[HN Gopher] Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring
___________________________________________________________________
Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 474 points
Date : 2021-07-09 08:08 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.baneproctoring.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.baneproctoring.com)
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I wonder to what degree is the cheating epidemics rooted in the
| fact that we have made a college title something of a Golden
| Calf. Or at least Bronze Calf with a thin gold finishing. (Even
| idol vendors cheat...)
|
| Too many people feel the push to have a degree even if their
| capabilities (not just raw intelligence, but things like grit)
| aren't on the necessary level. Then they resort to cheating.
| maweki wrote:
| We employed the method of mixing the order of questions, not
| giving question titles, and having a pool of subtly different
| questions (a negation or a different constant slipped in) in
| order to vastly increase the amount of necessary communication to
| collaborate.
|
| We had the students turn on their webcams just to discourage them
| sitting in the same room, which basically would negate our former
| efforts. Neither did we flag any behavior nor did we record
| anything or used some automatic software.
|
| I believe that worked quite nicely. A few cheaters were easily
| spotted when they had the wrong constants in their answer.
|
| I understand that not every course and exam style is suitable for
| that. But for our databases course, it was applicable.
|
| I think that this was not much more invasive than a traditional
| exam. Anything more, like watching the screen, or having audio,
| would make me feel uncomfortable.
| notenoughhorses wrote:
| This semester all my exams are open note, no proctoring. I
| think it is harder for professors to write a good exam this way
| (they need to make the questions things that test understanding
| instead of just recall.) I'm certainly doing way better with
| this method, but I think I am still learning the subject just
| as well as I would in the "old" method of stressful proctoring
| and memorization.
|
| It seems like with software, you could easily write math
| questions with different inputs, as you suggest (in fact, our
| homework software already did that for math last semester), but
| it seems that those tools are not built into the testing
| software so much. It definitely seems like a solvable issue
| though!
| pfortuny wrote:
| I (undegrad. prof. of mathematics, Spain) did "nothing" (see
| below) except prepare (not so) different exams.
|
| Same results as always. Exactly the same.
|
| Someone will have cheated. Well, as always: I am sure people
| cheat at my exams as they do at any other.
|
| I do not repent and I do not think I would do otherwise.
|
| *However*: I _DID_ spend a lot of time preparing materials,
| attending tutorials, replying to emails, correcting my lecture
| notes, recording videos...
|
| I honestly think my students acted in accordance to my
| attitude: if you are honest, we are going to be as well.
| Frost1x wrote:
| I had an very relaxed Indian professor who served as as
| department chair when I went to university and he always had
| open book/note quizzes, tests/exams with no restrictions.
| These exams weren't designed to be more difficult, some
| answers you could very quickly reference from the associated
| text, handouts, or your notes.
|
| People asked if he was concerned that people cheated or
| wouldn't learn anything and he once gave an insightful
| comment m that stuck with me: if people cheat, and they will,
| they're only cheating themselves.
|
| He was right because while almost everyone passed his
| classes, not everyone ended up with successful careers. If
| they did, they probably had to pickup the sort of knowledge
| he crafted together like a masterful chef and hand fed us.
| The education is the product, not the degree. The degree is
| often a necessary rubber stamp to get past the first
| interview filters but it's not going to help you in most
| positions for the subsequent interview or actual job demands.
| You're really only cheating yourself of the education because
| the education is the real product here.
|
| Things have changed a bit and you can find pretty much
| anything online readily, but you have to chop up the
| information, prep it, and craft it into a meal. Over time
| these skills improve and you too can become a knowledge chef
| but your (good) university programs give you the tools to
| become a knowledge chef in your field. They start you out as
| a cook who knows how to do certain things but they also give
| techniques you need to make your own new dishes. That's what
| you're paying for.
| nybble41 wrote:
| > He was right because while almost everyone passed his
| classes, not everyone ended up with successful careers.
|
| That can hurt the school's reputation if it becomes known
| for passing students who aren't actually prepared to do the
| work. Employers would prefer to recruit from schools where
| having a diploma actually means one is capable of doing
| what the job requires.
| undfg wrote:
| >We employed the method of mixing the order of questions, not
| giving question titles, and having a pool of subtly different
| questions (a negation or a different constant slipped in)
|
| What an awful burden to put on the shoulders of the already
| overworked and underpaid professors.
| notenoughhorses wrote:
| I pay over $6,000 a semester to attend a reasonably-priced
| state university. While the professors may be overworked and
| underpaid, from a student perspective, for the money I give
| the institution, the institution can invest a little in
| systems that do all this automatically.
|
| International students pay significantly more, and there are
| often 100 students or more in a class.
|
| So it's also not a great solution to put the burden of
| overworked professors onto the students by invading privacy
| and making them use poorly built suffrage to do so.
|
| The trouble is at the institution level.
| undfg wrote:
| I posted this during EU time; I understand they are ripping
| you off, but your comment does not apply to what I'm
| saying.
| lol768 wrote:
| Expensive fees are a thing in countries that observe
| timezones aligned with "EU time" too.
| maweki wrote:
| We did this through the exam software (Browser-Based).
| Everything not checked automatically (multiple choice) was
| sorted by question in the backend. We (the examiners) had all
| the information. It was just hidden from the students.
| legutierr wrote:
| Might I ask, was the exam software you used something you
| acquired from a third-party, or was it something you built
| yourselves? Would you recommend it? I have been
| dissatisfied with everything we have tried so far in my
| organization, and what you used sounds pretty good.
| maweki wrote:
| https://github.com/ILIAS-eLearning/ILIAS
|
| It's a whole platform for e-learning. The exam system is
| ... usable. The fine arts, law, and social silences like
| it very much, because long form answers are readable.
|
| The natural sciences with the math bit have to work
| around it. We manage.
| easton wrote:
| I don't know what you use for your LMS, but I know Canvas
| can do most of that as part of its Quiz system (randomize
| questions given, randomize constants and answers, etc).
| I'm sure Blackboard and moodle have something similar.
|
| https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-
| do-I...
| undfg wrote:
| Glad that you had an automatic system going, but most
| universities don't have one and can't fund its development,
| and wanting to shift this burden to professors is
| unreasonable.
| p49k wrote:
| Your stance is that it's unaffordable for a university to
| spend a small amount of money on randomized browser
| tests, therefore they should spend a large amount of
| money on intrusive spying software?
| undfg wrote:
| I don't believe a public institution would be able to
| come up with a system like this that works reasonably and
| have it developed in a reasonable amount of time within a
| reasonable budget.
| mkl wrote:
| Your belief is contradicted by reality. For example:
| https://stack-assessment.org/
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _I don 't believe a public institution would be able to
| come up with a system like this that works reasonably_
|
| I don't believe "e-proctoring" companies are capable of
| it, either. I got disqualified from an exam for five
| `onblur` events (while my screen was being recorded), and
| it kept counting while the "DO NOT CHEAT" lockout message
| was displayed; if that's "works reasonably" then I don't
| know what isn't.
| loktarogar wrote:
| In 2009 I developed a system like this as part of my
| course at the equivalent of a community college. The
| premise of the class was to develop a real world
| application employing the skills we had learned so far
| (project management, programming, etc). The whole class
| (10 people) participated in building this software.
|
| We spent 6 months on it and as far as I heard was still
| in use as late as 2015.
|
| You don't have to create a whole system; just a database
| that prepares variants of questions, and a method to put
| it into the existing exam software.
| mkl wrote:
| You are misinformed. Moodle (LMS) and STACK (maths quiz
| system with symbolic comparison etc.) are open source and
| fit that description.
| ShroudedNight wrote:
| > ...and wanting to shift this burden to professors is
| unreasonable.
|
| Why is it unreasonable? What level of duty do you
| perceive course instructors having to achieving positive
| outcomes for their students? Who is responsible for
| pushing improvements beyond the trough of the status quo?
| maweki wrote:
| In Germany we have multiple state-sponsored open-source
| e-learning platforms that basically all support
| examinations.
| tchalla wrote:
| It could also be a good argument to increase funding for
| professors and education.
| maeln wrote:
| I teached a C class during coronavirus lockdown in France and I
| also did something of the sort (having different question per
| student, mixing their order, etc).
|
| But I think, most importantly, I put a lot of emphasis on group
| work & home work. This has also its own issues. I like to do
| group homework because I believe that in the real world, you
| rarely work alone, and group work allow to have more fun
| project than what you can do in a 1-2h exam. On the other hand,
| I know some student hate it because there is always a slacker
| in every group. And home work is also an issue because not
| every student has time to work outside of school sadly. I try
| to give time during the classes for them to work on their
| homework but it is not all the time possible (limited number of
| hour for the whole course).
|
| Overall, I hate grading and exams, I consider that my job is
| teaching, not grading, but this doesn't really work in the real
| world sadly.
| watwut wrote:
| > I believe that in the real world, you rarely work alone,
| and
|
| Real world work is nothing like group work. In real world,
| you can carve part of project on yourself and be judged on
| that. You can complain about co workers doing nothing. The
| teamleader deals with interpersonal or productivity issues.
|
| And ultimately, you can leave team or find new job if above
| dont happen.
|
| > group work allow to have more fun project than what you can
| do in a 1-2h exam.
|
| Or someone else from the group do the fun parts and will try
| to offload only boring parts on others.
|
| School group work is less fun then individual, unless you are
| lucky to work with really good matching people. It has none
| of the processes and structures that mediates political
| issues in real work.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| > I know some student hate it because there is always a
| slacker in every group
|
| My experience is that there is sometimes somebody who is not
| a slacker, and it's usually the only one doing the work for
| the entire group.
| mprovost wrote:
| That's why this is good training for the real world.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| As most things in school, it's an artificial situation
| that bears no resemblance to the real world.
|
| IRL:
|
| - people has much higher stakes, while in school tanking
| a class project is no big deal for most slackers. IRL,
| they can get excluded, isolated, shamed, fired and so on.
|
| - such group would exist rarely in the first place,
| because institutions filter people;
|
| - if you are in the rare situation it happens, you can
| get out of it, but you it's very hard to move in the
| school structure, not to mention out of it.
|
| Anecdotally, I've seen the scenario playing out many
| times in schools, but rarely in a restaurant, a dev team,
| a NGO or a sport club. There are productivity
| differences, sometimes immense, and an occasional
| slacker, but that's not the same order of magnitude at
| all.
| majormajor wrote:
| I've seen the same school-type dynamic play out in
| companies amongst people getting paid the sort of numbers
| that make folks on HN say "most people don't get that,
| not everybody works at a FAANG."
|
| We (as a species, really) are bad at interviewing lots of
| people that we don't already know well - just like we're
| bad at testing academically, surprise! - and we're also
| bad at coaching/firing/managing them.
| bluGill wrote:
| Everyone thinks they are that one person. It is hard to be
| objective when different people are doing different things.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Nah, it's very easy to be objective when on a 5 pages
| homework, one write 5, and the others 0. Or if only one
| person has compiling code on their machine the day before
| the project. Of if only one person speak on the conf
| because the others don't have anything to say.
| bluGill wrote:
| I've never personally seen that. I've seen cases where
| one person writes four pages, and one writes one page
| claiming it was the hardest. I've seen cases where one
| person writes the code, and one writes the paper about
| the code. The only case I've seen where one person does
| all the work the person who does all the work refuses to
| allow the others to help.
| captainmuon wrote:
| Especially at universities I don't see the reason for invasive
| e-proctoring.
|
| When I was studying (physics, early 2000s in Germany), we
| didn't even have a honor system, we had the assumption that
| everybody is there to learn something. If you cheat, you harm
| yourself.
|
| Progress was assessed by weekly excercise sheets where you were
| _encouraged_ to work together with others, and to learn how to
| use the library to find solutions. After each semester there
| would be a test for each course, and you would get a
| certificate if passed. Attendence to lectures was usually not
| checked. The tests were "closed" and watched, but if you were
| determined you could probably have easily cheated. Anyway
| regular cheaters would have failed miserably at the latest in
| the oral exams or the lab courses.
|
| I think a major function of universities is to teach people to
| be independent and responsible, and if we school-ize them we
| loose a lot.
| fallingknife wrote:
| That was Germany in the 2000's. This is the USA in the
| 2020's. College is a game. They are getting rid of even
| having tests as a requirement for your application. And the
| admissions process is openly racist, even though this is
| directly banned by our constitution (for public
| universities). But don't mention this, or you will be called
| racist. You will be required to take "distribution
| requirements" (courses that have nothing to do with what you
| are there to study) for up to 2 years of credit hours
| depending on the school. The reason they do this is because
| department funding is set by the "asses in seats" formula
| where each student enrolled in the class is assigned a dollar
| value to the department. And, if you are an unpopular
| department, these 300 seat 1 level distribution requirement
| classes will be the vast majority of your funding.
| Departments typically squabble with each other about how many
| classes they get to have on the list. And everybody gets an
| A. Wouldn't want to have a reputation for being hard, or
| nobody will enroll in your cash cow class. These are all 1
| and 2 level courses, which means they are basically high
| school level, or sometimes not even that. But they are not
| free like high school! Most people will be deep in debt when
| they graduate. And there is no way to distinguish yourself.
| The grades are so inflated that the median GPA is around 3.7
| / 4.0! So I can't blame anybody for cheating the system that
| is cheating them.
| titanomachy wrote:
| > There is no way to distinguish yourself
|
| If you actually learn something in a class, that
| distinguishes you from many other students.
