[HN Gopher] ProctorU is dystopian spyware
___________________________________________________________________
ProctorU is dystopian spyware
Author : smitop
Score : 503 points
Date : 2021-11-09 15:07 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (shkspr.mobi)
(TXT) w3m dump (shkspr.mobi)
| dehrmann wrote:
| I'm sympathetic to not requiring students to install spyware on
| their personal computers, but I also TAed an introductory CS
| class for freshman engineers and, wow, there was a lot of
| cheating. No more than 5% of students, but it was enough where
| you wanted to do something about it, and remote education makes
| cheating on exams a lot easier.
| otrahuevada wrote:
| if this is paid for and this requirements were only disclosed
| after the fact, there might be enough money to be had here to
| entice a lawyer into making the course provider abandon the
| software.
|
| That's more or less the only silver lining I can think of here.
| fractal618 wrote:
| How is ProctorU different from Microsoft or Apple or Facebook?
| handrous wrote:
| Oh wow. I just had an epiphany. This is why companies are still
| treating VR as a serious product that might have a large market,
| even as AR seems much better-suited to a mass consumer market and
| surely not _that_ much farther off than good VR (perhaps closer,
| even). VR headsets with just a few sensors would make _excellent_
| isolation & monitoring tools for things like this.
|
| Now I get why Facebook (Meta, whatever) decided to get into it.
| I'd not been able to piece it together until just now. Of course
| there's a spyware angle front & center. It all fits now. Their
| main market's probably intended to be business, but education
| makes sense, too.
| pjdesno wrote:
| I teach mostly MS students, and at the moment I'm sitting in
| front of a class taking an exam, so as you might guess I have
| fairly strong feelings about proctoring.
|
| Basically I think that online evaluations have to be completely
| different than in-person ones. Proctoring is fairly trivial and
| non-intrusive for in-person tests - don't open your laptop, don't
| talk to the person next to you. For big tests in small rooms I
| assign seating.
|
| Online is different. Basically there is no reasonable way to keep
| someone from hiring someone on Chegg to do their entire test for
| them, and the most horrible proctoring software in the world
| won't stop a determined cheater from balancing a cell phone at
| the bottom of their laptop screen...
|
| You really need to use a different approach with online
| assessments, and honestly I don't know if it's possible to use
| online tests for some of the things that we use in-person tests
| for.
| Petabits wrote:
| In this scenario couldn't you just run it in a VM? Or would their
| software trip once they realize they can't see vacation photos on
| your desktop?
| javajosh wrote:
| The article states the software won't run in a VM
| josephcsible wrote:
| This kind of software almost universally detects and refuses to
| run in VMs.
| donkarma wrote:
| It is not hard to create a hardened VM. If anti-cheats can't
| detect it, neither can some off-brand user mode teaching
| software
| branon wrote:
| Got some links to resources about doing this? Would be
| interested in having a hardened VM on-hand for things like
| this.
| donkarma wrote:
| KVM is probably your best bet on Linux and VMware the
| best on Windows.
| https://github.com/hzqst/VmwareHardenedLoader works for
| VMware but doesn't work against some modern anti-cheats,
| but KVM universally works against anti-cheats when
| configured properly with RTDSC spoofing and such
| acdha wrote:
| It's harder than you think, and remember that the
| consequence is not "I can't play a game until I revert my
| config" but "I was reported to my college for an ethics
| violation and now my $$$ degree is in question" or "My
| professional organization has been told that I attempted to
| cheat and the certification I need to keep my job is in
| jeopardy".
|
| There are many things which are technically possible which
| are not a favorable cost-benefit for most people. This is
| in the same category as those guys who relied on
| technically being able to fly without showing ID to the TSA
| -- there's a reason why it was mostly affluent white men
| flying solo, because the potential downsides are much
| greater for most other categories.
| ok123456 wrote:
| VM detection is usually pretty bad. They just look for magic
| strings that are easy enough to fake.
| no_time wrote:
| The difference between "easy to fake" and "hellishly
| difficult" is the authors clicking next-next-finish in
| VMProtect or not.
| donkarma wrote:
| There are github repos to harden VMware against VMProtect,
| let alone KVM
| ok123456 wrote:
| they still have to interact the system, and make system
| calls.
| mountainofdeath wrote:
| ProctorU is a mandatory trojan that ETS (among others) require.
| It's also poorly built to the point where it changes random
| Windows settings, takes over all kinds of management features,
| requires full admin access on a personal computer (not a
| university or corporate managed one) while burning 50% CPU.
|
| Naturally, it's next to impossible to remove once installed. I
| speak from personal experience
| mdip wrote:
| This sort of thing _drives me crazy_ because it just needs
| someone to ask the question "Why is this necessary?"[0]
|
| The reality is that a sufficiently motivated cheat will _cheat_
| and will more than likely get away with it regardless of counter-
| measures when there 's not a proctor watching over their
| shoulder[1]. If the goal is to test proficiency, there has to be
| better ways that work remotely.
|
| Back in High School, "open book" tests were common in my
| Chemistry and Physics classes. The "open book" rule wasn't to
| help over privileged kids pass the test -- these were among the
| hardest tests; the book was useful only for referring to the
| myriad of formulas which a High School student was not expected
| to commit to memory, but if you were relying on that reference to
| tell you exactly _what_ you needed to do to solve the problem,
| forget it.
|
| This, obviously, falls apart in many contexts -- "open internet"
| tests are difficult to write in many subjects, simply because
| there are tools designed to answer those questions,
| immediately[2], but it likely just requires a little creativity.
|
| From my own personal experience: I ended up taking a
| certification exam which was offered online due to COVID. They
| attempted to re-create the security of "testing in a center" by
| spyware and procedure (photographing the room from every angle,
| myself, my drivers license), all trivial to defeat if I was so
| motivated -- the procedure was even communicated in advance. And
| it was a certification for _writing software[3]_.
|
| I took practice tests, online, which turned out to be nearly
| word-for-word what I saw on the test. I knew the answers, anyway,
| but had I wanted to, I could have spent my entire study time
| memorizing the test answers -- not technically cheating, but the
| test has abjectly failed to indicate anything about my expertise.
| A more useful approach would have been to present me with a
| program utilizing the features that they wished to test me on,
| then present a set of multiple choice questions asking questions
| about that code. With a diversity of test programs and frequent
| changes, it would reduce the probability that a Google search
| would yield an immediate answer, testing the candidates ability
| to _solve the problem_ using all of the tools that are available
| in the field.
|
| Assuming that "testing is still the most reasonable way to assess
| skill", which is another argument in itself that falls victim to
| footnote "0", the point is to make irrelevant the forms of
| cheating that the spyware is attempting to prevent. Both are
| losing battles against cheating, but the former is less so, and
| certainly less consumer-hostile.
|
| [0] The classic "Why do we do this?" with the most common answer
| being "Because that's what we've always done"
|
| [1] Just off the top of my head, a small camera in the room aimed
| at the screen and a discrete -- in-ear, like my daughter's
| (Bluetooth) hearing aids -- ear-phone Bluetooth connected to a
| mobile phone to a third party in another room with a computer
| being used to research answers.
|
| [2] And in a lot of contexts it _still_ doesn 't matter. If
| there's a tool that changes how that question is solved, and
| you're testing whether or not someone can solve that specific
| problem -- not whether or not that somebody can write a tool to
| solve that problem -- wouldn't it be more intelligent if they
| solved it using the most appropriate tool?
|
| [3] Before I get grief; it was requested that I take it out of
| the expectation that I would require no study and was needed due
| to us being a MS Certificate Professional shop.
| Sophira wrote:
| > [1] Just off the top of my head, a small camera in the room
| aimed at the screen and a discrete -- in-ear, like my
| daughter's (Bluetooth) hearing aids -- ear-phone Bluetooth
| connected to a mobile phone to a third party in another room
| with a computer being used to research answers.
