions, or,
| failing that, to offer another sitting. I have done both
| of these, among other remedies, and setting student
| expectations ahead of time is crucial for avoiding
| massively stressful problems (stuff like "If something
| goes wrong, stop and email me. I can add lost your time
| back and get you into the test again, no matter how long
| it takes to sort out. You won't lose marks from this."
| and actually follow through). Software inevitably fails
| sometimes, and it is just a tool. Staff need to make
| their own decisions.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I fully agree with you here that bugs in the software can
| be mitigated by having knowledgeable staff. But people
| can only be prepared for it if they hear about the issues
| beforehand.
|
| That's why I find it so offensive that Proctorio is suing
| what appears to be university staff to silence them.
| cycomanic wrote:
| You are correct this is a staff failure, the failure lies
| in using the software in the first place.
|
| If we agree that the current situation is so exceptional
| that we need to fully monitor all students taking exams
| (and that's still a big if, I also am a university
| teacher, we don't use any monitoring system. There are
| other solutions as well such as taking oral exams...),
| one could simply hire a bunch of proctors who watch the
| video feed. Considering the savings that universities
| have made they could send one to everyone's home even.
| mkl wrote:
| Copy-pasting from my other comment:
|
| > I see it as a currently-necessary annoyance, as the
| least bad option. The alternatives have greater
| deficiencies: human invigilators using Zoom etc. don't
| scale (institution experience); oral exams don't scale
| (my experience moderating such assessments); no
| invigilation leads to cheating (by few students but
| enough to be a real problem, especially for professional
| qualifications - my direct experience and institution
| experience); shutting down education until the pandemic's
| over is unfeasible.
|
| Last year, we tried not monitoring, we tried Zoom
| invigilation, we tried orals. Lockdown rules prevented us
| from sending in-person invigilators in one semester (and
| we couldn't have hired even 10% of what that would take)
| and the other we invigilated in person like normal. We
| are spending more than ever before, so there are no
| savings. All of these methods failed. This year,
| grudgingly, we have moved to proctoring software.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I find your statements in different parts of the thread
| quite contradictory. On one hand you say that things
| don't scale because of number of students, but then a bit
| down thread you mention it's not worth making a new
| course for 10 students (out of 640), but for 10 students
| in person proctoring is clearly not a problem. You also
| mention the issue of cheating for professional
| qualifications, but again, that's a tiny fraction of all
| exams.
|
| Regarding scaling of oral exams, there's actually some
| interesting research/calculations (I try to find the
| reference later) and the cross-over is somewhere around
| 150 students when oral exams become slower (I do think
| this is quite teacher and subject dependent though).
|
| Also about budgets, I believe that your department is
| spending more than ever, the issue is property services
| departments of the universities should be saving large
| amounts. Considering lock-downs and staff and students
| working from home, maintenance cost should be way down. I
| suspect though that money lands in completely different
| buckets (don't get me started on the business of
| university property services, we pay rent in our overhead
| cost when we get grants that are higher than renting
| office space on the main shopping street in our city).
| mkl wrote:
| Well I'm talking about decisions about different things
| by different people 1) running exams (institution level -
| run centrally), 2) creating bespoke purpose-designed
| online courses (mostly department level). The decision
| about exam invigilation was made at the institutional
| level, where 10 is a small number of online students for
| a course, and they have dozens of courses to worry about.
| For most of the institution's courses, other solutions
| don't scale, and for the institution as a whole they
| definitely don't. The course with 10 online students may
| only run online this year, and it takes hundreds of
| additional hours to make a purpose-designed online course
| (we're doing that for other courses where the material
| will be reused).
|
| The oral exams I moderated didn't seem like they could
| scale past 20 students. The reason our online students
| are online is almost always because they are overseas,
| and the majority of them have limited English. In that
| context, orals are discriminatory, stressful, and very
| slow.
|
| I'm in NZ. Our universities have mostly been operating in
| person as normal (i.e. costing just as much) with far
| fewer international students (who bring in money), except
| in addition we have comparatively small numbers of
| resource-intensive online students as well, and are
| attempting to bring parts of entire degree programs
| online for the first time.
| scrollaway wrote:
| The bar to use such invasive, buggy, user hostile spyware
| should be a lot higher.
|
| Just because this solves your problem (it clearly
| doesn't) doesn't mean it's a good idea. Killing half the
| students also solves your problem.
|
| You need to live in a world where this is not an option,
| period. What's the next solution then? People forget
| there are always more manual solutions even if they take
| more time...
| amcoastal wrote:
| As both a TA and a student during the virus, we did
| better and so can you. Stop trying to shoehorn your in
| person lesson plans and exams into virtual and design new
| material and tests. Dont be a shitty teacher just because
| you're too lazy to change your now dated ways.
| dang wrote:
| Please make your substantive points without swipes.
| Crossing into name-calling and personal attack is not
| cool.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| mkl wrote:
| Please don't make assumptions or resort to baseless
| insults.
|
| We have designed entirely new fully-online interactive
| courses in response to this.
|
| In other courses, where we have e.g. 640 local students
| and 10 online, they need to sit the same test for it to
| be fair.
| amcoastal wrote:
| Sounds like you need to design an online version of that
| course if you're going to allow online students to take
| it.
| mkl wrote:
| The expense isn't justified for 10 students, since this
| may well be the only year that course is offered online.
| They are not getting a bad deal out of it. The fully new
| online courses are first year, and the expectation is
| that students will come to study in person for the
| remaining years of their degree. The other course I'm
| talking about is second year, but those 10 students can't
| get into the country at present - a temporary obstacle.
| moistbar wrote:
| > The expense isn't justified for 10 students, since this
| may well be the only year that course is offered online.
|
| So instead you'd rather waste money on a barely-
| functional piece of software that actively invades your
| students' privacy?
| mkl wrote:
| It seems to function just fine (I'm not talking about
| Proctorio), and it doesn't invade privacy any more than
| the Zoom-based tutorials, which is barely at all. It is
| also better than any other alternative I know of, many of
| which have been tried already and found wanting. Privacy
| is not a god to whom all things must be sacrificed. All
| education involves losing a little privacy (in person
| people will know what you look like, where you're from,
| and many other things that are hidden for remote
| students; really they have more privacy than any others),
| and the fact that software is involved doesn't suddenly
| make things worse.
| moistbar wrote:
| >the fact that software is involved doesn't suddenly make
| things worse.
|
| When that software is required to be installed on private
| machines and is difficult to remove, yes, it absolutely
| does make things worse.
| mkl wrote:
| The software we use is easy to remove, and students have
| a lot of software installed on their private machines
| already, some of it more invasive in software terms (e.g.
| games with anti-cheating features). I have more qualms
| about the software and the privacy implications than the
| students do, and I'm resigned to it for now; the students
| just went ahead and installed it without comment.
| oxylibrium wrote:
| There's two problems with this statement. First is the
| assumption that students don't care about privacy, second
| is the lack of discussion about consent.
|
| I'm a student who takes special care about the software I
| install on my laptop. I use a Linux distro, run primarily
| open-source software, and sandbox every single
| proprietary app (limited access to files, no admin at
| all, no screen recording, disabled webcam, ...). I've
| also looked into several of these exam spyware tools (you
| really are forcing students to install spyware), and
| they're built with often hilariously poor security
| practices.
|
| Which is to say nothing of the regularly stolen source
| code; If you held the exam spyware solutions to the same
| standards that you held students to, you would write up
| almost every single _vendor_ to the Academic Integrity
| office. Another example of hypocrisy in academia from the
| perspective of a disgruntled student.
|
| I deliberately do not install any video games with
| invasive anti-cheating functionality (and I regularly
| critique them, like I do for exam spyware); that is a
| false equivalence anyway, since they don't deal in the
| same breadth of personally identifiable information (like
| a permanently saved panorama of my bedroom).
|
| Don't assume all students are the same.
|
| Second, the consent dynamics are _wildly_ different. For
| a game, its like "you trade this in for fun/relaxation"
| - and there's always other games that don't spy on you. I
| play those. With universities, many pulled a fast one and
| introduced the spyware to students after their tuition is
| already paid, and said "use it or drop the course". You
| can't switch universities because one university didn't
| consider the ethics of spyware; you can switch games much
| more easily.
| moistbar wrote:
| Right, but that software was their choice to install, not
| forced upon them by their academic institution. It's good
| that it's easy to remove, but other people's computers
| are not your property.