|
| I agree though, university is not a good system for
| determining who is capable and deserves the best jobs. It's
| unfortunate that our society leans on it so much as a
| sorting hat.
| mannykannot wrote:
| The notion that higher education is all about self-
| enlightenment would be more plausible if these institutions
| did not issue degrees or other certificates and their
| students would be satisfied with this.
| jordanpg wrote:
| The real story here is that cheating is rampant, everyone
| knows it, and that _the universities_ (as opposed to
| individual professors) are not prepared to do what is
| necessary to stop it.
|
| I'm speaking, of course, of measures like expulsion. Too much
| of a hit to the bottom line, too much messy litigation, and
| too much bad PR.
|
| All of this is another way of making your point, which is
| that the core mission of universities has drifted away from
| idealized learning to big business and sports.
|
| I suspect the entire thing needs to be nuked from orbit
| before it can be rebuilt and I'm happy to see COVID
| accelerating the process.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| Idk cheating in the college I was in (Top #30 US
| Institution) was punished severely. I fondly remember my
| Data Structures professor, bluntly telling us she'd end our
| academic careers if we were caught cheating. Fondly because
| she was a great professor who clearly had no time or
| patience for that kind of bs. It was school policy for
| expulsion, and this is a very well known school.
|
| This of course may have changed dramatically in the last
| two years given the major shift in how we all live but I
| would suspect that this is more common than you think.
| ticviking wrote:
| How many people do you know of who failed a class or were
| expelled for that kind of thing?
|
| Where there ever any rumors of that kind of thing. In a
| large enough class someone will be tempted to cheat, and
| if the school is taking decisive action there will be
| rumors even if they are making great effort to protect
| the students privacy and make the discipline a learning
| experience
| Grimm1 wrote:
| Rumors yes, there were rumors of people getting caught
| cheating, but I didn't know anyone personally.
|
| The people I knew on a personal basis weren't the kind to
| do that or really care about it enough to do so and
| without going into a story about the people I know and
| how we're all doing well in life you'll have to take my
| word for it.
| unishark wrote:
| Universities will definitely expel cheaters, though they
| may give a couple chances first (with increasingly-worse
| penalties like failing grade and violation on transcript).
| One of the things people are complaining about with this
| software is people claiming to be wrongly punished.
|
| Typically there's a faculty union or senate which
| negotiates policies with the administration. Individual
| professors aren't all alone in the fight. Though they may
| individually choose to give lax punishments or look the
| other way.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| A sibling was caught cheating in university. This would
| have been around ten years ago. He wasn't expelled, but he
| was suspended for the remainder of the semester and failed
| on all his classes that term. I don't remember if he
| finished uni late as a result or did makeup work during the
| summer.
| ev1 wrote:
| being forced to do an extra semester costing like 50k+
| results in some very interesting incentives, or lawsuits,
| when profit is involved..
| gambiting wrote:
| Again, I think the problem is elsewhere. Where I'm
| from(Poland) cheating is rampant and universities have
| absolutely no trouble kicking people out over it. Got
| caught cheating? Good bye, apply again next year. It
| doesn't lead to litigation or messy PR. Maybe it's because
| all universities are free to attend so no one can argue
| that they paid for something they aren't getting - all they
| are losing is their own time.
| basisword wrote:
| I went to university a bit later in life. When I was in
| high school smartphones weren't a thing yet and cheating
| in exams was difficult and not common. At university
| cheating seemed rampant and easy. It was easy to spot the
| potential cheaters but not easy to prove they were
| cheating so they got away with it. You just go to the
| bathroom (in a long exam they can't exactly stop you from
| this) and you have all your notes on your phone. There
| were people I'm surprised got into the university in the
| first place getting really good grades because of this.
| It was frustrating but I'm not sure what universities can
| do in this case. It seems to me that the "exam" process
| needs rethought entirely. I'm not sure how it could be
| changed but it is far too easy to cheat now. Like a lot
| of things in life too, the dishonest people tend to get
| away with it and manage to succeed while some portion of
| the honest people work very hard and struggle.
| mkl wrote:
| How do you have your phone with you? Stash it in the
| bathroom? At my university the invigilators make you show
| what's in your pockets before and after going to the
| bathroom (which has itself been checked, and which has a
| log of people and times), and you can't take anything out
| (e.g. formula sheet to secretly copy somehow-bathroom-
| stashed notes onto) or bring anything in. Phones are in
| bags up the front of the room, inaccessible. The kinds of
| things you're talking about very rarely happens, and
| consequences include fines and academic penalties.
| atatatat wrote:
| > The kinds of things you're talking about very rarely
| happens, and consequences include fines and academic
| penalties.
|
| You are making assumptions based on your own experiences,
| and they are incorrect.
|
| You have a lot of faith in for-profit entities.
| ttonelli wrote:
| Maybe making questions that you have to think about
| instead of just looking up the answer would help?
| basisword wrote:
| Depends on the subject. In a long form essay where you
| need to cite sources or technical details you could make
| a big difference to your score by quickly looking these
| up. Nobody can go into the exam blind but they can
| improve their answers significantly by looking up the
| details that others have to spend a long time trying to
| remember. For example in an English exam, direct
| quotations from literature. Or in a law exam, case names.
| bluGill wrote:
| > Or in a law exam, case names.
|
| I want my lawyer to double check the sources. Even if he
| has the case name memorized, joe vs sally is easy to get
| confused with joe vs sue (or sally vs joe...), and those
| details are important to get right, lest I lose the case
| on a technicality.
|
| There is a time to memorize details, but for the most
| part I want people who verify before making a statement.
| Fredej wrote:
| But why should you not be allowed to look them up?
|
| Isn't that just testing for memory rather than
| comprehension?
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Beats me. A well designed exam asks one to apply
| knowledge not to regurgitate it. You should be able to
| look up any of the supporting information but you also
| need to be able to organize that information.
|
| All of my BSc Applied Physics exams including the final
| (Exeter Uni. 1977) were open note and this really helped
| sort the competent students from those who thought that
| they were at university to learn facts. The latter
| brought fifty litre rucksacks full of notes in to the
| finals and without exception either failed entirely or
| scraped through to third class honours.
|
| They seemed to have not realized that the faculty would
| not set questions that could be directly answered by
| looking up the question in one's notes. The best example
| was the final quantum mechanics paper which did not
| contain a single question that had a direct answer in the
| notes we had taken or the textbooks we had used.
|
| My most recent exam was a C# course and that exam was
| open book. It wasn't as extreme as my QM final but had
| basically the same idea: apply what you have learnt.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| It sounds like the root problem is that your exam grade
| is boosted more by a direct quote or case name more than
| by your comprehension of the message from the quote or by
| the case name rather than the precedent established by
| the case.
|
| It should not matter if you have the exact line "To be or
| not to be" verbatim if you can explain what Shakespeare
| tried to convey about suffering and the meaning of life.
| More importantly, you should be allowed to have the book!
| You can't expect to jump from confusion to comprehension
| by reading the whole thing during the exam.
|
| It shouldn't matter if you can regurgitate "Miranda v.
| Arizona, 1966" or not if you can explain when a person is
| giving voluntary statements or is under custodial
| interrogation. Access to the full PACER database wouldn't
| enable you to understand those distinctions.
|
| And as comes up here all the time, it shouldn't matter in
| a whiteboard interview whether you have the arguments
| reversed in your strcmp(), an editor, compiler, or
| reference (or just running the code) would show you which
| way it was supposed to be. The important thing is the
| planning, algorithm tradeoffs, data structures, and
| debugging process that you used to write the thing. Heck,
| it shouldn't even matter if you can remember that the
| function is called 'strcmp'.
|
| Reliance on these factoids usually indicates that the
| grader is taking the easy way out - scanning for expected
| quotes, for case names, or compiling the code and seeing
| if it works or not - rather than gauging comprehension.
| I'll grant that it is far easier to do the former, but
| that's not what the goal is supposed to be.
|
| Edit: What can't be allowed is regurgitating someone
| else's comprehension of the question while having none of
| your own. If that's a possibility, you need to either ask
| different questions or have some way to prevent people
| from accessing that explanation. Remote exams need more
| of the former and less of the latter.
| unishark wrote:
| You need to give a range of questions from challenging
| like that to easy regurgitation to discern their level of
| understanding and be able to assign them an appropriate
| grade.
| zo1 wrote:
| Why do you need a grade at all? Fail, pass, distinction.
| You either know the answers because you know and
| understand all the material, or you have no business
| functioning in that field period.
| hobofan wrote:
| > Good bye, apply again next year.
|
| Apply again next year? In Germany, a university expulsion
| usually comes with a lifetime ban on studying the same
| subject again.
| fouc wrote:
| in Canada you'd likely be unable to get into ANY
| university with a note about plagiarism in your records.
| corty wrote:
| Same in Germany, but universities don't always share
| records. You are supposed to fill in a form on
| immatriculation where you state previous universities and
| why/how you left there, and you will get expelled if you
| lie on that form. However, if you pass your final exam
| without getting caught, there is a good chance you'll get
| away with it.
| blagie wrote:
| I'm not sure that would fly in the Western world.
|
| Poland has a completely different culture from Western
| Europe or the US. It's rapidly Westernizing, but it's
| still a world of difference. I think it's a pity. I
| prefer Slavic cultures to Western. One of the things
| which bugs me most is how modern Poland is starting to
| have the same surface, insincere friendliness as the
| West.
|
| - EU membership is clearly a net win, but doesn't help
| preserve Polish culture.
|
| - Many of the cultural differences are not recognized on
| either side -- people say the same things sometimes, but
| it takes deep digging to understand that they mean very
| different things.
|
| - Historically, Poles also looked up to and tried to
| emulate the West, which is part of the reason the culture
| is shifting so rapidly.
|
| So the change was rapid, but far from complete.
| Bayart wrote:
| >Too much of a hit to the bottom line, too much messy
| litigation, and too much bad PR.
|
| Well, that wouldn't be a problem to the person you're
| answering to, considering German universities aren't
| businesses who take people in for capital (both financial
| and social).
|
| In France it's certainly very easy to get yourself thrown
| out for cheating or not showing up.
| nicbou wrote:
| I agree with you, but at the same time, it diminishes the
| value of a degree, because it no longer certifies that meet
| certain requirements.
| moron4hire wrote:
| They already don't certify competence.
| conductr wrote:
| Which is why employers see undergrad has a filter and not
| adding value. They either don't hire or even interview
| without experience or they look to your internships and
| accomplishments as a more significant qualification
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Assuming everyone is not constantly cheating and the
| coursework is somewhat relevant and rigorous, surely they
| signal a higher probability of at least awareness of the
| subject matter or ability to learn something.
| fallingknife wrote:
| You're 0-2 on those assumptions, though.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Seriously. Even assuming those things--I would say the
| program I went through was very relevant and I don't
| think cheating happened very often. It was a really small
| program and everybody got to know everyone else. So while
| I can't say for certain, I never saw cheating amongst my
| friends, nor was ever approached to assist in cheating
| (though I was frequently asked for help in studying).
|
| The problem is, I knew some of the guys who graduated,
| with extremely low GPAs, who didn't cheat, have the same
| degree as me, exited with the same student loan debt as
| me, and can't code their way out of a wet paper bag. I've
| ran into some of them working retail jobs back in my home
| town.
|
| It's a _fucking_ travesty. They had to be saddled with a
| student loan debt load they would have no chance of
| paying back. I only paid mine back so early because of a
| lucky break on an insurance claim. I 'd still be paying
| on them, 20 years later, if I hadn't lost _everything I
| owned_ in a flood.
|
| Universties talk about how they don't want to be seen as
| vocational training facilities. Well, they need to admit
| the reality. Primary education is not preparing people
| for the work force. We give people a free education for
| 13 years, and if they want to have economic opportunity,
| they want to do something more than just manual labor, we
| can't give them another 2 to 4 years? It's bullshit.
| fallingknife wrote:
| It's preparing them just as well as primary education +
| college. It's just that college degrees were more
| meaningful back when the old people running most
| companies got them, and employers need a weed out, so we
| still use it.
| atatatat wrote:
| > though I was frequently asked for help in studying
|
| Your type of social group is not the one that this
| behavior happens in.
| moron4hire wrote:
| I'm saying, I knew _all_ the other students in the
| computer science program on a first name basis. Most of
| us even partied together. There were really only about 20
| or 30 of us. We all knew what each of us were really
| capable of, and I didn 't see anyone have any
| unexplainable wins in tests or assignments. The people
| who were failing just transferred to a different program.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I have not been in the education system for 15 years, but
| I would hope it is true for at least the high end schools
| in the hard sciences.
| swiley wrote:
| My calculus 3 professor would pass out tests 10-15 minutes
| early on test days. He'd dump them right on top of your study
| materials and expect you to push them out of the way if
| wanted extra time to study.
|
| Applying a panopticon to children to prevent cheating is
| questionable since it normalizes authorities using
| electronics to bully people. Applying it to adults at a
| university is arguably a human rights violation and a failure
| to write good course materials.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| This is the scary part. Teaching students and younger
| generations that's it's normal and okay to be surveilled
| 24/7.
| unishark wrote:
| instead let's teach them that if they cheat, nothing
| adverse happens.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Replace exams with vivas and see how far the cheats can
| get. At least make a viva voce a large proportion of the
| final score.
| titanomachy wrote:
| Probably the best way to evaluate people, I guess it just
| doesn't scale that well...