|
| Watching the video that this article links to, a couple of the
| requirements are, among other things:
|
| * To show the proctor all four walls of the room, and
| underneath the desk,
|
| * To take out any earbuds you may have.
|
| These requirements alone would probably mean your cheating
| solution wouldn't work.
|
| (I hate that I have to say that because I do not want to
| advocate for ProctorU here, but in this case these requirements
| would probably do what they were intended to do.)
| c74ds wrote:
| I worked with ProctorU in a university setting. Refreshingly, our
| (very large, public) school did not really want to use the
| platform, cautioned strongly against it, and were well aware of
| how invasive it was. They were worried about the potential for
| student outrage via media channels as a result of the race-based
| inaccuracies and biases and other issues that were coming up in
| the media. Oh and ProctorU had a data breach, which students
| happily reminded the institution of. A very small minority of
| instructors insisted on using it, and that's what I was helping
| with.
|
| Seeing the backend of this tool was much more worrying than being
| subjected to it. Simply put, the platform is SO bad, that it
| could not be used as evidence even in the most blatant cheating
| cases - for example, the screen capture feed and the webcam feed
| were two separate files, neither of which was time stamped. If a
| student had a poor or marginal connection, these two recordings
| would get out of sync and could never be reconciled. It was so
| primitive it was laughable. That's on top of the issues you'll
| find documented elsewhere.
| saruken wrote:
| I'd love to see a writeup/documentation on the backend issues
| you mentioned here. Sounds egregious! Do you have a link to
| point me to?
| c74ds wrote:
| I'm too intimidated to write it up publicly (though I
| detailed it all internally). A competitor of ProctorU,
| Proctorio, filed suit against a guy in a similar position to
| mine at a Canadian university. We're a big enough institution
| that others look to us for guidance, so I hope our de-facto
| moratorium on using these tools serves as an example.
|
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/student-
| surveillance-v...
| mountainofdeath wrote:
| Of course it can be used to catch cheaters. The bar is just so
| low that ANY suspicion is cause for sounding the alarm.
|
| In my SO's case, they told her wearing a sleeveless shirt was
| "inappropriate" _during an online exam_ and told her to put
| something that covers her shoulder on so she ended up wearing a
| sweater in 80F inside. When we reached out to their support,
| they said there is nothing they can do about it and rattled off
| some standard script.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| Proctor-spyware is also famously biased:
| https://library.auraria.edu/news/2021/why-online-test-procto...
|
| I opted out of using spyware in the university physics courses I
| taught last year, and caught my cheating students the old
| fashioned way. Proctor-spyware, like airport security, is more
| about theater than effectiveness. You aren't giving the USMLE or
| a Bar Exam, so you can take the time to write a good exam and
| evaluate it correctly.
| javajosh wrote:
| I've never graded tests or papers, but I always assumed
| cheating would be obvious because if you go to chat with a
| student about the problem, they will not have anything to say.
| bo1024 wrote:
| This doesn't scale, and teaching these days is expected to
| scale.
| Vrondi wrote:
| Well, if you put up an online exam that consists of only
| basic multiple choice tests, then you're making it a lot
| easier to cheat. That's the source of a lot of the trouble.
| professoretc wrote:
| That's true, but questions that are difficult to cheat on
| are both difficult (time-consuming) to create, and
| difficult (time-consuming) to grade. Which means less time
| for other stuff, like actually _teaching_.
| lostcolony wrote:
| So I only have experience creating/grading tests as a TA,
| not a prof, but that wasn't my experience at all.
|
| The total time spent in creating a few good, easy to
| discuss questions, the answering of which would
| demonstrate understanding, and then reading them,
| thinking about them, and coming up with a grade, was
| probably actually less than the amount of time it took to
| create meaningful multiple choice questions that didn't
| have any ambiguity, and which weren't easy to intuit the
| answer even without understanding. Doubly so when we did
| away with "partial credit" answers, but instead made it
| so each question was 1 point (or otherwise all or
| nothing), you had, say, 5 of them, and what we really
| were looking for was a paragraph that showed
| understanding (rather than checking off boxes in a rubric
| of "mentioned A, B, and C"; short essay questions, if you
| will), an expectation we communicated to the students.
|
| And that's aside from the actual project based grades,
| which were better still.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Not so much. They take time but to me it is a reasonable
| amount of time.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Yes, it's difficult, but that's why being a teacher is a
| job.
| aiisjustanif wrote:
| You assume you would know the problem and that body language
| is truth.
| soco wrote:
| As a teacher you're pretty expected to know the problem you
| just asked, and there's no amount of body language which
| can replace an answer to the asked problem.
| ht_th wrote:
| True, but that is not the same as proving someone cheated.
| Besides, when you have too many students, you cannot talk to
| all of them one-by-one in any meaningful way. Or assess them
| in a meaningful way, to be honest.
|
| By the way, where I work, management pushes for stuff like
| proctoring, and more students, and "measurable" results, and
| so on. As a teacher, I don't care much about the whole
| grading show.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > you have too many students,
|
| Then the students are not getting what they pay for.
| anon7725 wrote:
| > "It's become clear to me that algorithmic proctoring is a
| modern surveillance technology that reinforces white supremacy,
| sexism, ableism, and transphobia. The use of these tools is an
| invasion of students' privacy and, often, a civil rights
| violation."
|
| Must all of the cards in the deck be played at each turn?
| Things cannot simply be bad/user hostile/privacy invading, etc.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Is your criticism that these accusations are false, or just
| that they included too many true accusations in the same
| paragraph?
| anon7725 wrote:
| My criticism is that including a laundry list of "isms" is
| a polarizing, low-effort rhetorical device that elides a
| lot of nuance.
|
| White supremacy: darker skin tones tend to photograph worse
| than lighter skin tones. Laptop webcams are notoriously
| crappy and can make this effect worse. Is this white
| supremacy or physics? Can the test instructions be modified
| to ask all users to have an appropriate lighting setup (ie
| lit from above and from the side to ensure that your face
| is foregrounded properly)
|
| Ableism: for users who require assistive technologies, is
| it better to take a test in their own space with their own
| equipment or to travel to a test center and use shared lab
| equipment? For users with mobility challenges, is it better
| to be in their own space or travel to a potentially non-
| accessible testing center?
|
| Sexism: for working mothers, better to take a test in your
| own home or travel to a testing center and arrange for
| child care?
|
| Two "isms" seem more relevant but weren't mentioned: ageism
| - because fuck boomers, right? Socioeconomics - not
| everyone has access to a PC that meets the specifications
| or can acquire one on short notice.
|
| Lots of context is discarded when one engages in polarizing
| categorical rhetoric. I'm not here shilling for proctoring
| software but rather for nuanced discourse.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > White supremacy: darker skin tones tend to photograph
| worse than lighter skin tones. Laptop webcams are
| notoriously crappy and can make this effect worse. Is
| this white supremacy or physics?
|
| I'm not a photography expert, but it seems to me that
| cameras are physically equally capable of overexposing an
| image and underexposing an image. If a particular camera
| which is used in a facial monitoring system tends to do
| one rather than the other, I would ask why that is the
| case.
| frostburg wrote:
| Doesn't work like that. Overexposing (with the same
| light) means having worse SNR due to higher gain.
|
| The choice to use typically terrible cameras in a
| proctoring system disregarding that it might work ever
| worse than normally for a subset of people is suspect,
| yes.
| tshaddox wrote:
| But wouldn't it be just as easy to create a cheap camera
| that tends to correctly expose dark skin in normal
| lighting conditions, and cannot dial down exposure enough
| to prevent light skin from being blown out in normal
| lighting conditions? If that's possible but cheap cameras
| tend to not work this way, then why is that not the case?