| aravindet wrote:
| > human invigilators using Zoom etc. don't scale
| (institution experience)
|
| Could you explain further why this did not scale?
|
| I'm imagining an invigilator watching video feeds using
| an interface similar to, say, that used by security
| guards to monitor surveillance feeds. I would think that
| a single human invigilator can monitor more students
| using this system than an in-person setting. What am I
| missing?
| mkl wrote:
| In person, a single proctor can monitor 200+ students;
| our eyes capture far more detail and field of view than
| computer screens, and our peripheral vision is tuned for
| detecting unexpected motion. With Zoom, either you have
| one meeting with everyone in it, in which case students
| can look directly at each other, or you have a separate
| meeting for every student, in which case you need a large
| number of devices, all visible at the same time. I can't
| see the former scaling past 49, and I can't see the
| latter scaling past 20. If you had some software designed
| specifically for this and several big screens, it would
| still be pretty hard to pay anywhere near as close
| attention as you can in person.
|
| On top of that, there's always a bunch of annoying
| mucking about getting set up for Zoom invigilation: angle
| of camera, light, checking environment, etc. All that
| needs communication to and fro, and it can take up to 5
| minutes for a single student. Now multiply that by say
| 100 (a bit of parallelism is possible, but individual
| communication is needed with each student).
| michaelt wrote:
| So get more proctors.
|
| Given the cost of college courses, schools could easily
| afford $5 per student per course, and $100 for proctoring
| 20 students for a single exam is more than fair.
| initplus wrote:
| If your software is ethical, why smear your own name by
| bringing a spurious lawsuit against a singled out individual
| like this?
|
| There are real concerns around privacy with software like this
| - what will happen if some criminal finds an exploit in
| Proctorio's software? This kind of monitoring software is often
| designed to be hard to detect or bypass, and installs itself in
| ways that are challenging to remove. Development of this kind
| of software should be done with a high degree of caution and
| care. There isn't a risk that an invigilator will be
| compromised by a malicious actor, and then see every detail of
| students lives and all their private data for all time. But
| this risk does exist for software.
|
| If Proctorio takes legal action like this against critics what
| does that say about their software?
| mkl wrote:
| Agreed, the lawsuit is a terrible thing to do full stop, and
| doesn't seem to make business sense either. Maybe they think
| his critiques are worse than the bad press.
|
| I agree about the privacy concerns, and in normal
| circumstances I wouldn't use proctoring software, because all
| my students would be local (or they would have signed up as
| distance students knowing this kind of thing would be
| needed). I would also have much less issue with it if it was
| open source.
|
| I see it as a currently-necessary annoyance, as the least bad
| option. The alternatives have greater deficiencies: human
| invigilators using Zoom etc. don't scale (institution
| experience); oral exams don't scale (my experience moderating
| such assessments); no invigilation leads to cheating (by few
| students but enough to be a real problem, especially for
| professional qualifications - my direct experience and
| institution experience); shutting down education until the
| pandemic's over is unfeasible.
| necovek wrote:
| > no invigilation leads to cheating (by few students but
| enough to be a real problem, especially for professional
| qualifications - my direct experience and institution
| experience);
|
| How is it a real problem (I've never cheated but always
| felt I got fair grades, not affected by whatever cheaters
| did)? If a student memorizes everything they need for the
| exam today, but forget all of it tomorrow, is that useful?
| That's a very real thing happening every day in exams, and
| nobody highlights it as as big a problem as cheating (I
| think it's a bigger problem actually, but the solution is
| not necessarily in finding those who can do that, but in
| optimizing the material so memorization is not such a core
| part of it before you start specializing).
|
| In careers where such things really matter (think
| medicine), people only progress by _demonstrating_ actual
| knowledge and understanding while gaining real-life
| experience. We don 't get a surgeon out of a medical school
| that hasn't shadowed a surgeon and been quizzed on things
| to do next.
|
| It's similar with engineering: you are given smaller,
| simpler things when you start off, and you build up your
| knowledge and experience before being given the role of a
| lead engineer for an airplane engine.
|
| Exam grades are never used as a measure of someone's
| knowledge on the topic, though a paper they authored, or
| their dissertation, naturally, might.
| mkl wrote:
| It's a problem for institution reputation, and for
| remaining accredited to confer professional degrees
| controlled by external organisations, like engineering
| degrees.
| cassalian wrote:
| > I see it as a currently-necessary annoyance, as the least
| bad option... shutting down education until the pandemic's
| over is unfeasible.
|
| Is it necessary though? Have you considered there are ways
| other than testing for a student to demonstrate their
| knowledge on a subject? Projects, presentations, and
| writing all come to mind as effective ways to measure
| knowledge on a subject and do not require treating all
| students like cheaters because a few choose to do so.
| mkl wrote:
| Yes, but my subject is maths :-). 1st and 2nd year
| engineering maths don't really have projects,
| presentations, or writing as options, as we mostly care
| about whether they know particular fundamental
| mathematical techniques and skills. All those options
| also have the problem of knowing who did the work.
|
| From talking to remote students, I don't think they feel
| like they're being treated like cheaters. Instead, they
| seem happy we're making their study possible, and
| accepting of what they're asked to do. They know it's
| important that they can demonstrate unequivocally that
| they have particular skills.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Isn't Dominion suing Ted Cruz?
| jbarberu wrote:
| As far as I know they're suing Fox News, Mike Lindell,
| Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani for defamation.
|
| Not sure what your point is, but the difference between
| "dead president Hugo Chavez flipped votes for Biden" vs
| "Here is how the software works, I don't think it's right"
| is quite important.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| What the invigilator sees, stays in his/her head. They are not
| recording things with their eyes; this software is doing that
| (I'm not sure of the extent, how much is client side vs server
| side, anonymization levels etc). However, I'm making that
| assumption based on the fact that if a person disputes
| something, a recording of the event would be required to
| ascertain the facts. That kind of information can be damaging
| in case of security breach; e.g. someone could have a habit of
| picking noses when lost in thought or changing clothes during
| the exam (they might reasonably do that in their home and not
| in a public exam with invigilator present). If such videos leak
| due to security breaches and catch circulation on internet, the
| people in them can be subject to ridicule or invasion of
| privacy online.
| tobr wrote:
| > being videoed by a machine while you do a test is a) not much
| different from everyone else in the class who's being watched
| in person
|
| > "suspicious" events get reviewed by a person
|
| Being taped and having that tape scrutinized after the fact is
| not equivalent to being in the same room as an invigilator. I
| could accept a live video call as being roughly equivalent, but
| not if it's recorded.
| g_p wrote:
| Have been overseeing some exams being run at a well regarded
| university. No remote proctoring software (i.e. spyware) is in
| use. Students are taking their exams in the web browser of their
| choosing, on the platform of their choosing. They aren't sat
| dialled into a video call or anything else (but they have a link
| for a backup one in case they have issues or need clarifications
| on a typo etc.)
|
| It's straightforward - a well-designed examination should allow
| for adequate distinction between students, allowing everyone (who
| studied the course and learned) to show basic knowledge, and
| those who have more advanced understanding to demonstrate this.
|
| In designing assessments, questions were peer-reviewed to ensure
| they are not "easily googleable". They were designed to focus not
| on asking "what is X?" but on "tell us a way that Y could be
| achieved" or "give an example of how you would do Z". These
| questions are pretty hard to google, and time pressure makes it
| harder still.
|
| Focusing on understanding, and applying knowledge really seems to
| be the right way to design an exam. I can say from what I've seen
| and heard from colleagues so far, this approach is giving equal
| (if not more) differentiation among students than usual - the
| good students still perform well, and the poor students still
| perform poorly. And personally (from experience), I find it a
| more enjoyable to sit an exam that asks you to answer meaningful
| questions, than one that simply expects you to memorise and
| recite facts back. We're not bothered if you memorise the name -
| just describe how you'd solve the problem.
|
| From the number of people doing poorly even on fairly
| straightforward questions, I'm not hugely concerned that giving
| the exam online made any significant difference. A non-trivial
| number of students didn't even complete a mandatory question
| (which was clearly marked), so I assume they found it suitably
| challenging, even with access to the world's knowledge at their
| fingertips. I'd say that's a good exam.