| TravisHusky wrote:
| I have never had an oral exam, but I have always thought
| it would be great for smaller classes. Basically I would
| love to have an exam where I sit down with a professor
| for 30 minutes to an hour and talk about the content and
| answer questions they ask. I feel like it would be a bit
| more in-depth while also eliminating the possibility of
| misunderstanding a mistakenly ambiguous question. I am
| not sure how realistic that is for a class above about 15
| students, and also how things like disabilities would be
| handled, but I'd love to try it.
| swiley wrote:
| > Basically I would love to have an exam where I sit down
| with a professor for 30 minutes to an hour and talk about
| the content and answer questions they ask.
|
| That would have been fun! The only time I did something
| like this was when I tested out of one of the intro to
| programming classes. I was one of the last students to
| talk to the professor that ran it before he left.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| When a university grants a degree, they are attesting that
| the student has demonstrated mastery of the subject matter,
| because that's important to both employers and postgraduate
| programs. Without that it's harder to justify paying a
| university's price, or spending such a large fraction of your
| adult life there.
| holstvoogd wrote:
| It took me 5 minutes to figure out what eproctoring is
| [deleted]
| kzrdude wrote:
| I think this site should use _one sentence_ to explain what
| Eproctoring means or what it is.
| ShroudedNight wrote:
| I may not be neurotypical, but surely I'm not the only one having
| a hard time not parsing the domain name as "Bane Proctoring",
| which admittedly sounds rather ominous.
| ckastner wrote:
| I also read it that way.
|
| One would think that after the issues with whorepresents.com
| and expertsexchange.com (and dozens of other popular examples)
| from at least a decade ago, people would be somewhat more
| careful as to how their domain name could be misread.
| mercora wrote:
| i could not unsee it anymore after it got pointed out to me
| in "therapists" and sometimes giggle childishly when i
| encounter it
| drudu wrote:
| Given that "bane" is a nearly infinitely more common word than
| "eproctoring" I bet you (and I) are in the majority.
| Hamuko wrote:
| More people should use dashes in domain names.
| VLM wrote:
| To amuse a client who did "security by checkbox" everyone needed
| some entry level comptia certs, even old timers who "wrote the
| book" back in the old days LOL, so I took some proctored tests
| live at a testing center recently.
|
| I read a lot of reports of eproctor'd tests being cancelled by
| rando e-proctors with zero recourse. There are three problems.
| The first is some of these tests cost hundreds of dollars,
| although I suppose getting kicked out of uni for cheating would
| be even more expensive, its just a huge risk to e-proctor
| compared to the human touch at my local test center. Secondly
| there is no feedback no oversight and no escalation procedure for
| most e-proctor systems that I'm aware of, some amazon turk nobody
| can cancel your test on you for any reason they feel like with
| zero recourse and you're out all the money and theres absolutely
| nothing you can do about it. Infinite power with no oversight
| will be infinitely abused. Thirdly the demands for a sterile test
| location were kind of a PITA. Honestly its easier to go to a test
| center than to provably and verifiably remove every book and
| piece of paper and anything with writing on it, from my office at
| home. I need to remove the kids from the house as any sight of
| another person is an instant disqualification and loss of my
| expensive test fee. I can't take it outside what if my neighbor
| starts mowing the lawn or it starts raining, instant fail when I
| leave the camera view. I have to silence every electronics device
| in the house because any interruption is again another forfeited
| expensive test.
|
| (edited to add, I remember another complaint about e-proctor that
| to prevent brain dumps and copying questions out of their "secret
| test" any mumbling or even facial expressions were considered an
| autofail according to some online reports of people taking my
| test. I did the net+ and found it quite easy but sure enough I
| can't discuss for NDA reasons or whatever but I was eye rolling
| "you gotta be kidding" about one question and at a testing center
| locked in a room alone nobody cares when I roll my eyes but that
| would have cost me $350 if I did e-proctor testing.
|
| also to prevent copying their top secret test they needed proof I
| had no electronics devices in sight, so it wasn't just removal of
| all paper products but anything electronic had to be removed from
| my office/lab it was just ridiculous)
|
| Its just easier and faster and vastly less stressful to get out
| of the house and test onsite at the nearest Vue facility, which
| is a school I formerly attended LOL.
| fddddd wrote:
| from the other comments, it is a pain for honest ppl and a
| blessing for cheaters.
| mindslight wrote:
| That seems like the kind of situation credit card chargebacks
| are made for, as their process of discerning cheating is
| nonsensical. Not that doing so would have helped you get the
| magic piece of paper, but perhaps you could have assuaged the
| client with a piece of paper from a different company.
| accurrent wrote:
| When I was TAing last year we had to proctor the students via
| zoom (trust me its not fun for anyone). Quite frankly I found
| different professors approached things in different ways. All the
| exams were made open book, because its impossible to figure out
| if people are looking at their notes.
|
| One of the profs decided to make it impossible to cheat by
| basically making the exam so hard that even the A+ students would
| have a hard time solving it. This worked well in preventing
| cheating because for the A+ students to collaborate with others
| they would need spare time. On the other hand it left lot of
| students very demoralized.
|
| Some of the other profs came up with question randomization
| schemes. So the assesment tool would shuffle questions for
| different students. People were still on discord channels but to
| not much effect. Of course this required that the professors (or
| the TAs) were conversant with basic programming skills.
|
| For humanities oriented assessments however, I know most of the
| profs chose to do things via project work (it's a bit hard to
| cheat when writing essays. You can't possibly have the same
| argument as someone else so...)
|
| One thing I can't help but wonder is that I realized when we
| moved things online we missed out a lot on student interaction.
| Students were generally far more aggressive for their own grades,
| often at the cost of other students. Furthermore, I found
| students were far more ready to abuse the teaching staff than
| when we were physically there. Conversely, teaching staff was far
| more strict and stressed out than before. I can't help but wonder
| if the same courses were conducted face to face whether there
| would be more kindness all round.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| > For humanities oriented assessments however, I know most of
| the profs chose to do things via project work (it's a bit hard
| to cheat when writing essays...)
|
| This is true of copying and collusion generally, but not of
| commissioning unique work from an essay mill, which is
| shockingly prevalent in humanities subjects for this very
| reason. I am aware of no effective defence against this other
| than in-person exams or oral vivas. I'm glad I'm not a
| humanities lecturer right now.
| mkl wrote:
| I think making the exam really hard is more likely to backfire
| and push people to cheat. One of the main drivers of cheating
| is the perception of unfairness. The time limitation is not
| really an obstacle if you're organised, just divide and conquer
| doing a subset of the questions each.
| 10000truths wrote:
| Almost every college and university course I took would curve
| grades to adjust for difficulty. I've even had professors
| tell me that top scorers in a test were only expected to get
| x% of questions correct.
| shagie wrote:
| I recall calc 2 exam that I had... It was a rather hard
| exam and I left with a bit of a "meh" feeling to how well I
| did on it.
|
| The professor handed back the exam the next lecture with
| the percent on it. I was looking at a 50% on my exam. This
| was a Tuesday Thursday class (rather than MWF) and so was
| an hour and a half long. I'm staring at my exam thinking
| "F, maybe a D, hope I got a C, I'd settle for a D, probably
| an F... hope I got a C" all through the lecture. Just
| before the bell rang, the professor wrote the curve on the
| chalkboard.
|
| * 100 - 75 : A
|
| * 50 - 75 : B
|
| I don't remember any of the rest... I was stuck on "I got a
| B!" As I left, my TA congratulated me for getting a B.
| alanfranz wrote:
| Recent gatech OMSCS graduate here. I fail to recognize any real
| issue with proctoring. I have used proctortrack and honorlock.
|
| * proctoring software can be installed before an exam and
| uninstalled afterwards. It doesn't need to stay on your
| pc/browser, and its activation is very obvious. I have no info
| about permanent security issues caused by such software.
|
| * what proctoring does is mostly recording video and audio
| (possibly with room scans at the beginning ) and uploading it to
| a remote server for later verification. Then, such footage is
| automatically scanned for anomalies. The teacher can then check
| what happened in flagged content parts and choose what to do. The
| system does not impose a "cheater" label by itself.
|
| * proctoring systems don't force a closed book approach. I took
| open book exams where the only enforcement was "be alone and no
| collaboration with other people during the exam".
|
| It seems that some people are concerned with some very specific
| details of some implementations, or with shitty teachers that say
| some people cheated just because they were flagged for whatever
| reason.
|
| Some things that happened to me and I still passed the exam:
|
| * a coworker accidentally entered the room where I was taking the
| exam and I had to talk with him to send him away.
|
| * I had to change my position since I had setup my laptop in a
| way that was unbearable for a many-hours exam, and I briefly
| exited the webcam view.
|
| I contacted the teachers when this happened and I got no issue at
| all.
|
| Of course some teachers happened to be silly, at the beginning of
| the pandemics: I heard things like "no drinking, no eating, no
| restroom" for 4 hours exams. Blame the people, not the software.
| kevincox wrote:
| I think the main problem is that these are all malware by
| definition. They are grabbing all of the data they can get and
| the users are not the ones who what that. I could install this
| on a separate user account which should restrict its access to
| my stuff but it is still a lot to ask. And a lot of these
| software requires admin access, which is absolutely not ok even
| for a second on my personal PC. If the school wants to ship me
| their PC with it installed I have very little complaints other
| than the biases in the video analysis.
|
| There are other concerns, such as they often only support a few
| proprietary operating systems, however many programs require
| these anyways, so that isn't a major step back in most cases.
| poplarstand wrote:
| Current (almost finished) OMSA student here.
|
| I agree that the tools themselves aren't terrible, but I do
| believe they're an example of "doing the wrong thing faster".
| My claim would be that all time-limited exams are bad news.
|
| 1. The strictness and quality of exams varies significantly by
| instructor (as you mentioned in your post)
|
| 2. Exams aren't representative of any real-world analogue (how
| often does your boss lock you in a room and tell you to solve
| the Lagrangian by hand, alone, under a time limit)
|
| 3. They don't actually stop determined cheaters (anyone with
| the foresight to put up notesheets in their bathroom)
|
| In short, proctored exams do not effectively assess student
| proficiency in a subject, and do not effectively prevent
| cheating. Making proctoring more scalable means propogating a
| bad practice at ever-greater rates.
|
| What I would suggest instead, and what many classes in OMSA
| have already done, is to leverage project-based assessments.
|
| * Demonstrates learning by actually _using_ the material,
| instead of hollow repeat-backs
|
| * Encourages further learning since practice entails dealing
| with real-world complications
|
| * Helps students develop a portfolio so they have more to show
| at graduation than transcripts
|
| There are many other options though if that particular solution
| doesn't tickle your fancy.
| mindslight wrote:
| > _proctoring software can be installed before an exam and
| uninstalled afterwards. It doesn't need to stay on your pc
| /browser, and its activation is very obvious. I have no info
| about permanent security issues caused by such software._
|
| The permanent security issue is that violating a security
| assertion (eg running an untrusted program) on your machine
| means you can never trust that machine until it gets completely
| wiped. I'm well past the age where I have to worry about
| bullshit like eproctoring and my computing environment has
| become much more deliberate, but even in college I was running
| Linux as my primary. Reading how it's being normalized that in
| order to pass a class you're forced to install random spyware
| on your own machine gives me the willies. This is not what we
| should be teaching kids for information security practice!
| cesarb wrote:
| > The permanent security issue is that violating a security
| assertion (eg running an untrusted program) on your machine
| means you can never trust that machine until it gets
| completely wiped.
|
| That hasn't been the case ever since firmware became
| updatable. Nowadays, even wiping the machine completely is
| not enough, because the firmware might have been maliciously
| modified by whatever violated the security boundary. And it
| might not even be the firmware you'd expect (the SPI chip
| containing the UEFI); see the recent post here
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27740295) about someone
| who modified his laptop's EC firmware _and_ his laptop 's
| wireless card firmware, making the first intercept all key
| presses (the EC is also the keyboard controller) and send
| them to the second to be broadcast over the radio, completely
| invisible to both the operating system and the UEFI firmware.
| mindslight wrote:
| I hadn't wanted to go into that level of detail, but you're
| right to. My own definition of wipe includes reflashing
| libreboot.
| cesarb wrote:
| My point was, even reflashing libreboot wouldn't be
| enough, you'd have to also reflash all the small
| controllers here and there (hoping you hadn't missed
| some), and somehow do it in a way each controller cannot
| lie to you and just pretend it has been reflashed.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I was a TA in the first OMSCS cohort. I think the biggest
| difference between the OMSCS experience and what other people
| are giving here as anecdotes is Georgia Tech was prepared for
| this. They created an online program on purpose that was well
| thought-out and planned in advance. Many universities that did
| this in the past year, in contrast, were forced into it by the
| pandemic and scrambling to do whatever they could with no real
| plan, bad or no policies in place, professors and TAs that were
| not properly prepared.
|
| Though I actually agree here with the people saying this type
| of software is usually a rootkit by design and unacceptable for
| that reason alone. I understand why the school did it, but in
| my experience, we never caught a person cheating on an exam.
| Where we caught cheating was in project submissions, and that
| was often quite blatant with people turning in identical code
| or code identical to code on the Internet, sometimes even
| identical comments. No need for malware on student's personal
| home networks to catch that.