| frostburg wrote:
| Yes and no, but mostly no. Lighter skin reflects more
| light (which means more signal), so it's inherently
| easier to image (it would be harder in extremely intense
| light, but getting fast shutter speeds is a lot easier
| than dealing with not having enough photons). Auto-
| exposure algorithms tend to work more accurately on
| lighter skin, too, which could be improved but is
| generally not something implemented at the hardware level
| in a webcam as far as I know (software can ask for
| different iso sensibility and shutter speeds).
| 8note wrote:
| Would these webcams have shipped if you couldn't see
| white faces well on them? I don't think they would, and
| the test proctors would not think of requiring one that
| didn't. Both the camera makers and the proctors are
| putting in an assumption that these products are
| only/primarily for white people, and thus discouraging
| non-white people is not an issue.
| jpatt wrote:
| The "isms" referenced are less about the fact you can
| work around these complaints line by line and more about
| the fact no one bothered to check them before rolling out
| required surveillance technology for education.
|
| White supremacy is not just bad faith things done by bad
| people, it is also the assumption that whiteness is the
| default experience and the failure to account for that
| not being the case. Similarly with ableism and sexism.
|
| That being said, complaining about the accessibility &
| inclusiveness of our required surveillance technology
| does have a dystopian feel to it, lol.
| greenail wrote:
| > White supremacy is not just bad faith things done by
| bad people, it is also the assumption that whiteness is
| the default experience and the failure to account for
| that not being the case.
|
| This only works with "new" definitions of racism. It is
| in fact plainly racist on it's face to demonize a group
| based on immutable characteristics. It is even worse when
| actual diversity of though is ignored and people of color
| are demonized because they don't agree with a race-
| marxist ideology.
| jpatt wrote:
| I'm not sure I 100% understand what you are reacting to.
| I want to understand these two points a bit better:
| It is in fact plainly racist on it's face to demonize a
| group based on immutable characteristics.
|
| Yes. Where have I, or the study's author, done this?
| It is even worse when actual diversity of though is
| ignored and people of color are demonized because they
| don't agree with a race-marxist ideology.
|
| Yes. Where have I, or the study's author, done this?
| acdha wrote:
| Don't you normally expect people to make the strongest case
| for preventing something? It's pretty common for a lawsuit to
| bring every claim a lawyer can come up with on the hopes that
| enough will stick to get the outcome they want.
|
| I would especially consider that in the United States we do
| not have a broad legal right to privacy but there are
| potentially much stronger tools available if that software
| skews negative outcomes towards protected categories like
| sex, disability, or race. From the perspective of a student,
| job applicant, etc. being asked to use this, if the legal
| risks cause an organization to stop using it they'll enjoy
| that as a win even if the outcome isn't a blanket ban.
| ewalk153 wrote:
| I have found that two to three strong points far out weight
| a list of 5-10 weaker points. This extends to the case when
| the original two points are included in a longer list.
| awillen wrote:
| The difference is that lawyers act in a structured
| environment with specific rules on how things should be
| considered - you bring up all the possible claims because
| if any of them get thrown out, it doesn't impact the
| others.
|
| It's not the same with general discourse - when you raise a
| bunch of issues that aren't especially relevant and seem
| designed to be inflammatory, you damage the credibility of
| your other arguments. Arguing that test proctoring software
| is transphobic is such a stretch that it makes you question
| whether they author has such strong biases against the
| software that their evaluation of it is just generally too
| biased to be trustworthy.
| smelendez wrote:
| > Arguing that test proctoring software is transphobic is
| such a stretch that it makes you question whether they
| author has such strong biases against the software that
| their evaluation of it is just generally too biased to be
| trustworthy.
|
| It seems like the software is matching people against
| existing images, based on the issue with the black
| student, and trans people are I would assume more likely
| to change their appearance, including as a result of
| taking hormones and having facial
| feminization/masculinization surgeries.
| kazinator wrote:
| The rationally strongest case would be the privacy thing,
| not the neoliberal-outrage-inducing factors.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| > Don't you normally expect people to make the strongest
| case for preventing something?
|
| Yes, but with some evidence. Otherwise, as a society, this
| is a bad direction to head in.
| acdha wrote:
| https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2020.12.3
| %20... references two articles:
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/07/1006132/softw
| are...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/style/testing-schools-
| pro...
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| >Don't you normally expect people to make the strongest
| case for preventing something?
|
| Not at the expense of grounded reasoning. When I see poorly
| substantiated claims, it shouldn't, but it really drags the
| whole rest of the argument down. The argument presented
| about lawsuits is actually a great example of why I think
| that's a broken system. They resolve that issue of lost
| credibility by considering each issue with total, clear,
| and mandated separation. Outside of that legal world with
| very well-defined rules, using such tactics reduces
| credibility.
|
| I should note, that in this particular case, the claim of
| racial biases is at least substantiated by a believable
| anecdote.
|
| EDIT: To clarify why I think the legal methodology is
| broken, its only because the same principles apply to
| criminal trials. IMO, prosecutors should NOT be throwing
| poorly substantiated charges at a defendant just to
| increase their winning probability and make the required
| defense more expensive.
| tshaddox wrote:
| If you think the accusations are poorly substantiated,
| then make that case, rather than just complaining that
| too many accusations were included in the same paragraph.
| isoskeles wrote:
| I don't have to. Using a Gish gallop of bad arguments
| doesn't impose some moral imperative on me to prove every
| single one wrong.
| [deleted]
| kelnos wrote:
| No, but I think that raises the question of why you think
| the quoted bit above is a bad argument. It tracks with
| various reports I've seen linked in HN on this topic over
| the past couple years.
| isoskeles wrote:
| I know that 95% of the time I see a Gish gallop of
| identity politics, it's not an argument to engage in at
| all because even when you do, you're called racist
| yourself unless you subserviently agree with every aspect
| of the argument. The identity politics argument is often
| a tempting one because it allows people to act
| righteously indignant and feel powerful.
|
| Case in point, here's someone saying, 'How can you even
| handwave away systemic racism?' in reply to a comment
| agreeing that bias exists but is not deliberate:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29164295
|
| Also, the identity politics argument seems to hinder a
| simple, moral argument against surveillance software as a
| violation of privacy. The logical implication of the IP
| argument is that _this surveillance software would be
| okay to use if we manage to work out all the kinks_.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| > When I see poorly substantiated claims, it shouldn't,
| but it really drags the whole rest of the argument down.
|
| It should. If someone is willing to make wild,
| unsubstantiated, claims, it _should_ detract from their
| credibility.
| acdha wrote:
| You're talking about a letter from a U.S. Senator citing
| published reports in e.g. MIT Technology Review and
| concerns raised by professional organizations. I think
| dismissing that as "wild, unsubstantiated" would require
| at least some discussion of the linked claims.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| Why should I reference the particulars of the link when
| refuting a generalization?
|
| If the parent comment had said something to the effect of
| "I should give the benefit of the doubt to a sitting US
| senator" then you'd have a point, but that context wasn't
| part of their statement.
|
| Edit: Also, frankly, I wouldn't give the benefit of the
| doubt to a US senator. If anything, it makes the identity
| politics feel even more irrelevant.
| acdha wrote:
| Okay, trying engaging intellectually with the reports
| rather than just reacting to someone's one sentence
| summary of thousands of words. It's kind of hard to see
| any definition of "identity politics" which includes the
| reports but not your emotional reaction to accurate
| words.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| > Okay, trying engaging intellectually with the reports
| rather than just reacting to someone's one sentence
| summary of thousands of words
|
| I wasn't reacting to a summary, I was reacting to an
| independent premise. The sentence I reacted to, at least
| the way I read it, was broad to the point of being more
| of an axiom with which the commenter interpreted the
| post. As I see it, disagreeing with an axiom is an
| intellectual engagement. Feel free to counter my
| disagreement.
|
| > It's kind of hard to see any definition of "identity
| politics" which includes the reports but not your
| emotional reaction to accurate words.