| JPDSm8NTaAYBHd wrote:
| he/him
| jacksavage wrote:
| Recently, I had an exam through ProctorU and thought I'd try to
| reclaim some privacy using Windows Sandbox when I learned that
| they utilize TeamViewer to take full control of your computer.
| This was not allowed only because parts of the control panel were
| disabled and they couldn't verify that I had only one monitor. I
| used a mirror to show them my laptop and desk but that was not
| sufficient. Spent a lot of time that weekend just trying to take
| the open-book exam.
|
| I really hope that universities will consider their students
| before adopting this type of software.
| dang wrote:
| All: this thread discusses two distinct lawsuits. Originally
| there were two threads, but I merged them (see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26900217). Sorry! Now
| they're blended and there's not enough energy to reverse the
| entropy, so you'll need to track which is which as you read the
| thread.
|
| One is discussed in the OP. The other URL was
| https://twitter.com/Linkletter/status/1385004344903290883, but
| that doesn't give any background. There's more here:
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/22/21526792/proctorio-onlin...
|
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/student-surveillance-v...
|
| Edit: It turns out there have been quite a few previous threads
| too. Pointers to those at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26907558.
| unixhero wrote:
| How can we help? Is it donations? I couldn't see the donation
| link.
| input_sh wrote:
| Here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/stand-against-proctorio
| unixhero wrote:
| Thank you
| linepupdesign wrote:
| One of the problems with Academia is that they like to assume
| everyone should learn the same way, and look the same while they
| learn.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| His legal costs fundraising page is at [1] and gives come
| background to the harassment by Proctorio.
|
| [1] https://ca.gofundme.com/f/stand-against-proctorio
| dartharva wrote:
| I think the bigger issue should be how the University came to
| choose something like Proctorio. This has been the case with many
| colleges around the world; disconnected or ignorant authorities
| keep signing up to whatever the SaaS salesman pitches to them,
| without vetting the company's background and records, and not
| listening to the affected parties in their arrogance.
|
| My own college struggled with online exams, and turned a deaf ear
| to students and even professors objecting against the platform
| being used (it's the most popular proctored exam platform). In
| the end, due to their own incompetence at handling exams, there
| turned out to be large-scale cheating and the college then forced
| the entire batch to give the exams _again in the next term_.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| There's probably a market opportunity to replace testing w/
| something better. Some actual measurement of competence that's
| win/win/win for the students, instructors, and universities.
| Maybe a company come up with an interesting idea & get funding
| YC to scale the solution to that hard problem!
| TrackerFF wrote:
| The problem was that COVID lockdowns took many schools by
| surprise, and instead of making exams designed for online
| platforms, they tried to fit regular into a online platform.
|
| Turns out, it's incredibly easy to cheat on those exams.
| steelframe wrote:
| I conducted interviews at Google for about 8 years. I would often
| run across a fresh-from-college candidate who fell flat on their
| face, and all I could think was, "You've somehow managed to waste
| 4 years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars doing
| whatever it was you were doing for all that time."
|
| Some performed so poorly that I could only conclude that they
| cheated their way all the way through their program, because the
| discrepancy between their GPA and the fact that they can't even
| begin to explain memset (one of many trivial examples I ran
| across) was so stark. Well, all that cheating certainly caught up
| with them when they were face-to-face with me trying to get a
| job. It must of been stressful and humiliating for them as they
| sat there hemming and hawing while I asked them elementary
| question after question that they couldn't even begin to answer.
| Or maybe not, depending on whatever lack of pride and sense of
| self-worth led them to cheat like they did in the first place.
|
| I'm sure many of them managed to get a job somewhere in industry,
| and whoever hired them got to deal with a hire who turned out to
| be an imposter.
|
| Of course I recognize that some people may have been severely
| impacted by the technical interview process to the point that
| they were intellectually paralyzed. But at least some of them I'm
| sure just didn't learn anything.
| text70 wrote:
| What's the difference between a competent threat, and an
| incompetent threat?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Perhaps people get stressed in interviews?
|
| For instance, I don't code in C that often, and if asked, I'm
| not sure I could remember off the top of my head if the
| function signature is `memset(dst, value, n)` or `memset(dst,
| n, value)`. My guess from intuition is the first, but I would
| be hemming and hawing a bit if asked in an interview something
| like that.
|
| Also, many CS programs are easy enough that you'll never even
| encounter a memset.
| steelframe wrote:
| > Perhaps people get stressed in interviews?
|
| Like I said, "Of course I recognize that some people may have
| been severely impacted by the technical interview process to
| the point that they were intellectually paralyzed."
|
| > I'm not sure I could remember off the top of my head if the
| function signature
|
| That would be a terrible question. Of course I wouldn't ask
| that.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Fair enough, I missed that while skimming your comment, and
| if you agree that would be a terrible question, then I
| generally agree with your sentiment.
| filoleg wrote:
| From my personal experience (and that of many friends of
| mine) who interviewed at Google, you won't be asked about
| memset or any C-related question unless you stated you were
| proficient in C and picked C as your interviewing language.
|
| Knowing this context might actually explain the situation
| that the parent comment describes a bit better. It is
| absolutely possible, as you described, to be perfectly
| capable within your CS niche without ever bothering with
| memset. But in that case, you probably won't pick C as your
| interviewing language and won't state that you are proficient
| in it. Which is what, I suspect, might have happened in that
| scenario the parent comment is describing.
| steelframe wrote:
| > you won't be asked about memset or any C-related question
| unless you stated you were proficient in C and picked C as
| your interviewing language
|
| I might not ask about C-specific context, but if you don't
| know how to write a value to a sequence of bytes, you have
| no business being a SWE at Google.
| filoleg wrote:
| >I might not ask about C-specific context, but if you
| don't know how to write a value to a sequence of bytes,
| you have no business being a SWE at Google
|
| I know quite a few engineers who passed Google interviews
| and work there, and they wouldn't know how to do this off
| the top of their head. I also interviewed with Google a
| few times, and not once was I asked a question like this.
|
| Also seems weird you would say that they have "no
| business being an SWE at Google", given that this problem
| is pretty trivial, and any competent engineer would be
| able to figure it out after some quick googling. It isn't
| some difficult algorithmic problem, it is a very specific
| and small piece of trivia.
| selestify wrote:
| While IMO your example was rather specific to C, I've certainly
| met candidates who can't write a for loop who I've felt similar
| things about.
| dartharva wrote:
| My university forcibly pushed students into online proctored
| examinations with similar privacy-invasive software too, despite
| repeated concerns raised by both students and instructors.
|
| As expected, it turned out to be a colossal failure - students
| found the remote "invigilators" didn't pay attention for jack
| shit and started cheating in exams, leading to the college
| forcibly bringing the entire batch back to their campus and
| taking all the tests again along with the ones in the next term.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| I want to have faith in the justice system to eventually bring
| this company to heel -- to believe that what they're doing is not
| just ethically wrong, but also in severe conflict with the law
| and liable to open them to significant litigation risk. Any
| practicing lawyers here that have thoughts about this?
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| So proud of the EFF for stuff like this and it's why I'm a
| monthly donor.
| Immune wrote:
| I've sent an email in regarding a CCPA request and got this
| response.
|
| " Hello,
|
| Thanks for reaching out! I'm following up on your request. I want
| to let you know that no one at Proctorio has access to your
| information. Only authorized personnel at your school
| (Instructors or Administrators) can access any of the information
| collected while taking an exam.
|
| I'd be happy to discuss this further with your instructor if you
| would like to connect me to them.
|
| Best,
|
| Josh"
| batmaniam wrote:
| > This is a civil action seeking a declaratory judgment of
| noninfringement under the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. SSSS 106, 107,
| as well as injunctive relief and damages for misrepresentation of
| copyright claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
| ("DMCA"), 17 U.S.C. SS 512(f)
|
| Oh cool, so the EFF is gonna claim a false DMCA filing. I hope
| the student will be made whole financially after what he had to
| go through; apparently he's been fighting this for a year.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They need to go after the lawyers who signed off on the notice.
| That is the only way to get real accountability.