|
| There is somewhat of a fundamental conflict in the structure of
| the OMSCS courses, though. Personally, I don't think there is
| much value in even having the exams at all on top of the
| usually extremely comprehensive practical project assignments,
| for the terminal masters students. But that's everyone in
| OMSCS. The exams tend to test your knowledge of prior research,
| which is mostly valuable for people going on to a PhD
| afterward.
|
| Of course, some students do that, even if you need to
| separately apply after completing the terminal masters and
| can't just move straight into it like the on-campus grad
| students. So I don't really know the answer, but the structure
| right now is imposing a heavily research-focused curriculum on
| students who are overwhelmingly not going into research. And
| the OMSCS program largely exists because of sponsorship from
| industry that wanted stronger industry-focused CS education for
| their own workers from a school more reputable than a plain
| MOOC with no university behind it.
|
| They do an amazingly good job of best of both worlds right now,
| but it is a conflict as I think many of the exams are
| unnecessarily difficult for people who are never going to
| become researchers. I guess it's the classic Google approach to
| hiring, though. You end up filtering a bunch of students who
| may have been perfectly good as programmers, but you're
| probably never going to let anyone through who wasn't, and that
| is ultimately more important for maintaining the school's
| strong reputation in industry.
| mannerheim wrote:
| > * proctoring software can be installed before an exam and
| uninstalled afterwards. It doesn't need to stay on your
| pc/browser, and its activation is very obvious. I have no info
| about permanent security issues caused by such software.
|
| I wouldn't trust a computer that had spyware installed on it
| without a full system wipe.
| reayn wrote:
| 1. The software should've never existed, it's a testimony to
| the failure of our education system.
|
| 2. You are far luckier than most when it comes to your
| circumstances, i have seen myself people failing exams for
| similar mishaps to yours.
| alanfranz wrote:
| 1. Explain why.
|
| 2. Shitty instructors are not the software's fault.
| reayn wrote:
| 1. Re-stating what half the comments on this thread are
| already saying would be a waste of my time.
|
| 2. This has nothing to do with instructors (in my
| experience instructors have little to no say or
| participation in the usage of these systems), badly written
| algorithms will frequently kick students out of tests for
| non-adverse behavior or failure in facial recognition (once
| again oft-mentioned in this thread).
| raverpundit wrote:
| How I am hacking my university exams. - installed a virtual
| machine - renamed reg keys values to hide drivers name - use vm
| hardner etc. - on host machine installed charles to get
| response(html) of the proctor website - wrote a python script
| that takes in response html and outputs google search result for
| all the questions at once
|
| I got lucky and University hosted a mock test through which i was
| able to grab the whole proctor website The proctor software dev.
| Didn't obscure the JS Found so many vulnerabilities that led me
| to go full god mode. I can get questions paper 60min before the
| exam starts.
| zamalek wrote:
| > discriminate against students with disabilities.
|
| As someone who actually has learning disabilities (ADHD,
| dyslexia) this definitely isn't universally true. I have yet to
| complete a degree, but the most progress that I have ever made
| was in one was almost completely thanks to eproctoring. I had
| virtually no anxiety because I was in the comfort of my own home,
| and couldn't over-hear worrying discussions other students were
| having prior to the exam. It almost a complete 180 from every
| other examination experience that I've had.
|
| I had a few courses which required on-site (Pearson Vue)
| examination, and I experienced far more anxiety (by virtue of
| experiencing _none_ at home).
|
| I can certainly understand how certain (potentially the majority
| of) disabilities could face discrimination, as described by the
| linked article, but this is worded as a blanket statement.
|
| > Want to tell Fight for the Future about your eproctoring horror
| story? We'd like to hear it.
|
| I'd prefer to submit my in-person horror stories. I have more
| than a decade of them.
| erhk wrote:
| Amazon requires you show ID and have a camera on for their online
| peogramming screening.
|
| I chose to not enable my laptop webcam and to instead apply
| elsewhere, mostly from self respect.
|
| In paying an institute for education i doubt students have a
| similar luxury. I hope that the EU might enforce privacy similar
| to the move against cookies. Likewise i would love to see
| restrictions that prohibit facial recognition in private
| businesses without consent
| miki123211 wrote:
| This seems not to be a thing in the EU at all.
|
| At least in Poland where I live, it's pretty much unheard of.
| Sure, cameras are required once in a while, sometimes you need
| to show your student ID, but the scary e-proctoring software
| doesn't exist at all.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Anecdotal evidence, but I heard TU Delft (in the Netherlands)
| used e-proctoring software like this in some high level
| exams. So it might not be that black and white. If anything,
| I'd wager you mostly just don't hear about it because most
| students have nearly no leverage in situations like this.
| user_7832 wrote:
| I'm a TU Delft master's student so I can comment on this.
| E-proctoring here is highly dependent on your department
| (also called faculty). I am in the TPM faculty where we
| don't have any proctoring whatsoever (most of our exams are
| open book). But I do know from my friend that Aerospace has
| quite heavy proctoring with closed book exams. Similarly CS
| too (if I recall correctly) has proctoring.
|
| Additionally, proctoring is unsurprisingly quite unpopular
| amongst students - for privacy reasons, and also perhaps
| because of the "assumed guilt". There's a lot of push to
| completely stop e-proctoring university wide.
|
| Here are some interesting articles from our newsletter, TU
| Delta, with a lot of relevant information:
|
| 1. https://www.delta.tudelft.nl/article/online-proctoring-
| i-was... 2. https://www.delta.tudelft.nl/article/why-ae-
| students-have-so... 3.
| https://www.delta.tudelft.nl/article/dont-want-online-
| procto...
| Negitivefrags wrote:
| I can see why universities want to use a system like this.
|
| A friend of mine is a University lecturer for physics and one of
| his students gave him an invite to the discord channel where half
| his students are in there sharing all the answers during the
| final exam.
|
| He basically told me there is nothing he can do about it.
|
| He talked to the head of department and they basically said if
| you have proof of specific people cheating then they can escalate
| it for those people but short of that, nothing can be done.
|
| Not that I'm saying these systems are great either. But I really
| don't know how exams in the current form can be conducted
| remotely without endemic cheating.
| analog31 wrote:
| Idea taken from real life: Flood the discord channel with
| misinformation, so people don't know what's real and what
| isn't.
|
| No, I don't really advocate doing that, but it's what first
| came to mind.
| swiley wrote:
| Discord accounts are tied to real identities and the company is
| pretty aggressive about removing duplicate accounts. It should
| be possible to ID most of the people in that chat and report
| them to the administration.
| TheFreim wrote:
| > Discord accounts are tied to real identities
|
| Since when? My discord account doesn't have my name or phone
| linked at all, just email.
| swiley wrote:
| You got grandfathered in then, congrats.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| I think the only alternative to eproctoring is standard in-
| person exams in a room at the school/university.
|
| We can debate how far eprotoring solutions should reasonably go
| but really if someone is allowed to take an exam remotely alone
| there has to be a form a surveillance.
|
| This can include providing an approved, locked laptop with
| monitoring sofware instead of letting students use their own
| devices with eproctoring software but that obviously comes with
| an additional cost.
| elliekelly wrote:
| We allow students to take exams alone, unsupervised, all the
| time and we have been doing it just fine for hundreds of
| years. Have you ever written a paper as a final for a class?
| Or done a problem set? Or a project? Or even a take home
| test? No surveillance needed if you structure the format of
| the final to suit the "testing" environment.
|
| If the answers to your final are easily Googled then you've
| written a shitty final.
| krull10 wrote:
| Then you're lucky to have students with a lot of integrity
| at your college/university. Even with a great unique exam
| where nothing can be looked up online, this doesn't prevent
| students from copying each other, posting problems on sites
| like Chegg and paying for help, or working together...
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| A final paper is different and the concept itself obviously
| does not lend itself to surveillance, which used to be less
| important because it is/was less easy to cheat. There are
| growing problems with this as well because of all the
| online "help" students may get access to these days.
|
| Allowing students to take exams alone, at home,
| unsupervised is just a recipe for disaster without
| surveillance. It's not just Google but any sort of help in
| the room or remote, which can go all the way to someone
| else taking the exam. That really simply is the reality. I
| don't think this is contentious and I am surprised by the
| debate.
|
| On the other hand, it is of course possible to discuss how
| far surveillance should go and how perhaps to avoid too
| much intrusion (as mentioned in my previous comment). That
| said, with the expensive connectivity people have these
| days, in addition to all they can think of if the exam
| takes place at home this is really an arm race situation.
|
| So, again, the alternative is good old in-person, on-site
| exams, where students are also under surveillance, by the
| way, but that feels less intrusive because students aren't
| in their own private space at home.
| christophilus wrote:
| Spitballing here, but maybe exams need to be reconsidered. What
| if instead, the professor has a 1:1 conversation with each
| student, Socrates-style? You'd know pretty quickly whether or
| not the student was familiar with the material, and if not,
| where they were weak and needed more focus.
|
| Maybe systematizing everything about education is the wrong
| approach.
| shagie wrote:
| I had class where the final exam was indeed a socratic style
| oral. It was for an ancient philosophy class (300 or 400
| level - this was well beyond the 101 level) where we had
| studied Socrates (the dialog was on platonic forms). The exam
| was a 2:1 and lasted an hour if I recall correctly.
|
| For a class of 30, this took the professor 15 hours (three
| hours a day over the course of a week) to have all of the
| students go through the exam process during exam week.
|
| Trying to scale this up for something that can handle ~100
| students becomes difficult.
|
| Another part with this is the objective vs subjective
| evaluation of the student.
|
| With the "I got a poor grade because the professor didn't
| like me" type issues that come up, being able to objectively
| point to "this is the score on the homework" and "this is the
| score on the final" allows that subjective grading to be
| removed and protects the professors from students who feel
| that the grade they received was influenced by external
| factors.
|
| While systematizing the verification of material learned may
| be the wrong approach, it is where we are for a number of
| factors that the university doesn't have too many options
| (allegations of professor bias, even if unfounded, still take
| up a lot of time; class sizes for some classes go beyond what
| can be reasonably verified on a 1:1 basis)
| crazygringo wrote:
| This is exactly it.
|
| It's not scalable, and it's _way_ too open to professor
| bias.
|
| Except for in some niche seminar classes, it's a non-
| starter.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Others have already pointed out that thesis defences and
| hiring interviews already use this format. I'm not an
| educator, but I can see some downsides:
|
| * Unless it's recorded, you can't easily get another opinion
| on how to grade it, except from those at the event
|
| * Some students will naturally be better at interview-style
| exams, independent of their skill in the relevant material.
| This is also the case with written exams, of course, but I
| imagine the 'skilled bullshitter' types might do better in an
| interview-style exam, and a nervous student might do much
| worse.
|
| * I imagine it would be tougher on students who don't speak
| the language natively
|
| * The 'imprecision' of a wandering organic conversation might
| make it harder for the student to know what to study
|
| * Different students don't get the same exam, which might
| raise questions of fairness in itself, but it's worsened by
| that the examiner's mood is likely to change. (With written
| exams, an examiner can mark all students on the first
| question before moving on to marking the second question, to
| protect against this.)
|
| * Physical appearance and deportment might skew the
| examiner's judgement. (This is widely believed to be an issue
| with juries, after all.)
|
| * You can't hide the student's identity from the examiner, as
| a measure against favouritism. With written exams this can,
| and should, be done
| machinehermiter wrote:
| The older and more educated I become from free classes online
| the more ridiculous our education system seems.
|
| I pretty much know if I learned the material or not. A test
| is nice to confirm this for myself but the way we have put
| test scores above everything is just ridiculous.
|
| It is all the symptoms of credentialism. Imagine taking the
| same class for free that you don't get "credit" for. It is
| not "cheating" then if someone else gives you the answers to
| things you don't know. It is just a waste of your own time.
| Why even bother taking the class.
|
| Instead we have people paying tens of thousands of dollars
| basically to focus on test taking to get credentials that no
| one really cares about anyway instead of actually becoming
| more educated.
|
| The irony to me is I always got good grades when I was
| younger and in school because I have always been a great test
| taker. I didn't have to "waste" much time actually learning
| the material. "waste" time actually benefiting from the
| material.
| solveit wrote:
| > I pretty much know if I learned the material or not.
|
| Yes, but have you never met someone that was _convinced_
| they knew the material when they in fact didn 't? They're
| everywhere! Accurately assessing oneself is a skill that
| needs to be taught for a lot of people, and an important
| part of it is by having people fail tests they're not
| capable of passing.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| This is a very bad take.
|
| A major component of the university experience is
| collaboration and networking. Dividing tasks and plugging
| holes in each other's understanding. Bouncing ideas off
| other people to test your own understanding and verify
| against theirs.
|
| Any good university isn't simply about grades and there's a
| limit to what you can learn online. Credentials exist as a
| minimum filter, not as a mark of competence. One cannot be
| tested for an expressed numerically.
| kiba wrote:
| Testing is a very good reality check on what you think you
| know. Unfortunately, testing are seen and maligned as only
| an assessment tool, not a learning tool.
|
| Testing is itself a form of learning, because you are asked
| to recall facts, concepts, and practice skills.
| unishark wrote:
| I can't begin to count the number of books I am partway
| through when left to my own motivation.
|
| Signing up for a class with a hurdle at the end I need to
| jump over is exactly what I need. Free online classes are
| like gym memberships, but even cheaper. Most people won't
| stick to it.
| hugey010 wrote:
| This is how technical screens are done, as a conversation.