|
| Not entirely sure what you're saying here, but none of
| what I said was emotional. Simply pointing out that
| pattern matching is a viable way of filtering other
| people's thoughts and ideas. If someone makes wild claim,
| it should change the way you view other claims which may
| have seemed more rational in their absence. Not really an
| emotional statement in my mind, but again, feel free to
| point out which part of this you disagree with and I'd be
| happy to engage.
|
| As it stands now you aren't really responding to anything
| I've said, but rather disagreeing that what I'm
| responding to warrants responding, which is rather
| tangential.
| pdpi wrote:
| It's important to note that none of these things are
| necessarily done deliberately (though "white supremacy" is
| perhaps a bad way to express "racism that benefits white
| people specifically"). Other than transphobia, either the
| linked article, or the letter linked in that article provide
| evidence for all of the accusations. Facial recognition
| software that doesn't handle dark skin well intrinsically
| treats different ethnicities differently, in this case
| disadvantaging non-white people. Many of the markers for
| "suspicious behaviour" that are used to detect cheating are
| also present in people with both mental and physical health
| conditions. Dealing poorly with headware has an outsized
| influence for non-white women (who are likeliest to wear
| headwear that obstructs the face).
|
| Again, I wouldn't chalk any of this up to deliberate bias
| against any of these groups, but it's all bias anonetheless.
| ygjb wrote:
| > (though "white supremacy" is perhaps a bad way to express
| "racism that benefits white people specifically")
|
| Can you explain how racism that benefits white people
| specifically, as enabled through either direct, explicit
| bias in policies or laws, or indirect, implicit bias
| through a lack of diversity when conducting research on
| human computer interactions, or training corpus used for
| machine learning _is not explicitly white supremacy_?
|
| These types of issues have been mainstream and well
| documented that they are at the centre of a 2009 episode of
| a sitcom (Better Off Ted, Racial Sensitivity), among many
| other more conventional studies of the phenomenon.
|
| After decades of research (and centuries of practical
| observation) how is it even possible to handwave away
| systemic racism and bias "that benefits white people
| specifically" as anything other that white supremacy?
|
| _Edit: I accidentally left out the italicized part of the
| first question_.
| jedimastert wrote:
| I think "white supremacy" tends to imply direct, explicit
| bias, and may sort of exclude the built-in "unrealized"
| biases that exist in the current culture, where white
| supremacy was the _foundation_ but not necessarily
| explicitly imbued.
| pdpi wrote:
| I'm not handwaving anything away. It's just that I don't
| think all racism is the same.
|
| White supremacy, to me, implies explicit, militant,
| proactive racism. People who might very well be proud of
| the fact they're racists.
|
| This story is about a software system that (among many
| other issues) doesn't work well with darker skin tones in
| low light. Especially in light of all the other failure
| modes, I'd ascribe that to carelessness or indiference,
| mixed with pressure to reduce false negatives at the
| expense of more false positives. I wouldn't be surprised
| if training data and/or testing were filmed in an office
| setting with the amount of light you expect there, and
| they never ran across the issues with dark skin
| interacting poorly with the amount of lighting a student
| would have a home.
| ygjb wrote:
| > White supremacy, to me, implies explicit, militant,
| proactive racism. People who might very well be proud of
| the fact they're racists.
|
| That is only half of the story of white supremacy though.
| The other half is the entrenched systems and biases baked
| into those systems that largely benefit white people, and
| that train people, through experience, to prioritize
| preserving the existing systems and status quo.
|
| Not considering the fact that there is a well documented
| history over the last 20 years of tech companies and
| business in general prioritizing the experiences of the
| white majority, at the expense of people of colour, is
| largely the reason why you can _" wouldn't be surprised
| if training data and/or testing were filmed in an office
| setting with the amount of light you expect there, and
| they never ran across the issues with dark skin
| interacting poorly with the amount of lighting a student
| would have a home."_, and not consider that being the
| norm, or even acceptable as being indicative of white
| supremacy.
|
| Those biases may not always, and only impact people of
| colour, but they do overwhelmingly benefit white people.
| That's the entire point of the article that OP shared,
| and the references the author of that post uses to back
| their claims.
| rocqua wrote:
| White supremacy is the idea that white people are
| inherently better and more capable and therefore more
| deserving. Hence, for something to be white supremacy, it
| doesn't just need to have a bias favoring white people.
| It should also have a justification of this favoring
| based on white people deserving better or being better.
|
| Racist systems that have encoded societies biases are
| generally not white supremacist. The 'justification' for
| those systems is often things like "this is just the way
| it is" or "this was easier to do like this" or "I went
| with my own experience".
|
| These days a lot of racism does not come from white
| supremacy. It either comes from something like
| familiarity bias of people in power, or from following
| the status quo mindlessly. Calling those acts white
| supremacist can be dangerous. It allows the real white
| supremacists to hide among the unknowing. It also pushes
| people who unintentionally did something racist way into
| the defensive if you tell them they are white
| supremacist. And pushing people who unintentionally did
| racist things into defending their actions is not going
| to make things better.
| sophacles wrote:
| There's an old saying: "It is difficult to get a man to
| understand something when his salary depends upon his not
| understanding it" (often attributed to Upton Sinclair,
| not sure if that's true or not tho).
|
| Id like to suggest that what you are calling "familiarity
| bias" might have a component of the quote in it too. Not
| salary in this case, but social position. That is in the
| racist system, one race of folks get better treatment,
| and if they want to maintain better treatment, the status
| quo must be maintained. The group of people at top of a
| racial hierarchy (that is in the supreme position), are
| incentivized to keep the racist system. When race is
| considered a bad reason to judge a person, they still are
| incentivized to maintain the system, just find different
| words to justify the status quo.
|
| I guess a different way of saying this is - white
| supremacy describes a race based social hierarchy where
| white people are at the highest level. It has also been
| used to describe the lowlife Nazi or KKK wannabes that
| advocate for it in the baldest terms, but they are bigots
| who advocate for white supremacy using racist terms like
| "inferior genetics" or worse.
|
| Compare the term racist itself - there are folks who
| would have you believe that the term is limited to
| personal bigotry against people of a different race, and
| has nothing to do with the rules and actions of systems
| (a position I think you don't hold due to your
| description of racist systems).
| ygjb wrote:
| > White supremacy is the idea that white people are
| inherently better and more capable and therefore more
| deserving.
|
| That's a common dictionary or encyclopedia definition of
| the white supremacy. More broadly, white supremacy also
| refers to the systems and structures of power that are
| built into most of "western" (a better term might be
| post-colonial) societies that favor both white people,
| and people who support or uphold the balance of power in
| those post-colonial societies.
|
| > Racist systems that have encoded societies biases are
| generally not white supremacist
|
| I agree, however I think that those racist systems that
| are not inherently white supremacist in nature are
| largely rooted in non-colonial countries (basically
| countries other than the European colonial powers, and
| the countries that grew out of those colonies).
|
| > It also pushes people who unintentionally did something
| racist way into the defensive if you tell them they are
| white supremacist. And pushing people who unintentionally
| did racist things into defending their actions is not
| going to make things better.
|
| That is just not true. If someone does or says something
| racist, they can and should be challenged on it. If they
| become defensive, there are multiple reasons that could
| happen, but if the reason is that they simply didn't know
| better, it's just the way their society is, or if the
| reason is that they are opposed to "wokeness" (which is a
| catch-all for intersectionality, critical race theory,
| and many other modern perspectives and ideologies that
| are largely centered on dismantling power structures and
| reducing bias and discrimination), then it's likely that
| they are supporting white supremacy out of ignorance
| (whether that ignorance is from being uninformed or
| uneducated, or the more malicious willful ignorance of
| people who choose to use or engage in racist norms
| because they are opposed to "wokeness" from an
| ideological or other perspective).