| modsmustgo wrote:
| ^Astrikes the portion of the law that says anything about
| responding to all claims "expeditiously", and replaces it
| with something that accurately represents the severity of the
| situation(s).^A
|
| edit: severity in relation to an actual copyright violation,
| not possible damages imagined in the accusers theoretical
| situation if the content was not removed. Some companies
| might gladly eat a fine if only 1/100 people challenge their
| sick interpretation of the law and it keeps the bad PR from
| getting out. I could bore you with far worse scenarios but I
| will not aid the authoritarians with any further information.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The wording of the DMCA is irrelevant. All court officers
| take an oath to behave ethically. Submitting fraudulent
| documents because you're too lazy to exercise due diligence
| verifying the claim should result in meaningful punishment.
| paulgb wrote:
| I agree, especially considering that filing a proper false
| DMCA takedown requires perjuring yourself:
|
| > A statement that the information in the notification is
| accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining
| party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an
| exclusive right that is allegedly in-fringed.
|
| In these situations, lawyers are renting out their
| credibility to bully people who can't afford to go to court
| even if they're in the right.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| They should have just ignored this guy and gone on with life. Now
| the they got the EFF to deal with and it serves them right.
|
| There is another HN thread on this and a lot of people in it are
| more upset about the line of work Proctorio is in and how they do
| it than the fact they sued this minor irritating student. My
| opinion is there is simply no easy pain free way to do fraud
| auditing and that's that. I just recently took a professional
| PeopleCert exam online with a guy watching me through my webcam
| in a closed room I had to display in advance etc and temp
| installed some invasive application. So what ? If there was a
| better way to deal with the unfortunate fact that some people
| will cheat then I would be all for it but just getting all shook
| up about a temporary set of specific restrictions for a singular
| type milestone event is a little unrealistic in my book.
|
| But I am glad suing this kid is blowing up in their face.
| [deleted]
| varenc wrote:
| The HN post you mentioned now seems to be merged with this one.
| Very confusingly. This puts yours and other comments way out of
| context.
|
| Why do the mods/dang do this? Is it just to avoid multiple
| stories on the same topic on the home page? There's got to be a
| better solution than this. At least providing some sort of log
| of changes would be helpful.
| chmaynard wrote:
| I've been encouraging HN to merge comments on duplicate posts
| for a long time. If that's what happened here, I applaud it.
| rapnie wrote:
| dang has given an explanation on the merge
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26907466
| moron4hire wrote:
| Maybe catching a few cheaters here and there isn't worth
| implementing The Panopticon for everyone else.
| fastball wrote:
| The problem is that cheating (if allowed) does not end up
| being a few people here and there.
| [deleted]
| moron4hire wrote:
| Even if I were to believe you, so what? So a person gets a
| degree they don't deserve. Now they have all this student
| loan debt they can't pay off because they can't get and
| keep a job in their field because they didn't actually
| study.
|
| Or they do get a job and are able to keep it down, in which
| case, so what if they cheated? They're clearly capable. Let
| them keep doing the job.
|
| My solution: get rid of degrees completely. Can't cheat if
| there's no test to cheat on.
| wayne-li2 wrote:
| I actually agree with you here, our incentive structures
| are flawed for sure.
|
| The problem is, hiring is expensive, hiring mistakes are
| expensive, and new grads are a combination of "lack of
| signals" and "need lots of time to pan out". The result
| is companies look for any possible signal - this more or
| less becomes a degree, and within the degree, the GPA.
| Thus incentivizing the student to get the degree with a
| high GPA by any means necessary, and companies will still
| give you a year to ramp up.
| UglyToad wrote:
| I'm probably just agreeing with your agreement but being
| pedantic but.
|
| Isn't effectively the entire problem with
| university/college in the current age that instead of its
| original purpose it's treated as a hiring filter for
| companies. Shouldn't we do anything we can to
| disincentivize use of college degrees as a signal for
| hiring?
|
| Like, doing the job of software development a degree is
| completely irrelevant. Computer science degrees shouldn't
| be 4(?) year long coding bootcamps, they should be about
| computer science for people who are interested in
| computer science. (disclaimer I never did a computer
| science degree, I did chemistry but I felt the quality of
| the degree was similarly afflicted). Anything we can do
| to make college as a hiring signal worse for companies is
| better for the quality of education, better for people's
| financial health and better for equality.
|
| The entire system is rotten and we need to bring the
| edifice crashing down, not make life easier for companies
| who are about the only entities with money. You know what
| costs a lot more than hiring relative to the entity's
| financial means? A student loan [citation needed I
| guess].
| fastball wrote:
| I don't disagree with you, but our _current system_ that
| we have in reality does not handle things well if you
| just allow rampant cheating.
|
| Restructuring is a good idea but you don't want to throw
| the baby out with the bathwater in the meantime.
| wayne-li2 wrote:
| The cynic in me believes without any disincentive to
| cheating, "few cheaters" become "almost all participants".
|
| I was a TA in a prominent CS university. We used software
| that would compare everyone's submissions to see if things
| were copied. The penalty for getting caught was high, and we
| made it clear to everyone that this software was, while not
| perfect, capable of detecting simple tricks (like copying
| code and renaming variables).
|
| Nonetheless, after every project, I would go and have to
| manually review all the cases. There would be 10-20 severe
| cases, about 30 moderate cases, and then about 50 cases where
| some things might look suspicious but there wasn't enough
| proof to act.
|
| Overall, we would penalize about 20-50 people per project
| (granted this is a class size of over 1000). But still, 2-5%
| would still cheat despite our repeated warnings that we could
| catch them.
|
| I shudder to think what would happen if we had no way to
| detect.
|
| While TAing there, I was also a student. Cheating was pretty
| much the norm. I was always a cynic after those experiences.
| elliekelly wrote:
| > But still, 2-5% would still cheat despite our repeated
| warnings that we could catch them.
|
| There is research that the certainty of getting caught is
| the strongest deterrent (as opposed to the severity of the
| consequences _if_ someone gets caught) and yet, assuming
| the software was as good as you suggest and assuming the
| students were adequately and repeatedly warned, 2-5% of the
| class _still_ chose to cheat. Which begs the question: why
| would so many (presumably logical and rational) students
| take such a risk despite knowing they were substantially
| likely to be caught?
|
| I have to imagine those students, for whatever reason, felt
| cheating was their best (or perhaps only) option.
|
| The cynic in me believes we've created a system that
| _strongly_ incentivizes getting an expensive piece of paper
| with a value completely divorced from what it was intended
| to represent: having studied.
| saruken wrote:
| But isn't "cheating" the norm in real-world jobs too? It's
| rare that I or any of the developers I work with complete a
| task without looking something up or asking a question of
| someone more knowledgeable.
|
| Seems to me the problem is how the assignments are posed -
| If the goal is to create a program that does X, and I can
| do that by copy/pasting or tweaking something from
| StackOverflow, have I not completed the goal? But if what
| you actually want is for me to _understand all of the
| principles behind a program that does X_ , well that's a
| very different thing. And the assignment should be set up
| differently.
|
| It feels like Proctorio and similar solutions are treating
| a symptom of the real problem, which is that the way a lot
| of higher learning is administered is inherently flawed.
| And until we fix that, won't cheating and cheating
| detection be the same Coast-Guard-vs-smugglers arms race
| it's always been?
| Lev1a wrote:
| > But isn't "cheating" the norm in real-world jobs too?
| It's rare that I or any of the developers I work with
| complete a task without looking something up or asking a
| question of someone more knowledgeable.
|
| One part of one my math exams in a previous university
| was (I feel like) modeled around this idea, where you
| were allowed to use a non-programmable (graphical)
| calculator and to bring basically any written material in
| to help yourself solve that part of the exam. Of course
| there were some restrictions: none of the solutions to
| the various homework assignments etc. That part alone for
| the ~2 hours of the whole exam would've been nice if
| there hadn't been the other half: no calculator, no
| helping materials apart from those maybe provided on the
| exam sheet. This part (of course) was the one containing
| the questions about specific definitions, one or more
| things to write a proof on and calculating things like
| double and/or triple integrals, deriving complicated
| expressions.
|
| In other courses (Databases 1 and 2, Web Dev) at my
| 2nd/current uni with some specific professors there was a
| clause that you could bring with you help in the form of:
| "DIN A4 sheet paper, hand-writing on one side, non-
| copied" and the professor or the TA if one was present
| would pass through the rows during the exam to check the
| student ID, have the student sign a presence sheet and
| whether the help sheet was compliant (also if maybe there
| were some answers to the exam), signed that help sheet
| and would collect that together with the exam upon
| completion/timeout.