| Cheating happens, but it's blatantly obvious.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| It's certain that this Socratic professor has preferences and
| biases, like everyone else in the world, some of which he
| will be unaware of. How is he to avoid these biases affecting
| the conclusion he draws?
| erhk wrote:
| Who is to say these biases dont already exist in exams?
| watwut wrote:
| Your charizma certainly plays less role.
|
| We had oral exams in university. They are less fair then
| written ones for sure. For the record, I did well and
| tendes to know what to say. Could also bluff my way when
| encountering edge of my knowledge.
|
| And seen a lot of bluffing, appeals to emotion,
| negotiation for better grades or special advantage. Once
| I have seen a guy negotiate C all the way to A - and no,
| no additional questions were asked.
|
| Oral exams are not fair in any way.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| One way of doing this is to make the viva entirely pass-
| fail, with a fairly low bar for passing. More of a sanity
| check to see that a student is generally familiar with the
| material as taught, and is capable of explaining their
| answers to questions they've previously solved (or
| variants)
| unishark wrote:
| Then it's like a job interview. If the answer doesn't pop
| into your head the instant after you hear the question you go
| into panic mode and can't even answer questions you should
| know.
|
| Though I suppose it would make people a lot better at job
| interviews if done for every class.
| j605 wrote:
| I had oral exams in Belgium where usually you are given
| time to prepare your written work. In the oral, the task
| then is to expand on your written work and answer questions
| that probe your understanding a bit deeper than the
| question itself. The professor might also ask you to
| hypothesize by changing some assumptions in the questions
| to check that you actually know the theory and have not
| regurgitated the book or copied it from someone.
| YakBizzarro wrote:
| at my university (Italy), exams were typically composed by
| one or more written session and a final oral exam. In the
| written one we were asked to solve exercises, no multiple-
| choices questions. They would last between 30m and 2 hours,
| depending on the size of the exam. In the oral one, we would
| also go over the solved exercises and discuss about mistakes
| and choices. Sometimes, mostly for laboratories, the written
| one was replaced by an assignment to be done at home,
| typically in form of a report of the activities.
| amitport wrote:
| Of course, this, in the rare cases it is applicable. In my
| current course we have 400 students with 3 Prof. ... So it is
| not really applicable.
|
| Another thing to note is that undergrades' first job usually
| depends on having good grades. Some people will get lower
| grades and those will complain to the point of suing the
| university into having a more seemingly fair and unbiased
| process. (Note actually fair, but I'm pretty sure whoever
| will get a low grade on the Socrates style conversation will
| be pissed and demand something else. This kind of mentoring
| only makes sense in the PhD level really, where grades matter
| less)
| christophilus wrote:
| I thought of this when posting. Honestly, universities are
| the educational equivalent of industrial farming. We need a
| rethink.
|
| When I was in university (some time ago!), it was always
| the large courses that were easiest to game. They were also
| generally the subjects I was least interested in.
|
| My small comp sci courses were amazing in contrast. Easily
| worth the cost of admission. I think the education system
| would be much improved if we had fewer, but significantly
| smaller courses.
|
| So, you pay the same price, but instead of 100 courses of
| massive size, you get 25 courses of small size.
| mkl wrote:
| Fewer courses that are also smaller? Wouldn't that mean
| the number of students has to go way down? Paying the
| same price seems unlikely.
| polytely wrote:
| I did Communication and Multimedia Design at the Hogeschool
| van Amsterdam, and they did a lot of stuff like that: having
| a dialogue with your teacher or exams where you could bring a
| couple of handwritten notes.
|
| The largest part of the grades came from delivering projects,
| where you were graded both on result and process (you would
| present an end-product, and deliver a report documenting the
| product & the process of creating it). At the start of each
| project you would get a document explaining what categories
| the product & presentation would be graded on and what a
| failing, passing and excellent grade would look like, so you
| had a clear goal.
|
| I have the feeling the system only works with great teachers
| (which was the case in 90% of the teacher I had during my 4
| years).
|
| They would also have feedback rounds after each semester and
| actually change things based on feedback, applying the design
| process on the course itself.
|
| It was a really great experience and I would whole-heartedly
| recommend that program to anyone interested in
| design/programming.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Even for people who have cheated in a very obvious way, nothing
| is done.
|
| A friend of mine copied an assignment right down to the name
| and student number as he didn't even bother to read the whole
| block of code so also copied the comments with the submission
| information.
|
| He got 100%, but was told not to do it again.
| legutierr wrote:
| This is in the United States?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Canada. Heard plenty of similar stories though for the USA
| as well.
| consp wrote:
| Completely anecdotal and not in the US:
|
| My experience as a TA are quite different, though this in in
| Europe. Especially with the algorithmic courses there was
| quite a lot of copying since there were multiple TA's and
| they thought we didn't compare notes. Several of them got
| reported (you get a mark, two marks is suspension, three is
| out) and I know of at least one case who got caught again at
| a different course and was suspended.
|
| For a programming course for first year engineering students
| we didn't care they copied each others code but just asked
| students to explain specific parts of the programs they
| handed in. Those who copied failed mostly instantly and got
| one retry, and most at least tried to understand what it was
| about after that. Though copy/pasting and not even changing
| the student's ID numbers was an instant fail.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Another anecdote (Britain):
|
| I was a part-time visiting lecturer in computing, paid by
| the lesson. Cheating was rife; I often got duplicate
| submission of coding exercises. Scoring was mainly by
| coursework, not exams.
|
| I asked my colleagues what to do about it. They said:
|
| 1. You can ignore it.
|
| 2. You can report it; you will be accused of racism (the
| majority of the class were people with brown skin). You
| will be required to sit on an exam board for several days
| during the holiday season, unpaid.
|
| 3. You can explain to them that collaboration is
| encouraged, but submitting work you didn't do as if it were
| your own is cheating, and not permitted.
|
| I took option 3.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| That's a very sad state of affairs. I think that's partly
| due universities having indeed taken the easy and lazy
| path of making the least waves possible while collecting
| tuition fees. (2) is also a product of the current
| climate in society but that's a wider anbd bigger issue.
| fcatalan wrote:
| We tested a couple eproctoring products last year while we geared
| up to move every exam online. We disliked them on ethical
| grounds, but also as ultimately unpractical. I had also a bad
| feeling about the vendors, there was a strong whiff of "bad used
| car salesmanship" in the whole interaction. I also felt there was
| a correlation between the push for these tools and bad or
| antiquated teaching methods.
|
| Then to our relief the education authorities in our region
| straight banned the practice so we just drew up a document with
| various ideas about how to go about online assessment in a humane
| and reasonable way and we went through thousands of online exams
| with very few incidents.
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| Banning e-proctoring is unfair to students who worked hard.
| josephcsible wrote:
| You don't think students who worked hard deserve privacy?
| hrnnnnnn wrote:
| I took a course recently and the final exam had this kind of
| eproctoring setup where I would have to install proprietary
| software, show the examiner around my room, under my desk and so
| on.
|
| I did not take the exam.
| op00to wrote:
| I took a test like this in the bathroom. Real easy to clear the
| room.
| alanfranz wrote:
| Was that a curveball? Nobody had told you beforehand?
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| It's certainly possible. Thankfully I graduated before Turn-
| it-in was fully mainstream and before online tests were even
| a thing AFAIK. Nonetheless, I had one professor decide midway
| through the semester that our final paper would need to be
| submitted to Turn-it-in. I had to go to office hours, point
| out that this requirement was not in the syllabus, and that
| if it was I would not have taken the course, and finally
| threaten to go complain to the dean. I was incredibly lucky
| to make it through school without ever having to submit to
| this kind of BS, but I rather think it's simply impossible
| today.
| ShroudedNight wrote:
| > I did not take the exam.
|
| I assume at significant cost?
|
| I feel similarly strongly about my dominion over my own
| computing devices and the boundaries placed on their intrusion
| into my environment.
|
| I wonder, at what point should this reasonably be considered
| equivalent to a religious belief and provided the same sort of
| protection.
| erhk wrote:
| Surely you should lease my harddrive space if you believe it
| is necessary.
|
| I charge $10/megabit/minute as i am an exclusive artisianal
| cloud. And thats not including badwidth or installation fee.
| erhk wrote:
| And while we are on the topic my work from home office is
| 2300/month to lease
| dspillett wrote:
| _> I feel similarly strongly about my dominion over my own
| computing devices_
|
| Same here. If I ever need to take remote exams like described
| I'll get a cheap laptop, or something like a Pi attached to a
| TV/monitor, and take the exam on that. They can have me
| install anything they like, it will be on a guest wireless
| network that can't cross to the rest of the local network,
| will be freshly installed with an account that is not one of
| my primaries, and will be wiped down when the exams are done.
| In fact I have an old slow laptop that would do, assuming it
| still works.
|
| Of course, not everyone has the luxury of being financially
| and technically able to do that.
|
| I'm the same with work. If work wants specific control on the
| devices I use, then they need to provide devices instead of
| taking control of my personal ones. I did install the comms
| software on an old phone in 2020 but if the ability to
| remote-wipe this granted is ever used (accidentally or
| purposefully) I'll lose nothing but my "get up for work"
| alarm as that is the only other thing on the device. If I
| work from home it is via RDC over VPN to my machine at the
| office - if there becomes a requirement for more control of
| the machine I'm VPN+RDCing from then either they provide a
| machine they control or I stop being able to work out of
| hours (not a problem for me!) or work from home should that
| be convenient/required (which isn't often, other than during
| lockdowns over the last 18 months).
|
| I don't have an adversarial relationship with work (which
| might be implied by the above paragraph), at least not as far
| as I can tell, but I find it better for my mental health (and
| my work, I think, though that is the secondary concern from
| my PoV) to silo my work and personal life somewhat. I can see
| a day when extra requirements will turn up, as we work with
| clients in strongly regulated industries and many of them are
| actively tightening their internal controls and making
| increasing demands on their suppliers (including us) to do
| the same.
|
| _> and the boundaries placed on their intrusion into my
| environment._
|
| That you can do less about in many cases, though again I'd
| have options. I only have a two-bedroom flat, but the little
| bedroom is used as a training room, so I could setup a chair
| and something as a desk in there. All they'll see in the tour
| of the room is the treadmill, weights, mats, and related bits
| & bobs.
|
| Again, many do not have the luxury of this option.
| mkl wrote:
| An old laptop is the way to go, as long as its networking
| is good. A Raspberry Pi is unlikely to be supported; these
| programs usually only support Windows and macOS (and
| possibly ipadOS or Android). A virtual machine is not an
| option either, as it will be detected and the program will
| refuse to run.
| jackvalentine wrote:
| My institution is currently undergoing a review of our assessment
| policy and I am participating as a stakeholder.
|
| Nobody, academic or otherwise, wants to use e-proctoring ongoing.
| It was a kludge for sudden covid in 2020 but ongoing use will be
| restricted by policy to where it is used to accommodate a
| student's need for an alternative assessment arrangement.
| heisenbit wrote:
| People who have to cheat to get through university and succeed
| doing so have cheating skills to succeed without having to invest
| the time and money for a degree.
|
| People who would pass but cheat anyways because they believe
| grades matter are stupid enough that they will fail in any job.
|
| We are all poorer for the importance we assign to grades and the
| resulting design for testability of education
|
| Anyone here giving anything on grades when hiring? I know I never
| did.
| alistairSH wrote:
| _Anyone here giving anything on grades when hiring? I know I
| never did._
|
| For a new graduate with little other experience, I'd look at
| it. But, on the list of things that really mattered, it was
| near the bottom - at most, a "low" GPA would trigger me to ask
| more basic tech questions than I might normally.
|
| For anybody with career experience, I don't care.
| LysPJ wrote:
| For anyone unfamiliar with the term (like me!), Wikipedia says
| Eproctoring is:
|
| [...] a form of exam proctoring which involves monitoring student
| behaviour during exams administered electronically [...]
| deadfish wrote:
| Massive failure to not have "What is Eproctoring" as the first
| section of the page.
| vultour wrote:
| I had no idea what it was, but reading the first few
| paragraphs makes it quite obvious.
| dspillett wrote:
| I assume the target audience would all know the term, and
| others could work it with a little deduction or Googling.
|
| Though it is a bit US centric I think. Here in the UK what I
| think is referred to as a proctor would instead be called an
| invigilator. Though again, unless the target audience is
| international, that probably does not matter.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| I would add as an aside that the invigilated exam halls you
| likely remember from your British education don't really
| exist in most US universities. Final exams are generally
| administered by the lecturers themselves rather than
| independent invigilators, and there's (generally) less
| emphasis on having a standardised process from one course
| to another.
| onorton wrote:
| Funny, at my UK university for Computer Science we did
| not have independently invigilated exams. I would assume
| other courses were similar. We did have them for
| secondary education though.
| dspillett wrote:
| At York we certainly piled into Central Hall or other
| large locations for exams, often multiple in the same
| room not all Computer Science at the same time. Though
| this was more than two decades ago so a lot may have
| changed.
| jl6 wrote:
| I was recently sponsored by my employer to do a professional
| certification which involved an online e-proctored exam. I was
| asked to install the e-proctoring software on my personal
| computer, because corporate security policy does not allow
| unvetted 3rd party software onto company devices. I told my
| employer that's my policy too, and that I would need to be
| supplied with a separate laptop if they wanted me to take the
| exam. They did.
|
| I think if universities want to mandate use of e-proctoring
| software, they need to provide temporary/burner devices too.