|
| Pushing people who do things that could be cast as
| unintentionally racist is the only way to a) educate
| them, so they can do better, or b) determine if it was an
| intentional act. I know this from practical experience,
| and it was only from going through the hard and painful
| experience of being called out on harmful
| "unintentionally" racist jokes and behaviour that I
| learned to do better after being raised by a family that
| had (and for the most part, still has) some pretty racist
| and discriminatory views.
| fabianhjr wrote:
| [deleted]
| ygjb wrote:
| Yes, I totally get that, unfortunately I accidentally
| left out part of the first question in an edit :(
| fabianhjr wrote:
| Ah gotcha, deleted the comment.
| jedimastert wrote:
| This is speculation, but many transgendered folks tend to
| present gender in an non-traditional way, as well as people
| in the midst of transitioning that may be "in between"
| presentations in a traditional sense. If you only train on
| cisgendered faces, you may only be training on sort of
| "default" gender presentations, facial structure, and the
| like, which may give a similar disadvantage.
| pdpi wrote:
| I can totally 100% see how transgender people might trip
| up some of these things. For the point of this
| discussion, though, all the other biases had a specific
| example in the linked article, whereas that one didn't.
| agentdrtran wrote:
| Which one of these is inaccurate?
| throwaway135790 wrote:
| The claim of "transphobia" is extremely weak, for one.
| Clicking through the maze of links, the argument appears to
| be that because algorithms that attempt to guess gender
| based on photos sometimes guess wrong when trans people are
| involved, _all_ attempts by computers to look at faces must
| therefore be transphobic, even if those computers do not
| attempt to guess the gender of the person whose face they
| 're looking at.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| I followed the references to find the actual argument behind
| calling surveillance proctoring all of the above, and these
| are the relevant bits[0]:
|
| >At the beginning of a test, these products ask students to
| verify their identity by matching their appearance with a
| photo ID. As Os Keyes has demonstrated, facial recognition
| has a terrible history with gender[x]. This means that a
| software asking students to verify their identity is
| compromising for students who identify as trans, non-binary,
| or express their gender in ways counter to
| cis/heteronormativity. If a student's gender expression or
| name on their ID are different from their current gender
| expression or name, the algorithm may flag them as
| suspicious. When this happens, they may have to undergo
| another level of scrutiny to authenticate their identity, an
| already common and traumatic experience for trans and gender
| non-conforming students. If these students are not alerted of
| this possibility before the test begins, it may force them to
| either discontinue the test and risk their grade, or out
| themselves to their course owner when they may not want to,
| risking more trauma and discrimination including being denied
| financial aid, being forced to leave their institution, or
| have their lives put in physical danger.
|
| >The Eugenic Gaze is a combination of white supremacy,
| sexism, ableism, cis/heteronormativity, and xenophobia. When
| we apply the Eugenic Gaze using technology, the way we do
| with algorithmic test proctoring, we're able to codify and
| reinforce all of those oppressive systems while avoiding
| equity-based critiques because of our belief in the
| neutrality of data and technology.
|
| Their recommendations are quite reasonable:
|
| >Don't use algorithmic test proctoring. Instead, focus on
| pedagogical techniques that you can use to design
| assessments, online or in person, that draw from personal
| experience or require students to apply concepts in unique
| contexts. If you have to use algorithmic test proctoring,
| make sure students know about the test settings and ID
| requirement well before they take a test, and assure them
| that you will not take any behavior flagged as "suspicious"
| into consideration that isn't described explicitly in the
| syllabus.
|
| The GP link[1] instead calls out "Facial Recognition Tech",
| and "Algorithmic Proctoring" as being too biased and follows
| up with a petition[2] to ban these entirely.
|
| [0]: https://hybridpedagogy.org/our-bodies-encoded-
| algorithmic-te...
|
| [1]: https://library.auraria.edu/news/2021/why-online-test-
| procto...
|
| [2]: https://www.sheaswauger.com/post/petition-to-ban-facial-
| reco...
|
| [x]: https://ironholds.org/resources/papers/agr_paper.pdf
| "The Misgendering Machines: Trans/HCI Implications of
| Automatic Gender Recognition"
| aeturnum wrote:
| Things are bad in particular ways - software that is more
| likely to falsely punish people of color does support the
| continued dominance of white people in a real, material way.
| Noting how things are bad seems useful and important to me.
|
| That being said, there's a rotating list of "badnesses" that
| are in the zeitgeist and I agree that it's annoying to see
| them flogged at every opportunity (often w/o much insight).
| mercurialmaven wrote:
| "software that is more likely to falsely punish people of
| color does support the continued dominance of white people
| in a real, material way."
|
| The statement is at best extremely misleading, and at
| worse, mostly false. It also represents a juvenile,
| immature, and myopic perspective on reality.
|
| I would suggest reading "Wealth, Poverty, and Politics" or
| "Discrimination and Disparities" by Thomas Sowell. He has
| been debunking the "inequality of outcome therefore racism"
| logical fallacy for decades.
| monocasa wrote:
| Software that's way more likely to fail you literally
| because of darker skin sounds way more like "inequality
| of opportunity" to me.
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| It's more likely to fail because...physics. The sensor on
| your webcam is only so big, and can only capture so much
| light. Darker faces require more lighting to capture
| details. Photography isn't racist, it's physical
| limitations that come into play.
| aeturnum wrote:
| > _Photography isn't racist, it's physical limitations
| that come into play._
|
| I wanna pull this apart a bit because I think it's a good
| opportunity to talk about how systemic bias gets started.
| Digital sensor evolution is path-dependent. Technologists
| developed photo-sites that have "enough" dynamic range
| for most uses before moving on to increase the resolution
| on a sensor. What exactly is "enough" depends on your
| test data.
|
| The sensor on a webcam is only "so big" as you say - but
| how that sensor balances resolution and photo-site count
| depends on what conditions they consider acceptable. We
| could build web cams that would see more pigmented faces
| better - there is no fundamental limitation in the
| technology itself. It's that a series of decisions have
| been made over years of development, generally without
| people thinking specifically about race at all, and we've
| arrived at a status quo that has adverse outcomes for
| people with different skin tones.
|
| There was a similar process that happened with film
| photography[1]. Not that film, as a technology, is unable
| to capture dark skin - but that the development standards
| that were tested and distributed were designed for
| lighter skin.
|
| Like, I agree that the webcams we have aren't
| intentionally 'racist.' But I do think that the status
| quo that has led everyone to accept this balance of
| dynamic range and resolution is reflective of valuing
| people with lighter skin more.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/lens/sarah-lewis-
| racial-b...
| monocasa wrote:
| A) The major issue is not the sensors, it's the lack of
| emphasis of ML training data for darker skin.
|
| B) Even if it were simply physics at play, requiring the
| use of a system known to have physical constraints
| against darker skin causing failing grades purely on that
| metric is still pretty racist.
| aeturnum wrote:
| Where did I say that unequal outcomes must, necessarily,
| be caused by racism? What is misleading about what I
| said?
|
| It seems like you're reading a specific thing I said
| about a specific scenario and universalizing it in a way
| you imagine I might universalize it. I'd love to hear a
| critique of what I actually said, or we could talk about
| our views of society in a wider way, but I can't respond
| to this combination of generally dismissing what I said
| and attacking what you imagine I might think.
| mercurialmaven wrote:
| I stand at least partially corrected. I am not familiar
| with biases in facial recognition software but it looks
| like a real thing in some cases, caused for instance by
| lack of diversity in training data sets.
| comrh wrote:
| The quoted person expands on their arguments on those topics
| in the linked article. If you think they're needlessly
| "playing a card" why not engage with the actual argument?
| named-user wrote:
| Yes because to do otherwise would be exclusionist.
| vadfa wrote:
| https://library.auraria.edu/sites/default/files/images/fancy.
| ..
| monocasa wrote:
| When they break even worse when you have black skin, it
| certainly sounds like a civil rights violation.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| It really doesn't.