|
| Although our course was only ~80-90 people at the start
| of my first and ~30 at the start of my current uni, so we
| had to be thrown together with some other
| disciplines/outlines ("Studiengange" in Germany) for
| exams of the same courses to have an exam that made sense
| for everyone.
| phildenhoff wrote:
| Those are different lawsuits. The other (previous) article was
| for Ian Linkletter.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I'm sorry but lock the computer down and have a proctor. It's
| worked for hundreds of years. Teaching younger people that it's
| okay to be surveilled 24/7 is frankly BS and we need a new
| Digital Bill of Rights as of yesterday. Humans deserve dignity,
| if you treat everyone like a criminal they start to feel like one
| and drive up their anxiety levels Also fuck Proctorio and its ilk
| driverdan wrote:
| Proctorio is on my red flag list.
|
| If any current or former employees of a flagged company apply for
| a job on my team I expect their reason for leaving to be for
| ethical reasons, or for them to tell me about how they had
| ethical problems with what the company was doing. If they don't I
| immediately remove them from the candidate pool.
| hyperpape wrote:
| I'm conflicted about this.
|
| I agree with you that I think working for this company and not
| having an ethical objection is a red flag.
|
| But the interview environment is fraught. Is it really obvious
| that no candidate would think "this question is a trap"?
| There's a lot of interview advice that says your answer to this
| question can only ever hurt you, so be as bland as possible.
|
| Some employers want compliant employees who don't rock the
| boat. Some employers will hear complaints about proctorio's
| software and hear "SJW shit".
|
| I don't want to work for those kinds of employers, but I
| sympathize with people who want a job and might fear that their
| honest answer could be used against them.
|
| Ultimately, I think I have to come down on this policy being a
| bad idea, however understandable.
| ivan888 wrote:
| Yeah it's a tricky area. In multiple cases I have been
| tempted to badmouth someone or a company in an interview type
| context, but have almost always been glad that I avoided it
| and just found a more subdued (but still honest) way to
| express my feelings.
| [deleted]
| driverdan wrote:
| > There's a lot of interview advice that says your answer to
| this question can only ever hurt you, so be as bland as
| possible.
|
| Seems like terrible advice to me. If someone gives me bland
| answers I'll assume they're a bland person.
|
| > Some employers want compliant employees who don't rock the
| boat.
|
| Good for them, I do. I want people who are willing to stand
| up for what is right and say "no".
| [deleted]
| nickysielicki wrote:
| > Good for them, I do. I want people who are willing to
| stand up for what is right and say "no".
|
| See, the problem is you _think_ you 're selecting for
| ethics when in reality you're just selecting for how easily
| they can read you and the rest of the room.
| driverdan wrote:
| That's all interview questions.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > If someone gives me bland answers I'll assume they're a
| bland person.
|
| The issue is that plenty of interviewers are bland.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| There is no upside to speaking ill of your previous company.
| In no particular order, your potential employer might
| think...
|
| ... that you'll badmouth them in the future too,
|
| ... that you are the type of person who will cause drama by
| speaking behind other people's backs,
|
| ... that you don't know how to accept and recognize your
| mistakes ("it's not me, it's them")
|
| ... that you are not as nice to work with as any of those
| other candidates who didn't badmouth their previous employee
| when given a chance
|
| ... and so on. The interview process is biased enough against
| you to be worth the risk, specially when there's so little to
| be gained from it.
| throwwawayyy wrote:
| I was an early employee at a Proctorio competitor. We actually
| beat them to market but they managed to get more market
| traction than we did.
|
| In complete transparency, I left because I didn't get paid
| enough - not because of ethical reasons.
|
| Just-out-of-college me was sold hard on the argument: " _Good_
| students who work hard and don 't cheat are getting screwed
| over by _bad_ students - cheaters. There is no solution for
| this in online classes. We need to build one "
|
| In hindsight, it is crazy how long a simple argument, being
| ethical itself, can rationalize other shitty decisions and
| compromises. It's kind of like a religion or a cult when you
| are in it. Constantly surrounded by other people who are
| drinking the same koolaid as you. You might feel a little
| uneasy, but hive-mind grabs ahold of you and when you see other
| devotees to the company vision, it soothes that uneasiness.
| Which no...is not good.
|
| It wasn't until I was no longer an employee that I saw things
| much more clearly. In the "name of justice", we built an
| unethical product that fucked over many students. Plain and
| simple.
|
| You know the phrase.
|
| _The road to hell... Good intentions..._
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Ah yes, screw those people for... needing to pay the bills.
| tingol wrote:
| Someone working at a high profile software company has
| problems paying bills? Yeah sure...
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Even if nobody wanted to work for them, they'd just offer
| even better salaries until people did.
|
| Punish the politicians who allow this unethical software.
| Punish the CEOs and managers who make it happen. But don't
| punish the guys on the ground just making a living.
| hobs wrote:
| "Superior Orders" has been a tried and tested excuse - it
| doesn't work.
|
| If your shitty software harms people you don't just get
| to throw up your arms and shrug.
| macintux wrote:
| There's a _huge_ gap between concentration camps and
| software that can be misused by administrators to wrongly
| punish students.
|
| If I had to feed my kids and had no other options, I
| wouldn't shoot civilians, but I might well work for a
| software company where I had qualms about the output.
|
| In fact, it's hard (probably impossible) to find _any_
| large company that doesn't have some negative impact on
| the world.
| hobs wrote:
| Yes there is, just like there's a huge difference in the
| amount of disdain I would apply between those two
| activities.
|
| Either way you dont get to eject your agency and
| involvement.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > Even if nobody wanted to work for them, they'd just
| offer even better salaries until people did.
|
| Well then that is all the more justification for
| discriminating against them, for ethical reasons, right?
|
| They were highly compensated. Therefore, there is no
| problem with discriminating against them for ethical
| reasons.
| newsclues wrote:
| Is it possible that that employer is the first one to give
| a struggling person a job?
| inetknght wrote:
| People come from all walks of life.
|
| You should learn some empathy.
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| It can be pretty hard to get, for example, visa
| sponsorship. A pariah company might be the only option
| which allows some people to meet their goals.
| kulig wrote:
| Just doing my job, said the nazi guards.
| driverdan wrote:
| If they're applying for a new job it seems like that's
| exactly what they're trying to do.
| [deleted]
| edm0nd wrote:
| You should not be letting your bias and personal opinions
| remove hiring candidates.
| 2ion wrote:
| Yeah sure. I also discriminate against people because I don't
| like the color of their skin while feeling high and mighty.
| What you're saying is, that if company A bids more salary than
| company B, you reserve the prerogative to judge that anybody
| should join company B because you deem the totally legal
| company A bad, even though the principles of the labour market
| dictate that if company A furthers the welfare of the worker
| more he should join company A. This means you're denying the
| validity of a mechanism that you as the hiring manager --
| proudly calling yourself leadership in your bio -- are
| exploiting yourself every day to influence the commitment of
| your own employees. Pretty hypocritic. Chase the money but only
| if I want you to! -- you wish.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Unless those ethical concerns _directly_ impact your own team,
| then that 's deeply unprofessional and unethical on your part,
| and you should reconsider your priorities.
|
| Who appointed you moral judge of others? You discriminating
| against candidates based on their moral views _unrelated to
| their work_ is no different from discriminating based on
| religion or political party affiliation.
|
| It is legitimately within your purview to ensure that that a
| candidate doesn't have moral objections to the work they'll be
| expected to do, as well as look for legitimate _objective_ red
| flags such as previously embezzling from an employer.
|
| But the idea that you'd appoint yourself as some kind of moral
| purity guardian is deeply objectionable in a world where people
| legitimately disagree in good faith over ethical issues. You
| should re-examine this.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > Who appointed you moral judge of others?
|
| Well, they got appointed the judge of others when they were
| put in charge of figuring out if it would be a good idea to
| hire someone for the company.
|
| Having moral red flags is a perfectly valid thing for a
| company to be concerned about. Immoral employees are at risk
| of doing bad things, and can hurt the company.
|
| > based on their moral views unrelated to their work
|
| It is pretty related to the work though. It is directly about
| the moral decisions that they made, while at work.
| Specifically it would be for working for that company that is
| doing immoral things.
| mhuffman wrote:
| Hey, don't you know that "culture fit" means hating all the
| same things that I hate?