| poplarstand wrote:
| Imagine a business that sells deliverable medical testing kits.
| This business is the best at what they do; they sell more kits
| than any other organization, they cost less, they're delivered
| faster, and are superior in any way, shape, KPI, or form
| imaginable to traditional alternatives. The only issue being that
| each kit is in fact a bloodletting kit, and their intended use is
| to inform you which of your four humours is out of balance.
|
| I'm of the opinion that e-proctoring, whatever its privacy
| concerns, is fundamentally an exercise in "doing the wrong thing
| faster". Our exams are a poor reflection of student ability. Our
| exams have no bearing on actual proficiency in the subject
| matter. Our exams are ineffectual at catching cheaters. Leaving
| aside any discussion of privacy, e-proctoring (and traditional
| proctoring) fails to accomplish its fundamental goals.
|
| To automate these exams, to make them ever-more scalable and
| easier to distribute, is not a victory. We've merely perpetuated
| a flawed system.
|
| If we want a meaningful assessment of student ability then we
| need to use better methods. Dethrone exams from our curriculum.
| Leverage project-based assessments. Use oral exams where
| feasible. Replace the infinitely looping lecture halls with
| recorded videos and open-source textbooks. Use the recovered
| instructor time for something meaningful. This is not a Gordian
| knot. It can be solved with a little courage and a little
| pragmatism.
| bitL wrote:
| Algo for teachers affected by cheating:
|
| 1) make questions brutal and unique (compared to previous year or
| current groups) if possible
|
| 2) make everything open-book
|
| 3) set a tough time limit
|
| 4) curve the results to a desired grade distribution (that is
| often imposed from above anyway)
|
| 5) use software that can the catch most obvious frauds (i.e. 360
| degree room scanning, ban use of phones/second computers etc.)
|
| 6) if the exam requires algos, use software analyzing AST of the
| code produced to catch possible "cooperation", then decide on
| those cases individually (i.e. if an algo is common, then there
| is a high chance of very similar AST for non-cooperating people,
| but if it's unique, the chance is low)
| noodlesUK wrote:
| I'm not sure about curving the grades. It creates a level of
| adversarial competition between students that I don't think is
| healthy in an academic environment. Sometimes it can be
| necessary, but it's not fair to punish people for having better
| peers than last year.
| sokoloff wrote:
| In most cases, at least for medium and large courses (over
| 30) the curve is calibrating the exam contents more than the
| peer group.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| I agree with you on that point, especially with extremely
| large sample sizes (think national exams like SATs or
| A-Levels).
|
| My point is more that universities (in my opinion) should
| hope to foster a cooperative rather than ruthlessly
| competitive learning environment, and students know that
| curves mean that there's effectively a quota of good grades
| available, and they're competing with their friends for
| them. I feel this massively impacts peer learning dynamics.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _i.e. 360 degree room scanning_
|
| Tape a smartphone to the laptop screen. Out of view of the
| webcam at all times. (This isn't hard.) Such room scanning is
| harmful, and doesn't prevent cheating.
| op00to wrote:
| The tests I've taken (amateur radio, tech certs) require a
| second device to show the rest of the first device.
| bitL wrote:
| Some tests I've taken required a 360-degree scan first
| including under-the-desk walk (to show no cheat sheets were
| glued anywhere) and then required a second device with a
| side-view of the desk I was sitting at. When I was taking
| an ETS test for a Stanford admission, they just required
| 360 room scan and the test itself only with a laptop
| camera.
| ShroudedNight wrote:
| Do you have personal experience finding success with #6? My
| limited experience with detecting code plagiarism has been that
| detecting re-use that has been non-trivially obfuscated is a
| rather difficult problem.
| bitL wrote:
| One of the Top 10 CS universities I studied at had some
| system for that, obviously it couldn't catch somebody who was
| a good programmer and could reshuffle AST with properly
| renamed variables. But it was still helpful for less-gifted
| students who cheated. Typically teachers had to set a
| threshold of similarity for their given assignments over
| which it was automatically reporting student names. The
| software scrapped GitHub as well.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| For me what tends to happen is it becomes easy to catch the
| weaker students students who are cheating, since they often
| make weird/unusual mistakes that would be unlikely to occur
| in the same way (e.g. weird misspellings of certain
| keywords/variables).
| rednerrus wrote:
| Honest question: Who cares if people are cheating? It's not like
| I can't call my friend when I have a question at work.
| aeorgnoieang wrote:
| I'd imagine your friend(s) would care if you called them with
| questions frequently enough!
| tristor wrote:
| When I was in college, cheating was already rampant. I ended up
| dropping out the semester prior to graduation, despite performing
| well, because I just couldn't muster the desire to continue. Part
| of that was because of seeing how many people around me were
| blatantly and consistently cheating compared to the work I put
| in.
|
| Without the credential it's definitely created some challenges in
| my career, but I took the far more valuable /education/ with me
| into my career and have been very successful overall. When I look
| up most of my former classmates, they have not achieved near my
| level of success, partly because they failed to learn due to
| their rampant cheating. They may have received the credential,
| but they failed to learn anything they could take forward in life
| with them.
|
| I'm of two minds on this. I think that rampant cheating greatly
| undermines student morale for those students that don't cheat,
| but on the other hand it doesn't really matter because in the
| long-run it cheats the student who's cheating, not the class. The
| piece of paper at the end doesn't matter.
|
| All that aside, the way e-proctoring is done now, and new
| "advancements" with facial recognition being added into it, is
| horrifyingly privacy invading and often done in a way which is
| effectively malicious software being forced to be installed on a
| student's personal equipment. As a strong advocate for privacy
| and security, I cannot be anything but opposed to the way things
| are going. When I do remote proctored certification exams for
| continuing education, I've always preferenced taking them in a
| testing center kiosk specifically so I don't need any such
| software installed on my own computer systems.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Thank you for standing up for what you thought is the right
| thing to do. Takes character to swim against the stream and not
| simply falling back to group behavior.
| [deleted]
| masondunn wrote:
| Snowflakes... "Youth were never more sawcie, yea never more
| savagely saucie . . . the ancient are scorned, the honourable are
| contemned, the magistrate is not dreaded."
| JasonFruit wrote:
| One problem here is analogous to the separation of powers in
| government: education and testing are separate powers, and
| shouldn't be exercised by the same body. Educators ought to be
| doing everything they can to help students gain understanding,
| and such evaluation as is necessary for them to guide that
| process ought to be consequence-free, except to alert the
| educator to what next step is needed. Doing otherwise creates a
| needlessly antagonistic relationship between teacher and student,
| and causes all sorts of unhelpful incentives in both parties.
|
| Evaluation of the success of that education, on individual and
| institutional levels, ought to be done by people not involved in
| the process of education. Such testing should be infrequent
| enough that live, in-person proctoring would be no burden. There
| is no reason for high-stakes evaluation to be a constant feature
| of education.
|
| I don't think that'll happen anytime soon, but it seems like the
| right approach, to me.
| jjeaff wrote:
| This is an interesting point. Testing and professors and their
| curriculum were always so intertwined in my college days that I
| never even considered a "separation of powers" but it makes
| sense.
| edtechdev wrote:
| This is how Western Governors University works - they have
| separate instructors and evaluators. Not sure how well it works
| in practice, however. I have read a few complaints.
| stuartbman wrote:
| Medical students in the UK were forced into incontinence for
| their exams due to proctoring failures. The same has also been
| happening with doctors doing their postgraduate exams.
| news_user wrote:
| Related: Bengaluru (India), Student alleges invigilator addressed
| her as 'baby', sparks row.
|
| https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/bangalore/bengaluru...
| quenix wrote:
| Not related, really.
| insomniacity wrote:
| I think it's related because eproctoring often forces people
| to electronically invite strangers into their homes and show
| them round.
|
| Creeps are going to creep, but it's legitimate to want to
| reduce the number of avenues they can do that.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| On the linked site it calls the eproctoring algorithms that have
| difficulty with dark skin tones "racist" I think it's foolish to
| ascribe human belief systems to computer vision frameworks.
| Instead you could describe them as "buggy" or "missing critical
| features that make it unusable"
|
| But no, the article linked on baneproctoring.com is instead
| saying something more along the lines of "eproctoring hates black
| people" This isn't helpful.
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| > A federally-funded study found that even the best facial
| recognition algorithms fail to work on Black and brown people,
| trans and non-binary people, as well as children and women in
| general.
|
| I assume it is black and brown trans and non-binary people. I
| don't see an algorithm fail because someone identifies as
| anything. However, why even mention it here, in this context? It
| makes the people behind this sound ridiculous.
|
| Aside from the technical difficulties with image recognition on
| BPoC which make this sort of tech a non-starter, I think
| universities and schools need to (finally) find a way to assess
| people that does not involve anything that can be cheated by
| having a book open next do the computer. Projects and papers and
| weekly problem sets to solve are a way better way to assess
| people.
| jarcane wrote:
| Recognition algorithms often make assumptions about the way
| people "should" be shaped according to their recorded gender or
| the way the machine attempts to "guess" said gender, and a
| clash in expectations gets flagged and generates false
| negatives because things aren't in the "right" places it thinks
| they should be.
|
| For a really simple example if this problem, the TSA body
| scanner machines flag on trans people constantly. It detects as
| an "unknown mass" if gendered body parts (ie. breasts/genitals)
| don't match its binary expectations for what gender is marked
| on their passport. Often they get it coming and going: a trans
| femme still marked M will get flagged for having breasts, but
| if they've changed it to F, they get flagged for their genitals
| instead.
|
| Now you get a full grope patdown from a suspicious TSA officer,
| because a machine was coded to make binary assumptions about
| bodies.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >Now you get a full grope patdown from a suspicious TSA
| officer, because a machine was coded to make binary
| assumptions about bodies.
|
| No, you get a full grope patdown from a TSA officer because
| the United States' reaction to 9/11 was disproportionate and
| insane.
|
| In no other free nation on Earth* would a machine detecting a
| suspicious, dick-shaped lump where your vagina should be
| cause an airport security agent to want to sexually assault
| you.
|
| *Yes, I'm sure there are a few, and I'm sure someone will
| respond to my comment with at least one of them.
| goatxi wrote:
| It just means that the body scanner is programmed to
| recognize biological realities (that transwomen are men
| presenting as women, and transmen are women presenting as
| men), rather than questionable self-beliefs.
| donkarma wrote:
| So we put sex on passports? What is the issue?
| goatxi wrote:
| One problem is that in some countries (such as the UK), you
| can legally change your birth certificate to have it record
| your supposed 'gender identity' in the sex field instead.
| Your actual sex is erased.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _Often they get it coming and going: a trans femme still
| marked M will get flagged for having breasts, but if they
| 've changed it to F, they get flagged for their genitals
| instead._
|
| An F sex marker isn't going to stop this happening.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| Is there a source or explanation for how a proctoring service
| running on a computer webcam (not a body scanner) would flag
| students because their outward appearance doesn't conform
| well to a particular gender distribution? I didn't see any
| links in the article.
| goatxi wrote:
| Reminds me of that AI model for sex classification that would -
| quite accurately - recognize trans people as their birth sex
| rather than their 'gender identity'.
|
| People were complaining that it was transphobic or whatever,
| but it was just saying what it saw. Like what most of us see,
| even if we politely acquiesce to the fantasy.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| It isn't so much a book that is a problem. It is divide and
| conquer by groups of students.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Everyone wants a tie-in to the hot button issue of the day. You
| don't need to get black trans kids involved to point out all of
| the flaws in Eproctoring.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| To point out _enough_ flaws to disqualify e-proctoring, no.
| To point out all of them, yes.
| fcatalan wrote:
| In our initial trials involving about 5 people the software
| systematically failed to recognise one woman just because her
| (pretty standard) hairstyle. It also failed to detect my kids
| coming up on camera a few times.