| devilduck wrote:
| Must it always be a game where cards are to be played? Things
| can indeed simply be bad, such as your ideas about the text
| you are quoting.
| backoncemore wrote:
| > proctoring is a modern surveillance technology that
| reinforces white supremacy, sexism, ableism, and transphobia.
|
| All you can do is laugh at this point.
| compscistd wrote:
| It's hard to make people care with "bad/user hostile/privacy
| invading" because those terms have saturated descriptions of
| behavior that users are okay with. Example: tons of articles
| mention FB as a privacy invading or user hostile service but
| it continues to be used by people who don't really care.
| Using the same terminology for something that is arguably
| worse with much higher stakes (algorithmic proctoring that
| "reinforces white supremacy, sexism, ableism, and
| transphobia") is appropriate because it gets the reader to
| care by illustrating exactly what is possible with algo
| proctoring.
|
| I sense you're tired of discussions that mention the "cards
| in the deck", likely because you aren't affected by them and
| therefore care little for them. That's honestly fair, but
| there's value in writing that way to channel outrage into
| action.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| So you're completely okay with saying anything that has
| dubious truth value as long as it supports whatever cause
| you happen to promote.
|
| Great. Good to know where the zeitgeist is.
| kilnr wrote:
| But extrapolating from one HN commenter onto the entire
| zeitgeist is acceptable to you?
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Direct question. Do you agree with the aforementioned
| commenter and why or why not.
| ygjb wrote:
| I mean, it's an article about how a technology is negatively
| impacting marginalized groups, and cites research that backs
| those claims. It makes sense to cite the groups and practices
| most impacted by it.
|
| You could read the research and refute it, or you could just
| bluster about things. I know you tried to expand on it in
| your comment below, but minimizing the specific concerns
| raised to "isms" and ignoring that at least two of the
| references in the articles linked and their references for
| the actual research addressed at least the socioeconomic
| portion of it, illustrates that you only applied your surface
| level perspective and criticism.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Things cannot simply be bad/user hostile/privacy invading,
| etc.
|
| In this case, the algorithm is actually bad for _all_
| ethnicities [0]. It 's just that it's extremely bad for black
| students (fails half the time) and just regular bad for
| everyone else (fails a quarter of the time).
|
| [0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/8/22374386/proctorio-
| racial-...
| gunshai wrote:
| Haha, you gotta know when to holdem
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Yes. Since its A) incredibly easy to play all the cards and
| b) its pretty much impossible to attempt to refute without
| being labeled all of the above and c) gives the accuser woke
| points
|
| Its win win win for the accuser
| r00fus wrote:
| b) is untrue. It's pretty clear when fake accusations are
| BS and you don't have to be "labeled" to call them out.
|
| It does require you to engage with people directly.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Im calling out this accusation as fake and
| unsubstantiated.
| [deleted]
| r00fus wrote:
| You're not being accused of anything, so whatever's fake
| is in your head.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Clearly you are attempting to deliberately misread my
| comment since your comment literally makes no sense in
| context.
|
| "This" clearly means the original accusation in the OP.
| toqy wrote:
| You're anonymous online. You have the ability to create a
| throwaway and refute the actual arguments in the article
| all you want with literally 0 repercussion. Honestly seems
| more like you're chasing your own version of woke points.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Ok Fine.
|
| > It's not clear to me that algorithmic proctoring is a
| modern surveillance technology that reinforces white
| supremacy, sexism, ableism, and transphobia. The use of
| these tools is an invasion of students' privacy and,
| often, a civil rights violation."
| hhhhhbh wrote:
| He's not anonymous, he's posting with his real name and
| has a KeyBase identity in his profile. Honestly it takes
| serious guts to call out Woke BS with proof of identity
| in your profile.
| devilduck wrote:
| Of course! Calling this out makes you a free-spirit and
| free-thinker. Definitely not brainwashed at all to be
| oppositional to that list of things that are obviously
| terrible.
| camgunz wrote:
| It's not news that facial recognition is best at white male-
| presenting faces and bad at all the others. ProctorU is also
| pretty hard to use for the differently abled.
|
| I think you just reflexively dismissed this because you saw a
| basket of words that normally go along with things you
| disagree with, but the argument is pretty solid.
| handrous wrote:
| > It's not news that facial recognition is best at white
| male-presenting faces
|
| Really? On the male part? I'd have expected it to do best
| with women, because I'd have figured facial hair is more
| difficult to deal with than a wider varieties of hair
| styles.
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| > ...reinforces white supremacy, sexism, ableism, and
| transphobia.
|
| Article proceeds to use a lot of words to not show any of these
| being true.
|
| I am against it for the general dystopian surveillance
| normalization it encourages. We don't need to throw a word
| salad of made up progressive insults against it to resist its
| implementation.
| wespiser_2018 wrote:
| Agreed: even with room scans, you could defeat it by unrolling
| a giant cheatsheet on timer/remote control, and just stealing
| glances.
|
| Still, ProctorU it's a major deterrence to cheating, I'm just
| not sure it's worth the cost.
| spoonjim wrote:
| I've never seen a critique of proctoring software that offers an
| alternate solution to the problem (remotely delivering a skills
| assessment that is used to allocate resources in an environment
| known to have rampant cheating)
| hackermailman wrote:
| Best way is do away with exams and have projects graded
| instead. Math write a survey paper on the subject that
| demonstrates expertise, then orally defend it on live chat
| where you can't easily cheat, that's what my school did but
| only had european accreditation whereas regional US likes 20th
| century examination style.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Anything subjectively graded like a project is a big vector
| for introducing evaluator bias.
| [deleted]
| ketzu wrote:
| And the ones that do propose alternatives do so from a very
| narrow point of view. Oral exams are much more time consuming
| and simply not practical in many situations. Projects and
| seminar papers have similar problems, especially in early
| semesters.
| schroeding wrote:
| At least in STEM:
|
| Create an exercise that contains a technical term that does not
| exist, and create a page containg it with a plausible, but
| wrong solution for the excercise. Make sure that the page is
| easily found with Google. Give everyone who solved it using the
| wrong solution a failing mark.
|
| Personalize every exam. Create a pool of exercises and choose n
| exercises per student, based on the student id. Easily done if
| the sheets are already LaTeX anyway.
|
| Create heavy time pressure. Cheating is very hard when even
| completing all exercises regularly is almost impossible.
| (Lovingly called "Zeitklausur" in German, lit. "time exam",
| it's normal that students are unable to finish those in time)
|
| Create exams that don't just test the ability to vomit
| knowledge, but test the ability to use that knowledge, and let
| students explain in their own words.
|
| Replace the exam with multiple small projects and
| presentations.
|
| All of those things were used by different chairs / departments
| in my university :-)
|
| Nothing will prevent "someone else writes the exam for another
| student" with absolute certainty, yes. But neither does
| proctoring software.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| There's a discussion upthread right now about making the whole
| problem irrelevant by switching to open book tests and/or
| having a 5-minute conversation with the student to make sure
| that they actually have some clue what they're talking about.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| Have students sit for an exam and then follow up with a
| question or two (from a pool of N), live, to see if they
| actually understand the material. We're paying hundreds or
| thousands each, they can easily afford to spend the time.
| hackermailman wrote:
| How do enroll in a Msc program and not read how exams are done? I
| took remote university for a while, you either go to some exam
| invigilator and pay the $20 for them to monitor you (some campus
| libraries it's free) or you have someone volunteer to do it who
| meets the criteria. Big deal this article is a twitter quality
| rant.
|
| The problem is of course regional accreditation rules of
| proctored exams
| rudian wrote:
| Nothing in the video is particularly egregious other than having
| to use your own hardware to do it. All those precautions are
| followed if you're in a controlled test environment; Since they
| can't control your home and computer, they must ensure you're not
| cheating.