| mdoms wrote:
| It's unethical to hire people who align with your (and your
| company's) values?
| crazygringo wrote:
| To _only_ hire such people, or give them preference? Of
| course it is.
|
| This is precisely why hiring for "cultural fit", very often
| also called "company culture" or "company values", often
| leads to racial or other discrimination. Because different
| groups hold different values. E.g. white guys from
| expensive colleges hiring people who "align with their
| values" can result in _deeply_ discriminatory behavior --
| racially, culturally, socioeconomically, etc. -- even if
| that 's not the intention.
| driverdan wrote:
| > Unless those ethical concerns directly impact your own team
|
| Privacy issues impact every team. The threat of SLAPP
| lawsuits impacts every person willing to exercise their
| freedom of speech.
|
| If someone has worked for a company that does privacy
| invasive unethical things then it's reasonable to assume
| they'd be fine with doing privacy invasive unethical things
| somewhere else.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's up to a company to set its own policies around privacy
| and ensure employees follow them.
|
| The fact that an employee worked somewhere with different,
| or opposed, privacy policies, doesn't mean they're unable
| to follow yours, any more than the fact that working at a
| company that used a 4-space-width tab to indent code means
| they're unable to follow your guideline of two-space
| indents.
|
| What does it matter if an employee would be fine doing what
| _you_ consider to be privacy invasive things at another
| company? If they can do the job you expect them to,
| following _your_ company 's privacy policies, then that's
| _all_ that matters. Otherwise, their personal moral compass
| is absolutely _none_ of your business, and it 's
| offensively paternalistic to suggest otherwise.
| bena wrote:
| I don't think that's entirely fair to the candidates. I don't
| know your stance on Proctorio and I'm not going to air dirty
| laundry to an effective stranger. And any company or hiring
| manager who tries to bait me into bad-mouthing a company I've
| worked at gets a red flag from me.
| yhoneycomb wrote:
| Agreed. An employer could just as easily say they don't want
| anyone who bad mouths their previous employers because it
| reflects poorly on them.
|
| Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Only if the goal is simply "get a job, anywhere". If the
| interview is to mutually figure out if you should work for
| the company, there is no such thing as a damned if you do,
| damned if you don't; all it can be is a "they care about
| what I care about" or "I don't want to work there".
| yhoneycomb wrote:
| Being able to pick your job that way is a privilege, and
| it certainly isn't granted to everyone in all fields
| lostcolony wrote:
| Hence my first statement. That said, the whole context
| was about a software company.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Sure it is. My first job outta college was for a defense
| contractor. It's perfectly fair to ask me why I left, or even
| more pointedly, "how do you feel about working for a defense
| contractor?"
|
| It's not an invitation to badmouth, it IS an invitation to
| discuss the ethical concerns involved, and why you found it
| acceptable (even if it's just that it was a meal ticket until
| you found something you objected to less)
| crosvenir wrote:
| Out of curiosity, how _do_ you feel about having worked for
| a defense contractor and, separately, working for one
| again? What tradeoffs have you experienced (good and bad)
| moving from defense to non-defense industry?
|
| I'm personally beginning to think there is a crossroads
| coming up for me and would value your perspectives if you
| have time to share. Thanks!
| lostcolony wrote:
| So this was about a decade ago and only a couple years of
| my life; I really wouldn't want to misrepresent my
| experience at the time as being reflective of what it's
| like now. So I'll just touch on the things that likely
| are the same now.
|
| The bidding process for defense contracts means a lot of
| Big Design Up Front, and an inability to change things
| easily once signed, means that though there are attempts
| at being agile, they likely involve only the technical
| delivery side (CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, etc),
| not the interaction with product and other stakeholders
| (no fail fast and pivot, real MVP, etc). I know there's
| been some attempts at moving in this direction, but I
| honestly can't see it happening, since it's innately at
| odds with the short term incentives that Congress has
| (and the Pentagon operates under).
|
| The place I worked at had decent perks, but nothing like
| Silicon Valley tech companies. We had a cafeteria and a
| Starbucks in the building, but neither was subsidized.
| Vending machine snacks, again, at cost. Pay and benefits
| were reasonably competitive for the area as best I could
| tell (but didn't look that much; when I was ready to move
| on I wanted different geography as well).
|
| General culture was fairly laid back; only the month or
| so before something was due did it feel crunchy, and then
| only for certain people. A lot of dead weight, but a lot
| of job security, especially for those who delivered.
|
| The projects could be interesting. I worked on a
| distributed data visualization system that got me exposed
| to the CAP theorem back in 2011ish, which helped set the
| trajectory of my career, though I didn't realize it at
| the time. I also encountered people who said, half
| jokingly, that their skills had stagnated to the point
| they weren't hireable elsewhere. I doubt that as true,
| but certainly at the time there was work on technical
| things that didn't translate outside of defense (but many
| of the skills did even if not the technology).
|
| In terms of would I go back to the defense industry?
| Probably not if I have a choice. While there are a lot of
| problems in public sector tech companies too, and many
| with the same issues as defense contractors, there are
| more of them, and the constraints placed on them tend not
| to feel as daunting or arbitrary as some of the ones
| placed on defense companies. Ultimately the impression I
| got was that defense companies tend to be very stable and
| predictable, and I just don't appreciate that as much as
| I appreciate being able to suggest changes and seek
| improvements.
|
| Approaching this the other way - stepping into my first
| public sector company, I got to appreciate being agile,
| actually working with stakeholders to understand and
| address their needs directly. I got to make technology
| choices with the team based on what would address the
| problem the best (and that we were interested in
| supporting) instead of being told what they were based on
| what the contract said. And I got to work on smaller more
| focused teams. Longer term, I've gotten better
| compensation I feel like (though haven't directly
| compared; is there more than just a ~15% bonus offered at
| defense companies now?), the feeling of a lot more things
| 'done', and the ability to change jobs (without having to
| change geographic locations) when I felt like I needed a
| change.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| I'm not sure whether I can take this statement at its word.
| If that's the response when questioned about working at a
| company whose entire purpose is purportedly ethical, I would
| strongly reconsider your position. There are many corporate
| cultures where this kind of apathy and whatabout-ism would be
| considered a red flag. That would certainly be the case for
| any process I've run.
| bena wrote:
| Let me put it this way, asking why you left an employer is
| fine. Expecting a certain answer for a subjective situation
| and rejecting an applicant because they didn't give you
| exactly that answer is not exactly a healthy behavior.
|
| I'm here for a job, not to play weird mind games.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Bingo. If you discard my resume because I refuse to
| badmouth a previous employer in an interview then that's
| just a sign that I'd probably rather not work for you.
|
| And as other people mentioned, _especially_ in an
| interview where you 're being intensely judged and have
| to give second thought to everything you say, I'm not
| about to give anything other than a neutral answer that's
| supposed to appease most people.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Then why ask? All job interviews are weird mind games. My
| assumption when I'm asked why I left my last employer is
| that they're looking to second-guess my other answers
| based on what I say, or checking to see if I'm a
| disagreeable person who is willing to badmouth somebody
| _generous enough_ to employ me. This is just taking the
| latter in the opposite direction.
| bena wrote:
| There are plenty of reasons to move employers that
| doesn't involve saying that company you were working for
| is unethical. You could say that you've reached your
| ceiling and are looking for the next step up. That's a
| fair one. The company you are leaving may not be able to
| promote you. You're looking to work on new projects and
| your current company is just maintaining and/or adding
| features. That's also fair.
|
| > checking to see if I'm a disagreeable person who is
| willing to badmouth somebody generous enough to employ
| me.
|
| Ah, but you see, the guy I originally replied to is
| checking to see if you're willing to badmouth companies
| he dislikes. And if you don't, he will dismiss your
| application. It's an unspoken rule you can violate
| without ever knowing you're in violation of it and has a
| huge affect on the outcome of the scenario.
|
| No reasonable interviewer is going to put you in the
| position of having to cast aspersions on a previous
| employer. That's a minefield for all sorts of reasons.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| I'm not sure why it's so hard to say "Yes, company X did
| a lot of things well (Y, Z, AA) but could have improved
| in sectors AB, AC, AD." Actually, I do understand why --
| you may be risk averse, and the fear of losing your job
| or rocking the boat precludes you from making a critique
| even if other people get hurt. Maybe in part because you
| too have mouths to feed and folks who will get hurt if
| you do so. So you downvote and make up excuses for it.