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| Sounds like these solutions are just outright garbage. I
| wonder if ML/CV will ever work outside of GAFAM.
| RegBarclay wrote:
| There are basic technical hurdles for a lot of users too. My wife
| recently took a professional certification exam at home. She is
| an RN. We had to borrow my son's desktop gaming system, set it up
| in the kitchen, and jump some technical hoops (buy an external
| web cam) to meet the proctoring requirements. My wife probably
| couldn't have done it without my technical help and it was more
| stressful for her than going to a testing center.
| TravisHusky wrote:
| Just to throw it out there, I graduated during the pandemic, and
| it was so frustrating not only the amount of cheating that
| occurred, which meant that if you didn't cheat you fell behind;
| but also how professors responded. I had a few professors who
| made exams ridiculously hard with strict time limits, just
| because they expected people to cheat. So the exams were designed
| in a way they cheating was the only way to get through it, which
| just encouraged more people to cheat. Not to say every person
| cheated, or every professor designed tests to be harder, but both
| groups were larger than you'd expect.
|
| The good news is I think that with classes being in person again
| things will go relatively back to normal. Honestly I don't think
| I can fault students who cheated during the pandemic, it was just
| so abnormal that most people did whatever they had to to cope.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I graduated in 2000, and cheating was rampant if you knew where
| to look.
|
| One variety was legal - you'd have a doctors note to get a
| reasonable accommodation for ADD. In the 90s, it was pretty
| trivial to do that. Once you had that, you were taking tests in
| a facility that made cheating very easy (open book) if you were
| motivated.
| ridiculous_leke wrote:
| > Honestly I don't think I can fault students who cheated
| during the pandemic, it was just so abnormal that most people
| did whatever they had to to cope.
|
| I beg to differ. Saying that dishonesty is acceptable in
| certain scenarios will only motivate them to further partake in
| bad acts. In extreme cases, the child will end up as a
| criminal.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| "In extreme cases, the child will end up as a criminal."
|
| these are university students pressured to have high grades
| for internships/first jobs, not some impressionable
| elementary schooler. Thinking way too obtusely for this to be
| a factor and compare this to some middle schooler getting
| into drugs.
| cowpig wrote:
| I had an experience like this in Numerical Methods in
| university years ago.
|
| The exams were incredibly difficult for bad reasons: you had to
| calculate many iterations of an algorithm by hand. You also had
| to memorize a bunch of algorithms (rather than understanding
| how they worked or how to modify them to solve different
| problems).
|
| The professor also had a "can't do anything about it" attitude,
| and so the entire class was blatantly cheating as a result, and
| I got the worst grade of my academic career.
|
| It sort of broke the camel's back for me; I consider our
| current approach to academics to be fundamentally broken.
|
| It's harder to design exams where people cannot cheat, but it's
| certainly possible. Randomize the orders of questions on the
| test. Have multiple versions the same question (e.g. in a math
| exam, change a 2 to a 4, or a sin to a cos). Now you have
| unique exams for each student.
|
| Most importantly, design questions that require critical
| thinking, and allow everyone to use their
| computers/books/notes/whatever. That's far more representative
| of real life anyway.
|
| These simple changes would both make cheating very difficult,
| and result in better learning: memorizing a bunch of crap the
| day before an exam will have basically no impact in my life.
| Learning how to reason critically about the subject matter will
| give me lasting benefits, even if that subject never comes up
| again.
|
| This ProctorU stuff is just quadrupling down on a fundamentally
| broken approach and making it much worse.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| You must not have seen a modern home cheating rig. The
| student read/scrolls through the entire test to read each
| question, as is recommended. A small camera that sees the
| screen transmits the questions to a team in another room.
| Each team member works on one question at a time. A single
| person then communicates the prepared answers back to the
| test taker via an earpiece, one small enough that it isn't
| detectable on the camera. Such a rig costs a few hundred
| dollars at most.
|
| Another common trick: looking at your keyboard isn't
| cheating. Any small display secreted on your keyboard will go
| unnoticed. You will just look like you aren't a great typist,
| someone who needs to look at the keys.
|
| Want to go real hardcore? Cut into your laptop and send the
| screen/keyboard/mouse signals to a different monitor. Then
| you can have an actor sit in front of the webcam pretending
| to take the test. I doubt they are correlating keypress
| sounds to characters appearing on the screen... yet. As any
| security expert would tell you: if the attacker has
| unfettered access to your hardware then all bets are off.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| How much does the team cost?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| That would depend on the level of expertise you need. To
| pass a highschool calc exam, probably less than 100$. To
| have someone sit the LSAT for you in person, probably in
| the low five figures. I've never been involved with
| people actually being paid for such things but they do
| happen. Huffman allegedly paid $15,000 to get her
| daughter unlimited time on the SAT. Paying to have
| someone actually stand in would have certainly cost more.
| pjbeam wrote:
| This is one of those situations in which it pays to have
| likeminded friends.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Fundamentally, what you are complaining about is teaching
| being under resourced: making lots of variations of questions
| obviously takes more effort both to create and to score so
| that's why it's not done. Making questions that require
| critical thinking is very hard because you need a _very_ good
| understanding of the students mind to test the correct thing,
| so it 's usually not done.
| kiba wrote:
| Have you considered that memorization is a good thing?
|
| I memorized a lot of information, but I still search just as
| often on google and stackoverflow whenever I needed to check
| something.
|
| It also help that I don't try to memorize a bunch of a crap
| before an exam.
| jdmichal wrote:
| My AP calculus teacher allowed us to use calculators on our
| tests. Why? Because he knew _exactly_ how to design questions
| such that the calculator would switch from exact to
| approximation mode. So you could enter any problem on the
| test into the calculator, and all it would spit out is a
| useless answer with as many decimal places as it could
| handle. Of course the calculator worked fine on every
| homework question. But you better have still learned the
| material if you wanted to make it through the test.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Calculators are generally useless in Calculus. Or at least
| they should be. Calculus is a process, and normally you are
| graded on that process, not on the answer.
|
| We were allowed calculators too, but the problems were
| designed that anyone even mildly good at mental math didn't
| need them. In theory you could teach all of calculus
| without ever even using numbers (perhaps except 0).
| cbsks wrote:
| It's been a while since I took calculus, but I seem to
| remember that a TI-89 calculator could show its steps
| when solving a problem.
| voxic11 wrote:
| Yeah I also had a TI-89 and you could directly type in
| most calc problem and get a great step by step answer.
| The symbolic solver on that thing was great.
| astura wrote:
| >Calculators are generally useless in Calculus. Or at
| least they should be. Calculus is a process, and normally
| you are graded on that process, not on the answer.
|
| Yes.
|
| It's been so long since I took calculus but that's the
| reason why we weren't allowed calculators in my Calculus
| class. All the formulas needed for the test were also
| provided (as we weren't being graded on our memorization
| skills either)
|
| My professor also said don't bother doing simple
| arithmetic just to simplify an answer - leave it at 12/56
| or whatever.
|
| Turns out, it was a really, really great system.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > Calculators are generally useless in Calculus. Or at
| least they should be.
|
| Mathematica, on the other hand...
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica got me through Calculus. I
| paid for an account because I absolutely loved the "show
| step by step process" feature so you could actually learn
| how and why you were getting various results.
| shadilay wrote:
| In calculus a calculator can often give you the answer
| but you only get credit for showing the steps which the
| calculator can't help you with.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Just get or a program a calculator that shows steps then.
| titanomachy wrote:
| I think you need more numbers than that. At least 1, pi,
| and e. Definitely don't need any numbers bigger than 4.
| sonograph wrote:
| I don't follow. Do you mean to say that the calculator
| would produce .333333333 repeating but the student was
| expected to write 1/3 ?
| VLM wrote:
| Those reciprocals are too small.
|
| Lets see if the kids know how to multiply fractions:
|
| factorial(256) times ( 1 divided by factorial(256) )
| equals ?
|
| And yes, there will unfortunately be kids trying to brute
| force it by typing it in instead of cancelling the
| factorial(256).
| voxic11 wrote:
| The TI-89 comes with a excellent symbolic solver that can
| do solve this or any calc problem and give the proper
| symbolic result. It can even do things like equation
| simplification and give the results in terms of the
| variables. Looks like this https://imgur.com/a/FmdCyYU
| [deleted]
| azalemeth wrote:
| I suspect think more along the lines of spitting out a
| numerical answer instead of sqrt(pi) when fed with
| \int_-\infty^\infty exp(-x^2) dx...
| xg15 wrote:
| I think professors should ask themselves if their exam would
| make a good CAPTCHA. If a machine could solve the exam easier
| than a human, it's a bad exam.
| someguyorother wrote:
| Calculus captchas do exist, which I guess proves the point!
|
| https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/03/09/a-complicated-
| ca...
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| "circle all pictures that represent sqrt(pi)"
| deregulateMed wrote:
| In engineering school, our professors wanted to treat things
| like the real world (as much as you could during test time).
|
| Their solution was to let us use whatever we wanted except
| other students. Cellphones, textbooks, laptop, Internet.
|
| You had 2 hours to answer 2 or 3 questions, it was definitely
| reasonable if you studied... But the questions were insane.
|
| You know how homework would be assigned 1-50 odds? These were
| like the problems 74 and 76, 1/4 page long and difficult,
| multiple parts.
|
| That seems as similar as engineering school got to the real
| would outside our sophomore and senior design projects.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| > Honestly I don't think I can fault students who cheated
| during the pandemic, it was just so abnormal that most people
| did whatever they had to to cope.
|
| Cheating is never OK. Look what that lead to. A few bad apples
| ruined it for the other students. People have to learn, that
| their behavior in such a setting does not only affect
| themselves. In this case it very negatively impacted everyone
| studying with them.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >People have to learn, that their behavior in such a setting
| does not only affect themselves
|
| at some point it's like defensive driving. Sure, they are at
| fault and an idiot, but for the sake of your own safety you
| shouldn't "stick to your morals" or just "hope they get
| theirs". Look out for yourself, because for some people
| that's the only person that will do it.
|
| With that lens, yes. I don't blame people who need to do what
| they do for one day in some artificial environment so they
| aren't impacted in their transition to real world work where
| they are otherwise moral.
| gopher_space wrote:
| Why are we constantly surprised when people focus on the only
| metrics they're judged by?
| fddddd wrote:
| i still cannot understand why american (i am assuming)
| education is based on competition and ranking students.
|
| almost like the point is NOT education at all.
|
| your comment makes no sense in my universe. Thankfully.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > I had a few professors who made exams ridiculously hard with
| strict time limits, just because they expected people to cheat.
| So the exams were designed in a way they cheating was the only
| way to get through it, which just encouraged more people to
| cheat.
|
| That's such a strange response to that expectation. For the
| class I teach, I made my exams open book, open notes, open
| internet and gave them a extended time to work on the exam. If
| they're gonna cheat, they're gonna cheat. Don't fight the tide.
| But the questions I asked where analysis/synthesis questions
| that couldn't simply be looked up, and student performance was
| on a bell curve with a 80 average (in line with previous
| years). I think a lot of professors need to embrace the
| situation and adapt rather than forcing a police state on
| students during exam times.
| TravisHusky wrote:
| I had a couple professors do exactly what you did and it was
| much more enjoyable. I feel like I leaned a lot more in
| classes like that, and now that I have a real engineering job
| I have realized this style is a lot more accurate to what the
| real world is like.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| > it was so frustrating not only the amount of cheating that
| occurred
|
| Yeah, it's crazy that cheaters are the protagonist of the ban
| e-proctoring story.
|
| What if the university only admitted students who don't cheat?
|
| How do we know that policy works for real at a place like
| Caltech?
|
| Academic culture is accommodating, and you feel that way too.
| But universities must know that cheating harms everyone, it's a
| losing proposition. The right response should have been to
| suspend grading.
| cvwright wrote:
| Or just grade other work that doesn't require proctoring.
|
| Personally, I removed exams entirely in the last courses I
| taught in Spring 2020, and it seemed to work out OK. I had no
| faith that the proctoring systems would catch everything, and
| I had no desire to inflict them on my students in any case.
| zepto wrote:
| > What if the university only admitted students who don't
| cheat?
|
| It's a common fallacy to attribute behavior to innate
| qualities of people, rather than situations.
| bulatb wrote:
| For anyone interested, it's called the fundamental
| attribution error.
| hinkley wrote:
| We had a particularly articulate young man in our graduating
| class that argued that checking the book is ultimately not
| cheating in the world of professional CS and software
| development. Rather, it's considered being responsible. So why
| should we be taking tests that treat it as anomalous or
| cheating?
|
| He convinced one professor, possibly two, but if he had any
| more luck than that, I wasn't in those classes with him.
|
| Most of what we do is synthesizing facts into knowledge. But I
| know from copious personal experience that there is a wide grey
| area between recalling a fact at will and forgetting it exists
| entirely. I am fairly good at recalling concepts in general
| terms. Y might be applicable in this case, but I need to check
| the details to be sure/explain how.
|
| Which is also why I think banning computers from planning
| meetings is stupid. You want us to agree to do things without
| being able to spot check any of our hunches that will
| drastically effect our estimates? That's a winning plan /s.
| ekidd wrote:
| > _We had a particularly articulate young man in our
| graduating class that argued that checking the book is
| ultimately not cheating in the world of professional CS and
| software development._
|
| My school's CS department defaulted to allowing students to
| use almost any available resource (unless specifically
| indicated otherwise). But you were required to _write down_
| what resources you used.
|
| So a professor might assign a whole pile of nasty algorithm
| proofs, and say, "You're allowed to work in groups to find
| the general solution. But you need to write down your group
| members, and you need to do your own writeups." Tests were in
| person but not especially proctored. The penalty for cheating
| was a heavy suspension and a transcript annotation, with
| permanent expulsion for a second offense.
|
| This actually worked pretty well, back in the day.
| camgunz wrote:
| Totally agree. Generally my response to that situation is
| usually, "wait you did that from memory without looking it
| up? That's super irresponsible, check your work or use an
| existing ___".
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| Does anyone in academia know if tests are designed on a curve?
| You can give a test that everyone gets 100% on (assuming they
| show up) and you can give a test that everyone fails. Is part
| of creating a test thinking about how many students in your
| class are capable of scoring A's, etc or is it just a side
| effect
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| If school is using grading curves that school has already
| failed and there is no saving it before grading system
| changes.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I had a highschool calculus teacher who was very explicit
| about designing their tests on an A/B/C system.
|
| The idea was that the A section was the basic plug-n-chug
| versions of the problem that everyone should be able to get
| if you were even half paying attention in class; the B
| section is stuff that requires a bit more reasoning and
| analysis, and may have a pitfall or two, but they'll be
| things that were at least mentioned; and the C section is
| effectively extra credit-- a problem where you needed to have
| a deeper understanding in order to figure out something novel
| about it, or like you needed to re-derive something from
| first principles in a way that was slightly different from
| what was shown in class, that kind of thing.
|
| And the sections weren't equally weighted; I think it was
| usually like 50/30/20, or even 60/30/10.
|
| Some people hated this, but I really liked how explicit it
| was. There was no mystery meat-- the whole evaluation scheme
| was very open about its design and intent.