|
| I don't see a problem with that, you're taking a test.
|
| That said, I would not like to install this on my computer and
| would 100% use a separate user to do so. As long as it runs in
| the home directory I will trash it afterwards. I even use Zoom
| from my phone rather than installing it on my computer, but if I
| had to I'd do the same.
| zeppers wrote:
| There is an alternative solution to this problem with far less
| privacy implications....
|
| Examind.io
| ManBlanket wrote:
| I was entertained until this undoubtedly vaccinated hero used
| Covid as an excuse for not taking an in-person exam, despite
| writing this article in November of 2021. It's okay if you don't
| want to do something, but stop exploiting Covid. If you're still
| doing this it sounds ridiculous. Get over it.
| serjester wrote:
| I think a lot of people underestimate how rampant cheating is. I
| knew people in undergrad that would get entire groups together to
| take online exams. While invasive, ProcotU makes this far more
| difficult.
|
| You could make the argument this is how real life works, but
| we'll need to radically redesign the current curriculum if the
| internet becomes fair game. Long term this is a must, but short
| term not making an effort to stop cheating will corrupt the
| entire institution - anyone that doesn't cheat is at a severe
| disadvantage.
| wooptoo wrote:
| This looks like something the UK Gov could use for SELT exams,
| visa & immigration tests or other similar secure tests approved
| by the government.
|
| At the moment these are taken in person in secure buildings where
| you are identified at the entrance, your belongings are stored in
| a locker, and the exam itself is taken in a secure room on
| computers with no/limited internet connection, etc. You are timed
| and monitored.
| Cort3z wrote:
| What is stopping someone from having a separate machine right
| next to the infested one?
| MH15 wrote:
| Proctorio (competing software) can require students to "scan"
| their room by moving the camera around, making it more
| difficult to hide a second device.
| rickspencer3 wrote:
| I'm waiting for the world to catch up with the fact that looking
| up information while you are working is a core part of any real
| job. Do I care if my Linux Security Professional spends a few
| minutes looking up information on the internet before taking some
| action? It's not the case that anyone can solve any problem so
| long as they have a search engine. Without domain knowledge, an
| open ended web search is not going to lead to a convincing answer
| except for the most trivial questions.
|
| This extends to coding interviews as well. Using the resources at
| one's disposal to get a sense of the landscape before diving into
| algorithms must surely be part of the job, right? What do I care
| if a developer needs a quick reminder before diving into a
| solution, or even reads up a bit and scans someone else's code
| before answering?
|
| What is the value in ensuring that people have perfect recall if
| this is something that will almost never be necessary in a real
| world job?
| dunnevens wrote:
| I took an astronomy course a few years ago which had a fairly
| forward-thinking (if a bit lazy) instructor. The initial tests
| were fairly conventional. But for the intense test right before
| the final, he gave us a comprehensive take-home. With the full
| assumption we'd be hitting Google hard for the more difficult
| questions. He knew this was a complex topic. Thought we'd learn
| more and retain more with a test where we had to show some
| initiative in finding the right answers without the stress of
| having to remember it on the spot.
|
| Plus, it doubled as a study guide for the actual final which
| was only a couple of weeks later. I thought it was a remarkably
| kind thing to do. Took out a little stress. Gave even the
| struggling students an easy "A". And it worked as a
| comprehensive guide to almost everything we covered.
| mijamo wrote:
| You are not thinking about the real risk. It is not about
| preventing a candidate to Google a few things on the side. It
| is to prevent a completely different person from doing the exam
| instead of the candidate and simply sending them the answers.
| And don't think it is just an abstract threat, there are whole
| businesses built around that. Unfortunately there is not much
| you can do to have exams remotely and be sure the candidate is
| the one doing the exam without being extremely invasive.
| rickspencer3 wrote:
| This is a good point that I had not, in fact, considered.
| soco wrote:
| I bombed once an interview at a major bank when the hiring
| manager insisted what I would do if something happened to the
| system, and there would be no internet to search for answers.
| When I answered that nobody would notice the system was crashed
| if there was no internet didn't please him very much.
| kabdib wrote:
| Ironically enough, you might not have internet access at your
| datacenter (reception issues, so no wifi or phone data, and
| switchport connections are often secured or don't route to a
| public internet). And things get really entertaining when
| your whole office network is down.
|
| It's not an odd question. "Okay, the whole subnet where your
| credentials server used to be is now a smoking hole in the
| ground, and IT forgot to pay the fiber bill last month. What
| do you wish you'd done three years earlier to address this
| problem?"
| bengale wrote:
| It's always seemed a little off. I've been coding for 15 or so
| years and I still sometimes completely blank on certain
| javascript array functions and need to google it.
| vianneychevalie wrote:
| In consulting I produce better thought-out and constructed
| recommendations if I parse a book and previously-delivered
| decks of slides. Hell, even ISO standards.
|
| On the other hand, at least a basic level of recollection is
| necessary for quick thinking in meetings, you don't always have
| the time to look up documentation.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| And you can perfectly evaluate that by setting a realistic
| (!) time limit and judging the quality of the answers. It's
| absolutely irrelevant how much recollection you have if you
| still manage to solve the problem efficiently.
| seanc wrote:
| I invite candidates to "error out" to internet resources and
| use their own professional judgement about what is and is not
| okay.
|
| To set people at ease I tell them up front that only one
| candidate has crossed the line (googled the solution) and
| everyone else has made perfectly appropriate choices; "elseif
| or elif?" and small details like that.
| acdha wrote:
| They also lie about supporting Firefox. A family member needed to
| use this for a professional license. Following the instructions
| (which is basically turning off most security warnings and
| installing a bunch of malware) didn't work and the first thing
| support said was to install Chrome.
|
| Shockingly, this was due to some JavaScript relying on an older
| Chrome proprietary API so there's no possible way they actually
| tested it against their alleged support matrix.
| chuckee wrote:
| Sounds like an open and shut case of false advertising, a
| crime.
| acdha wrote:
| Sure, got a few million dollars to bring a lawsuit knowing
| that if it starts go somewhere they'll issue a 3-line patch
| and blame the intern for not testing it?
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| I know it's just a saying, but I feel the need to de-
| mistify this.
|
| Lawsuits don't cost millions. Court fees are absolutely
| never that high, and lawyers, while some may be expensive,
| are generally affordable for ~middle class (or even lower
| class if someone wants to do pro-bono work for you)
|
| The whole "lawsuits cost millions" thing is a myth
| perpetuated by big corporations and further relied by
| normal folk who hear it from somewher else, which probably
| heard it from somewhere else, and so on.
|
| When you read in the news "X company wasted $XX million in
| legal fees", what it actually means is "they stretched out
| the case with a team of very expensive corporate lawyers
| whoses price ranges are in the millions".
| jcranmer wrote:
| You're right that lawsuits don't always cost millions.
| However, they will cost at minimum tens of thousands of
| dollars. Filing fees are generally a few hundred dollars
| _per document_ , and median lawyers' fees are somewhere
| around $300/hr, depending on jurisdiction. And--in the US
| --it is generally expected that you pay your lawyer's
| fees whether you won or lost.
|
| The advice I have gotten from _actual lawyers_ is that it
| 's literally not worth it if you expect to get only a few
| thousand dollars.
| dheera wrote:
| This is why we need robot laywers that can Sue-as-a-
| Service for $5/hr. Just log into the website, type in who
| you want to sue, why you want to sue them, and it should
| take care of the rest. With enough proceedings from past
| cases it should be possible to train an algorithm to
| create the defense that is most likely to win.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Unfortunately, that doesn't really work. While there's a
| lot of court documents that are going to be highly
| formulaic and could plausibly be written almost Mad Libs
| style, there are several court documents that are going
| to rely very heavily on the unique factual nature of the
| case. Responses and replies to motions are going to fall
| into that latter category almost universally.