| After all, that's easier than addressing the cognitive
| dissonance, no?
|
| It's understandable, but I still can't agree that it
| leaves you without some amount of ethical culpability.
| Maybe significantly less than an executive. But still,
| some. It's more understandable for roles that don't have
| as strong a position in the labor market as engineers,
| but I find it a little bit less so for myself, as someone
| who works in engineering.
|
| I think you (and anyone else downvoting) should read
| Eichmann in Jerusalem [1]. It's about this exact ethical
| quandary. I would hope it would change your opinion on
| these things, but if it doesn't, agree to disagree. And
| certainly don't expect any sympathy from me or the rest
| of society.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem
| driverdan wrote:
| There's a difference between bad-mouthing your employer and
| discussing ethical issues that are public knowledge.
| AYBABTME wrote:
| I wonder if anyone ever reverse-SLAPPd the humans behind the
| SLAPP suits.
| everyone wrote:
| They actually called their software Proctorio !??!?!
|
| From the Greek "anus"
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/procto-#English
|
| I am dying lol
| gambiting wrote:
| No, it's from the word "Proctor" which is frequently a person
| overseeing an exam:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proctor
| SEMW wrote:
| ...Or, just maybe, from the English word "proctor", meaning
| someone who invigilates an exam.
|
| Which is from the Latin "procurator" meaning overseer,
| unrelated to the Greek procto-
| everyone wrote:
| Yeah i found that..
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/proctor
|
| Though in fairness proctor / procurator are extremely
| antiquated english words, that have survived in common usage
| only in the US for some reason.
| everyone wrote:
| I reckon the majority of english speakers who read
| 'Proctorio' will immediately think anus.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I recon the majority of _english_ speakers will not think
| of the Greek word for anus. Especially educated English
| speakers who have had exams proctored before.
| Smaug123 wrote:
| Google Trends: "proctor" is dramatically more common than
| "proctologist". I'd go so far as to say you're
| objectively wrong.
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=proctor
| ,pr...
| jessaustin wrote:
| Isn't that a measure of how often words are searched?
| Everyone knows what a proctologist is, and no one wants
| to learn any more about them than they absolutely have to
| learn. A comedic trope is for a sadistic doctor to
| brutally thrust his hand into a nitrile glove and ask if
| some poor sap is ready for his exam. On the other hand,
| those with college degrees (a minority of the population)
| have heard the word "proctor" on eight different
| occasions in their entire lives.
| yunohn wrote:
| I think the majority of English speakers are completely
| unaware of this meaning. "Proctor" on the other hand, is
| something they would've heard of in an exam setting.
| festive-minsky wrote:
| Mabye I'm in the minority; I'd never heard of a
| "Proctor", but I have heard of a "Proctologist", which is
| an anus doctor
| scbrg wrote:
| Is this one of those regional things? Is the same word
| used throughout the entire English speaking world?
|
| Not a native English speaker myself, so my association
| was to the Greek word as well.
| mkl wrote:
| Proctor is in wide use in education, not just in the US.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0140000/
| heraclius wrote:
| Scotland's Procurators Fiscal are fairly important and
| frequently referred to.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Please send the proctor to my home, I'm cramming for my final
| exam and need some help invigilating my webcam...
|
| https://www.hemantmedicam.com/product/usb-video-proctoscope/
| [deleted]
| northrup wrote:
| It's as if nobody has ever read George Orwell's 1984: "It was
| terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in
| any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest
| thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of
| anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself - anything that carried
| with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to
| hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face
| (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example)
| was itself a punishable offense."
| jcelerier wrote:
| > It's as if nobody has ever read George Orwell's 1984
|
| no, they read it and think "how can we do even better"
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post this sort of cheap flamebait crack here. It
| makes discussions poorer.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| toyg wrote:
| Orwell is the modern Machiavelli. In about 100 years, people
| will be wondering if _1984_ was satire /criticism or an
| actual blueprint for effective government in the digital age,
| in the same way the real aim of _Il Principe_ has been
| endlessly debated for centuries.
| bostik wrote:
| I came up with one of EFF Finland's t-shirt slogans:
| _Orwell was an optimist_.
|
| Of course, I was soon outdone. It didn't take long for the
| adapted version to surface: _Orwell was an amateur_. Which,
| I have to admit, is an apt description of our times.
| Rochus wrote:
| In contrast, Orwell's fundamental rejection of the
| totalitarian surveillance society is well known and
| documented. Even in 100 years, those who are interested can
| read it all.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Unless, of course, such documentation will be surpressed.
| Which is pretty Orwellian, in fact, such operations are
| the protagonist's job.
| bayindirh wrote:
| The irony is, 1984 is used as a manual of sorts by some.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Not if it gets Fahrenheit 451'd :-)
| maxk42 wrote:
| Machiavelli gets a bad rap. I read Il Principe and the
| primary message is moderation. I dunno how people contorted
| that into evil scheming.
| csomar wrote:
| They just now found the tools to enforce it.
| dang wrote:
| Related past threads:
|
| _Students of color are getting flagged because testing software
| can't see them_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26745582 -
| April 2021 (21 comments)
|
| _Student Surveillance Vendor Proctorio Files SLAPP Lawsuit to
| Silence a Critic_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26250800
| - Feb 2021 (40 comments)
|
| _Parents demand academic publisher drop Proctorio surveillance
| tech_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25506007 - Dec 2020
| (106 comments)
|
| _Proctorio used DMCA to take down a student's critical tweets_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25002730 - Nov 2020 (116
| comments)
|
| _An ed-tech specialist spoke out about proctoring software. Now
| he's being sued_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872084
| - Oct 2020 (6 comments)
|
| _EduTech Spyware Is Still Spyware: Proctorio Edition_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24450248 - Sept 2020 (9
| comments)
| cycomanic wrote:
| So lots of people commenting that they don't have an issue with
| such software. Fine, but that's an entirely different debate.
|
| This is about the company sueing someone for criticising the
| software, by detailing how it is supposed to work. So even if we
| accept that we need such software, do we really want to go down
| the path that software companies can sue people for talking about
| how it works and criticising them?
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| Agreed the problem here is the lawsuit. They should have just
| ignored this guy and gone on with life. Now the they got the
| EFF to deal with and it serves them right.
|
| On the software side there is no easy way to do fraud auditing
| and that's that. I just recently took a professional PeopleCert
| exam online with a guy watching me through my webcam in a
| closed room I had to display in advance etc and temp installed
| some invasive application. So what ? If there was a better way
| to deal with the unfortunate fact that some people will cheat
| then I would be all for it but just getting all shook up about
| a temporary set of specific restrictions for a singular type
| milestone event is a little unrealistic in my book.
| zibzab wrote:
| Note also that the original lawsuit was for Ian tweeting about
| their public YouTube videos.
|
| How can this garbage lawauit be allowed to go on and cost a man
| $100.000 in lawyer fees??
| worik wrote:
| Because the rules are made by lawyers
| elliekelly wrote:
| By lobbyists*
| draw_down wrote:
| Many of whom went to law school... come on
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Maybe... But in the US we have anti-SLAPP laws written by
| lawyers in a lot of states. Any California court would toss
| this shit out in a second.
| koonsolo wrote:
| and because it's in US.
| ayewo wrote:
| Small correction: he's being sued (by a US company) in
| Canada, under a new Canadian law.
| koonsolo wrote:
| Aha, that might change it indeed. Do they have the "loser
| pays the costs" policy or not?
| ayewo wrote:
| Kind of.
|
| According to the EFF [1], he might be able to recover his
| legal costs: " But Proctorio's bad behavior has inspired
| a broad community of people to fight for better student
| privacy rights, and hundreds of people donated to
| Linkletter's defense fund, which raised more than
| $50,000. _And the PPPA gives him a greater chance of
| getting his fees back._ "
|
| 1: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/student-
| surveillance-v...
| input_sh wrote:
| SLAPP suits are absolutely a thing in the EU as well.
| christophilus wrote:
| I haven't seen anyone commenting in defense of Proctorio. To be
| honest, Proctorio seems indefensible. I hope this student makes
| bank.
|
| To your second point, the US legal system is extremely
| litigious, so I don't know how you turn that ship around. I
| agree that this should be thrown out as a frivolous suit and
| the student should be compensated for damages-- legal fees,
| time, psychological stress, etc.