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| From my experience... it varies widely. The university will
| have a standard, the department will, the professor will.
|
| I had experience taking undergraduate courses at 4
| institutions in the USA and of course many departments.
|
| I had some professors that expected the grades to fall like
| grade school did with 90-100 % being a high percentage.
| Others gave 4-6 difficult multi part problems and graded on a
| transparent curve. Others gave difficult problems and were
| not transparent about the grading scheme.
| corty wrote:
| Depends on country, university and professor. In Germany, the
| general rule is that grading on a curve isn't allowed or at
| least strongly discouraged. There was a short while when such
| a system was acceptable, called ECTS grades (not to be
| confused with ECTS credits), but that was done away with in a
| year or so. Currently, grades are based on the lecture
| contents and the expectation of the lecturer for the progress
| a student should make. Lecturers are relatively free to do
| whatever they please within those bounds. If a test ends in
| everybody failing, tough luck, maybe next time. If that
| unfortunate event does repeat too often, the dean might get
| involved, but can't do a lot more than talk to the lecturer.
| allgreed wrote:
| Not strictly curve grading, but when I was studying
| electronics one of the professors had a 9-step algorithm for
| processing raw scores into grades. That involved normalizing
| the lab scores between different reviewers (so that harshness
| of a particular reviewer would be compensated for). He also
| assigned `cos(percentage_from_other_test as radians)` instead
| of resits if you missed one of the tests for valid reason but
| had shown up on the other.
|
| On one hand I really like the former approach and could
| understand the latter (organizing resits is likely a huge
| PITA). On the other that's the only professor I heard of that
| was attacked with an axe by one of his students.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Important to suss out the two issues, because they are in
| conflict:
|
| 1) EProctoring is bad when it does not work as intended (racism,
| getting people wrong, etc)
|
| 2) EProctoring is bad when it works exactly as intended.
|
| The second is the bigger issue, IMHO. I refuse to use it
| categorically. We teachers need to learn to adapt to the current
| world. This means understanding that there is _very little_ use
| for this kind of testing in general. Very few situations in life
| require rote memorization in a time sensitive environment where
| you can 't talk to people or use the internet. Teachers, teach
| better.
| krull10 wrote:
| How are you supposed to assess whether a student has learned
| quantum mechanics, or chemistry, or calculus if any questions
| you ask them they can simply contact another student for help,
| or get someone to do it for them on sites like Chegg? Short of
| giving an individualized oral exam, which is not feasible for
| anything but tiny classes, proctored exams are necessary for
| assessment in such classes. This has nothing to do with
| memorization or time pressures, and everything to do with
| making sure the student is the one who actually did the work.
| In an ideal world one could trust students to do take-home
| exams on their own, but I've yet to be at a university where
| undergraduates did not take advantage of such trust...
| kevin_young wrote:
| Nothing to hide, nothing to fear. Simple really.
| spoonjim wrote:
| I agree that these e-proctoring measures seem draconian, but the
| flip side of this is absolutely RAMPANT cheating at universities.
| I don't know what kind of fair system lies between these two
| issues.
|
| Also, the domain is poorly chosen, "Bane Proctoring" sounds like
| a particularly terrifying proctoring service.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| > but the flip side of this is absolutely RAMPANT
|
| I REALLY doubt this. There's plenty of alternative or hardened
| testing methods.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| You'd be absolutely shocked by the amount of flagrant
| plagiarism that you get in certain courses.
|
| There are ads for essay writing services targeting every
| university student out there. A lot of them take those
| offers.
|
| It's usually a symptom of a larger problem though.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Ones that scale?
| mvanaltvorst wrote:
| Me and my roommate are first year undergraduate students. We do
| different bachelors; I have taken all my tests this year with
| online proctoring, my roommate has had all his tests without
| online proctoring.
|
| The proctoring process is actually pretty simple: I have a Google
| Chrome extension installed that I enable when I have to take an
| exam. It takes 5 extra minutes before the exam: I have to show my
| identification, the materials I'm using on my desk, my ears to
| check whether I'm using wireless earphones, and do a quick sweep
| around the room. It records my screen, my webcam, and my
| microphone. Of course, the system is not fool proof (I've heard
| some students use post-its on their display), but communicating
| with other students becomes nearly impossible.
|
| My roommate is actually jealous of my proctoring. He does not
| cheat, but knows most others in his year do. There are groups of
| students who meet up and take exams with each other. As a result,
| some of his peers consistently get higher grades, while my
| roommate clearly put in more effort and is more capable of
| achieving a high grade on his own. Because the barrier to
| cheating is so low, it almost becomes a requirement to cheat if
| you want to achieve grades that are high relative to your peers.
|
| I do not believe proctoring is a breach of my privacy. Google
| Chrome's sandbox is good at explaining what information the
| extension is requesting, and when it is turned on. Chrome's
| battle-tested sandboxing makes me confident that the extension is
| not snooping through my files, for example. It only sees my
| screen. I can hide things I do not want the online proctor to see
| before the exam starts. Similarly with my room, you can hide
| everything that would breach your privacy before the exam starts.
| Of course, online proctoring is invasive, but I believe students
| should think more carefully about the dilemma our teachers are
| facing. Lack of online proctoring discourages smart students,
| discourages learning, and hurts the reputation of the university
| in the long term with unreasonable diploma's. This pandemic
| requires flexibility from everyone, and simply crying "privacy"
| without considering both sides is short-sighted. The data
| recorded for online proctoring is reasonable, and does not bring
| us closer to any kind of "big brother" scenario.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| College is a game. If you arent cheating, you really dont care
| about your gpa and waste too much time in school. Those
| students that cheat and get away with it are actually much
| wiser than your friend seeing as they save way more time.
| MereInterest wrote:
| > Similarly with my room, you can hide everything that would
| breach your privacy before the exam starts.
|
| The need to hide things is itself an effect of privacy having
| been breached. Privacy isn't just to keep information secret,
| but also to provide a space in which you can be comfortable
| because it is your own space. Needing to hide things away is a
| reaction to privacy being breached, not a way to preserve
| privacy.
| mvanaltvorst wrote:
| I do not understand how hiding private items from the camera
| breaches your privacy. That is like saying you have already
| died of thirst because you have to drink water; the
| preventive measure does not cause the thing it tries to
| prevent.
|
| Furthermore, you do not have to take the exam in your own
| room. Any quiet room where there are no other people is
| theoretically fine. Having access to such a room is your own
| responsibility, just like having access to a laptop to do
| your study is your own responsibility. In practice, hiding
| private items in your study room is usually the most
| practical way to get access to a comfortable room, but I do
| not believe requiring students to have access to a private
| room for 2 hours breaches their privacy.
| joppy wrote:
| "Having access to such a room is your own
| responsibility"...
|
| It might be a little much to ask for during a pandemic
| where people are stuck in places they didn't expect to be
| for a long while though, with a whole bunch of other people
| also stuck inside.
| MereInterest wrote:
| > I do not understand how hiding private items from the
| camera breaches your privacy. That is like saying you have
| already died of thirst because you have to drink water; the
| preventive measure does not cause the thing it tries to
| prevent.
|
| I think I see the difference here. You're seeing "privacy"
| in terms of information being leaked. So long as no
| information is revealed, then no privacy has been lost. The
| information security is key. Is that an accurate way of
| describing your views?
|
| For me, "privacy" is a state in which effort does not need
| to be expended to maintain information security. The cost
| is not the personal information being leaked, but rather
| the effort needed in order to prevent information from
| being leaked. Of knowing that your sanctuary has been
| violated, that your comfortable place has been exposed to
| others. And sure, you may try to minimize other effects of
| that breach of privacy by hiding away aspects of yourself,
| but that is a response to an invasion that has already
| occurred.
|
| To use your analogy, suppose I'm going on a trip through
| the desert. I know that water may not be readily available,
| so I take several gallons of water with me. On the other
| hand, if I'm going to a restaurant, I can assume that water
| will be available and do not pack my own. In neither case
| have I died of thirst, but in one case I have needed to
| spend additional effort to ensure that was the case. If I
| hide things away from the camera, I haven't had information
| leaks (died of thirst), but I have needed to take extra
| precautions (carrying several gallons of water) due to the
| breach of privacy (travel through the desert) that has
| already occurred.
|
| > Furthermore, you do not have to take the exam in your own
| room. Any quiet room where there are no other people is
| theoretically fine. Having access to such a room is your
| own responsibility, just like having access to a laptop to
| do your study is your own responsibility.
|
| During normal times, when there may be publicly available
| study rooms at a university, those options exist. When
| those same study rooms are closed to stop the spread of a
| pandemic, or when those study rooms cannot be booked due to
| lack of availability, a person's private room may be the
| only room available. In that case, the requirement of
| exposing one's exam space implicitly requires exposing
| one's personal space.
|
| > I do not believe requiring students to have access to a
| private room for 2 hours breaches their privacy.
|
| Requiring students to have access to a private room isn't
| the issue. Requiring proctors to have access to the
| student's private room is.
| mkl wrote:
| What proctoring product is it you're using?
| isiahl wrote:
| It sounds like HonorLock
| tchalla wrote:
| The banning of such a tool is a good start. One could also think
| about creation of requirements for tools to protect student
| privacy in the future that goes beyond a specific tool or
| software.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| Eproctoring is a terrible solution to a real problem.
|
| There is cheating at universities. Traditional invigilated exams
| are fairly effective at detecting certain kinds of cheating, and
| ensuring a minimum level of competence in some subjects.
|
| I'm aware of a number of different notions of cheating, though I
| am by no means an expert:
|
| The sort of looking over somebody's shoulder to see their answers
| is what comes to mind first, and this is fairly easy to detect
| through existing means (turnitin etc for written work). This is a
| common form of plagiarism.
|
| There is collusion, where people try to share answers. There are
| varying schools of thought on how bad this is. I personally don't
| worry too much about it because most assignments are primarily
| formative rather than summative examinations, and in these cases
| it is basically peer learning a lot of the time.
|
| The most heinous kind of cheating and the hardest to detect is
| commissioning. This is basically when students use essay writing
| services or similar. They will generate an original work of
| appropriate quality.
|
| It's almost always possible to detect the kind of blatant
| cheating people are particularly worried about (commissioning and
| plagiarism) through sufficient contact time between the students
| and staff. A brief conversation every now and then with students
| will promptly reveal blatant cheaters.
|
| There is no magic technological solution to this. Eroding student
| trust and privacy through invasive surveillance will inevitably
| lead to worse outcomes.
|
| The solutions to this are to set better assignments, which
| require thoughtful answers, rather than scantron-like quizzes
| where answer keys can be shared, high levels of contact time to
| get to know students, and occasionally controlled exams to ensure
| nothing is slipping through the cracks. There's a big difference
| between teaching and certification, and it's very hard to balance
| those needs.
|
| Anything summative needs to be marked anonymously (or at least
| pseudonymously), and often needs to be done under controlled
| conditions.
|
| It is not possible to detect a sufficiently advanced cheater
| (particularly people commissioning work) working in an
| environment they control, on a device they control. The cheaters
| will beat you. They do in video games, and they will in academic
| pursuits too.
|
| The people selling this are preying on a legitimate fear of
| cheating that universities have, but their solutions are snake
| oil, and degrading to the majority of students who are honest and
| want to learn. Better teaching solves many of these problems, and
| individual projects with vivas are an extremely effective
| solution for where you need higher assurance. We can go back to
| invigilated exams if we desperately need to after covid.
| tyingq wrote:
| An adjacent issue, not from a privacy standpoint, but from an
| "inappropriate use of tech" standpoint, is anti-plagiarism
| software.
|
| A relative of mine recently took an English course, and
| constantly had to lobby for re-evaluation of low grades caused by
| false positives with Turnitin[1].
|
| The issues were varied, but the most frustrating one was that
| passages in her paper that were quoted and footnoted were marked
| as "sourced from the internet". Turns out that would happen with
| any passage quoted from a book that someone put on the internet,
| somewhere.
|
| Of course, instructors are supposed to manually review for this
| sort of thing, but it's such a basic miss. One that's going to
| get worse over time. People put existing source material on the
| internet, and it gets indexed.
|
| Also, see this example from Reddit:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/h731k/thank_god_for_tu...
| Argh.
|
| [1] https://www.turnitin.com/
| 542458 wrote:
| In turnitin's defence, in my recollection their training
| material explicitly and repeatedly tells you not to do this -
| that a positive turnitin result is not the same as plagiarism,
| and that all positives should be manually reviewed. The
| student-facing side of it can be bad, as it errs on the side of
| extreme caution.
|
| When I (as a TA) had to mark dozens and dozens of papers pre-
| screening for obviously copied paragraphs was a very nice time
| saver. Otherwise the only students I would catch are the ones
| with poor English skills (grammar switching from flawless to
| flawed and back again is a pretty good tell that the paragraph
| was written by somebody else).
| tyingq wrote:
| I do agree that instructors hold a fair amount of
| responsibility for using the tool right.
|
| But the tool is shite. It misses some very basic stuff. Like
| "stuff in quotes followed by a footnote/citation" is copied,
| by definition, on purpose.
|
| It also notes things like missing commas as if it's 100%
| authoritative. Even though the passage in question passed
| Grammarly, Word, etc. There's no notion of nuance or
| suggestion, just "right/wrong".
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