| Hiopl wrote:
| Might have been different hours ago, but now I see plenty of
| comments saying "but it's necessary".
| qmmmur wrote:
| If anyone here works for Proctorio. Please quit. Just quit.
| BigGreenTurtle wrote:
| Looks like they outsource most of their company to Serbia, so I
| doubt many will see this.
| barbazoo wrote:
| So many organizations you could say that for. They're probably
| paying people enough to keep them "happy".
| kasperni wrote:
| Background: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/student-
| surveillance-v...
| squarefoot wrote:
| The EFF took the student defense and sued back Proctorio
| yesterday. Good!
|
| https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-sues-proctorio-behalf...
|
| https://www.eff.org/document/johnson-v-proctorio-complaint
| dang wrote:
| (This was originally posted to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26900217, which we merged
| hither.)
| input_sh wrote:
| This isn't the same, it's two different lawsuits.
|
| One is for a student by the name of Ian Linkletter from
| British Columbia.
|
| EFF is suing on behalf of Erik Johnson from Miami.
|
| The only thing they have in common is Proctorio.
| dang wrote:
| Ah--sorry, I definitely missed that. I doubt that the
| distinction makes much difference for HN purposes, though,
| since threads on either one of those will fuse into the
| same discussion.
| 6510 wrote:
| There was a time when calculators were not allowed. The solution
| was that since people can always have access to calculators they
| should be allowed to use them. I think that should work, if a
| student can use a computer to answer a question he can always use
| a computer to answer that question. It should be encouraged to do
| so, the school should make an effort providing- and keeping the
| answers online and available for download.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I remember a prof telling the class "if you can figure out how
| to program your calculator to do this then go for it". I
| learned how to program my calculator in that class and not much
| else.
| bagacrap wrote:
| this clearly doesn't work because most test questions for
| students are trivially Google-able. So then tests as they
| currently exist would not be able to differentiate someone who
| has studied and internalized the material from someone who
| Googles quickly. Tests would have to be re-written to require a
| lot more creativity, which is not only hard to do as a test
| writer, it's harder to grade and ultimately for students,
| requires even more effort (compared to rote memorization of
| facts or rules). So I don't think most students or instructors
| love this idea.
| 6510 wrote:
| It just struck me that memorized facts and rules are
| extremely hard to update.
| 6510 wrote:
| Yes ofcourse, you would have to adapt the test. Make it more
| goal oriented. What are we testing for anyway? Ability to do
| something? Looking up or memorizing things is different from
| applying them.
| unixhero wrote:
| You mean the ass company?
| plank_time wrote:
| This is something that Student Unions around the country should
| pick up and launch protests against. Refusing the take tests
| administered by Proctorio and having very loud protests across
| the country would be a perfect way to drive them out of business.
| helloguillecl wrote:
| I have a question for anyone who has seen similar situations.
| (I'm 35+ years old and have never work at a corporation except
| for some small gigs when I was 18, so I'm really ignorant of how
| these companies and internal decision making work)
|
| Why in the world would a company sue a critic, under weak legal
| arguments, thus buying themselves this kind of terrible negative
| publicity? Who will trust/like/or want to be associated with them
| now?
|
| I guess that this is to suppress criticism, but it must be
| expensive and difficult to do the same in every jurisdiction in
| which critics pop up, so it looks like a dumb strategy (let alone
| immoral).
|
| I mean the guy seems to be educated and good citizen, works at a
| Uni, you can publicly read his views on twitter. THe kind of
| person I tend to sympathize with. Without knowing who Proctorio
| is, I imagine them being the kind of company I don't want to be
| associated with, just because of this.
|
| I don't understand.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's terrorism. You know that if they sued him, they would
| definitely sue you. He'll probably get his costs covered by
| donations in the end (after a lot of stress), but you won't.
|
| In that way they also create a floor of wealth and/or
| visibility for people to realistically qualify to criticize
| them. Those people are more likely to be investors than
| critics.
|
| It also proves to investors that they can defend themselves and
| are not risky.
| atdrummond wrote:
| This actually seems pretty effective to me. I now know that if
| I criticize Proctorio, I am likely on the hook for six figures
| in legal fees. That alone would be enough to scare off many
| people who would otherwise feel inclined to critique the
| product/company.
|
| In fact, winning the case may not even be that important to the
| firm.
| helloguillecl wrote:
| But for example in my home country, there's no way I could be
| sued for this. I mean I could, but if I was, the legal fees
| would likely need to be assumed by the entity making this
| kind of ridiculous lawsuit.
|
| There are too many like me, in different jurisdictions, who
| cannot be silenced like this.
|
| And I'm still in awe that a modern democracy like Canada,
| would allow their citizens to be threatened using their legal
| system. It seems corrupt.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Sure, you could scare some others into not criticizing you.
| But this case is going to be mainstream news now, while
| before their case only a small number of people would have
| read the tweets.
|
| And I think losing this case could get very expensive if the
| defendant manages to convince the judge it's a SLAPP case?
| anarazel wrote:
| Anti-SLAPP statues aren't available everywhere in the US
| (nor I think I'm Canada). Importantly, there is none
| federally. Although sometimes state statutes can be used in
| federal court.
| input_sh wrote:
| SLAPP suits (acronym for Strategic Lawsuits Against Public
| Participation) are designed to shut up critics, plain and
| simple.
|
| They're not designed to be won, they're designed to be an
| annoyance to those that are being sued, dragged on as much as
| possible, and incur as many legal fees for the defendant as
| possible.
|
| The end goal is simply for other people's self-censorship to
| kick in. As in, when other people want to criticise Proctorio,
| there's a chance they're gonna stumble upon this lawsuit and
| decide against speaking up.
|
| Highly recommend this John Oliver video. In my opinion, it's
| the best one they've ever done with an absolutely magnificent
| ending: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN8bJb8biZU
| arp242 wrote:
| A lot of people will likely never have heard of this, and it's
| not like you or I as a student will have any choice in the
| matter anyway; it's not like we can choose to _not_ use this
| software. And universities generally don 't care.
|
| They have nothing to lose, except a comparatively small amount
| of money.
|
| Given that the CEO has previously gone on Reddit to bollock a
| student complaining and post part of the private support chat
| log, this may not necessarily be a rational decision. Sometimes
| just a single vindictive and nasty C-level person can set these
| things in motion.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| After my years in the industry, I have to say that it at
| least feels like there's an overrepresentation of this in the
| CEO population. But I'm not sure whether that's statistically
| the case, or whether it's more because, as you say, a single
| vindictive and nasty C-level can set these things in motion
| without necessarily any checks and balances to stop it -- and
| that more over, it's really really visible and memorable when
| it happens.
| arp242 wrote:
| To be honest in my experience a lot of people tend to be
| kind of vindictive. See some of the responses to the Linux
| bogus patch research for example, with people calling for
| things like "destroy their careers". That seems a bit
| overly vindictive to me; yes, they screwed up and yes,
| there should probably some consequences. But destroying the
| entire career of a 20-something? Sjeez...
|
| I've gotten death threats over email because ... reasons?
| These are of course entirely hollow threats, and it's easy
| to just shrug them off as "assholes internet crazies", but
| there's no reason you can't be crazy or an asshole _and_
| have a successful career.
|
| Add to this that a lot of these people put a lot of hard
| work in these kind of comparatively small businesses and
| that criticising the company _feels_ like an attack on you
| ... and you end up with this.
|
| The difference, as you say, is that most of us aren't
| actually in a position to enact these kind of things.
|
| Maybe there's also some bias towards certain personality
| types, I don't know.
| mint2 wrote:
| Backcountry is a generic term very commonly used in the
| outdoors community and features on numerous company names and
| products. The legal team of the online store backcountry
| decided they would sue any small company that had the generic
| term in their name.
|
| It's almost like suing any 'cafe' with 'cafe' their name after
| you start a business called 'cafe'. Except this is the type of
| corporate stoogery that much of the outdoors community
| particularly loathes.
|
| So yes the large outdoors company sicked corporate lawyers on
| small businesses who can't afford legal fights to bully them
| into removing the very common outdoors term from their name.
| This caused a huge backlash and boycott and is why I still
| refuse to shop there and instead shop at rei and others.
|
| That incident shows how corporate decision makers can be
| completely out of touch with their customers, their market, and
| reality.
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