| fabianhjr wrote:
| What about just funding public prosecutors? (Or rather
| more funding for public prosecutors)
| lisper wrote:
| > The whole "lawsuits cost millions" thing is a myth
|
| That may be, but they can easily cost many tens or
| hundreds of thousands of dollars. Lawyers typically bill
| at multiple hundreds of dollars an hour so it doesn't
| take a lot of hours to rack up five- or six-figure costs.
| That's high-stakes poker for most people.
|
| I once sued a neighbor for their barking dog. It cost me
| over $10,000 before I pulled the plug.
|
| https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/07/dog-days.html
| acdha wrote:
| Okay, yes, hopefully that's hyperbole but it's still a
| LOT more than most people are going to want to spend --
| that's why this works: if they were trying to take your
| house, sure, you'd lawyer up but when it's more like a
| principled stand on privacy, an awful lot of people are
| going to reasonably conclude that it's not worth the
| cost. This is the advantage to having, say, a government
| privacy regulator which has lawyers on staff whose entire
| job is to do things like this.
|
| This is especially work considering with this particular
| company, which has a history of using legal threats to
| silence critics:
|
| https://www.gofundme.com/f/stand-against-proctorio
|
| I would DEFINITELY not jump at the chance to incur a
| similar reaction.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I don't understand how you think this is solely one-
| sided.
|
| > "they stretched out the case with a team of very
| expensive corporate lawyers whoses price ranges are in
| the millions".
|
| Yes - The company stretched the case out with expensive
| lawyers: Do you think the other side is somehow not
| obligated to also continue dealing with that case?
|
| Who pays my lawyer while the company stretches the case
| out? Oops - that's still me.
|
| ----
|
| As someone who has actually retained a lawyer for dealing
| with a previous employer:
|
| 1 - Most places had zero interest if the money at play
| was less than 100k (ie: They would not take the case
| unless I had a potential win of 100k or more)
|
| 2 - They charge ~$350 an hour. Sometimes billing for
| "intern" work at ~$150 an hour instead. I make good money
| (~200k) and I can afford less than 23 days of lawyer time
| a year, assuming I spend my _ENTIRE_ yearly income on it.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I once did a security review for a site that claimed to only
| support Chrome. I tried Firefox and used a UA switcher to fake
| being Chrome, and sure enough, the site didn't work. The page
| would load, but nothing would interact.
|
| Turns out, their JS minifier was creating code that contained a
| syntax error. Chrome was able to make it work, but Firefox
| would silently error out. Rather than try to solve the problem,
| they blocked any browser that wasn't Chrome.
|
| -_-
| acdha wrote:
| When IE8 was released:
|
| Me, to <litigious tech company>: "Your JavaScript fails on
| IE8 because it now throws an exception when it attempts to
| set an invalid CSS value. I made a tiny patch but do you have
| an ETA for the fix?"
|
| LTC support: "We don't beta test Microsoft's products for
| them!"
|
| Me: "Okay, it was released this week. How's testing going?"
|
| [a week passes]
|
| LTC support manager: "Hey, can we get a copy of that patch to
| give to other customers?"
|
| My employer at the time paid 7 figures annually for support.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Stop testing people on memorization and then you don't have to
| worry about cheating. Allow people to recall data with resources
| typically available to them in the real world. This is the same
| issue I have with code/interview challenges that say don't use
| the internet. I would be a fool to not use the resources readily
| available to me or at least validate what I think I already know.
| periphrasis wrote:
| I think this common argument underrates the extent to which
| core factual mastery informs your ability to perform analysis
| and to synthesize arguments. For example, if given the exam
| question "Discuss the role of demagoguery in Athenian
| democratic politics in the Peloponnesian War." and you need to
| look up whether the Sicilian Expedition happened before or
| after the death of Pericles, then you probably don't really
| understand the role of Athenian political dysfunction during
| the war either.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Stop testing people on memorization and then you don't have
| to worry about cheating
|
| I'm not following. If you don't know the material, you have
| same incentive to cheat.
| sabas123 wrote:
| It could also help prevent unwanted communication between the
| students and the outside world (or between themselves).
| metalliqaz wrote:
| nearly every exam I had at University, as a Computer Engineer,
| allowed 1 sheet of notes. So they were already not focusing on
| memorization even 20 years ago.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| All of my B.Sc. Applied Physics exams including the finals
| were open note (anything in your own hand plus any duplicated
| sheets handed out in lectures). My finals were in 1977,
| Exeter Uni.
|
| There was no limit on how many notes one brought in to an
| exam. Some of the weaker students turned up with rucksacks
| full of ring binders and the invigilators had frequently to
| admonish them to make less noise rustling the papers! Those
| students almost all failed or attained only a pass degree.
|
| In my opinion this successfully weeded out those who thought
| that memorisation was enough. The exams typically never asked
| anything that could be answered simply by looking up the
| answer in notes or even the textbook.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Yes, the sheet of notes means you're not memorizing formulae,
| but I'm 95% sure the real motivator for professors to allow
| them is you learn when you put the notes together.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I just finished up my masters in CS from OMSCS at GT and some
| of the classes allow a sheet of notes. It's still a thing,
| even in the days of online education and proctor software.
| pinkman68419 wrote:
| I graduated that program a few years ago. The best final I
| had was Intro to HPC, you were allowed to use book, notes,
| internet, etc. The questions were open-ended and in-depth
| enough that the average on the test was still around 60-70
| IIRC. You need a very deep understanding of the material to
| answer the questions sufficiently.
| badRNG wrote:
| At least Proctorio (despite suing a college student under DMCA
| for reversing their software to show the extent of its
| capabilities [1]) doesn't go to this far a level. It's a browser
| extension that I can install for an exam, and remove afterward.
| It gets microphone, screen, and camera inputs, and permissions
| are handled through the browser.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898651
| nobrains wrote:
| I am looking for an exam proctoring solution at my employer (an
| accredited online university). What are my best solutions? Any
| solution can be hacked (i.e. workaround it's limitations). And
| without proctoring there is no guarantee students will not have
| someone else attempt the exam on their behalf or send the exam to
| someone to solve it for them. The only approach I see, but not
| favored by the Deans, is testing centers (prometric, etc.).
|
| Any suggestions?
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| https://www.tax.org.uk/onlineexams
| bambax wrote:
| > _It looks like I can go to one of their regulated test centres
| and take the exam there._
|
| ProctorU is absolutely, positively insane, but the alternative
| sounds quite reasonable.
| ajnin wrote:
| What's the legality of all this? I assume refusing to install
| ProctorU will fail your exam, so you don't really have a choice,
| when the process presents you with all kinds of check boxes and
| consent forms it's mostly doing the motions of informed consent,
| but at no step do you have a real choice. Surely no sane person
| would allow this blatant invasion of privacy willingly, this is
| practically duress.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| is there any non-dystopian spyware?
| idrios wrote:
| The dystopian part of it is that it's institutionalized.
| datameta wrote:
| I don't think you're phrasing your idea well. Perhaps you mean
| that any piece of software that allows surveillance has the
| propensity to trend toward being misused? It seems to me
| spyware is a loaded word and has its connotations. What has
| happened here has been on a massive scale very quickly in a way
| we have not seen before.
|
| Edit: For example, remote sensors placed in a power plant or
| foundry where people work also would constitute surveillance.
| But it is in an environment where carefully calibrated machines
| can otherwise fail catastrophically.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I would say if it does not spy all the time it runs it can't
| be spyware - does Teamviewer spy all the time or can it just
| be made to spy as a side effect of its main purpose?
| datameta wrote:
| Teamviewer came to my mind as well but I'm not sure desktop
| monitoring is quite on the same level as a camera pointed
| at one's face. Unless teamviewer made some strides in the
| years I haven't used it..
|
| To add, I suppose what I am really getting at is that it
| may be more useful to address ProctorU in particular rather
| than bring it under the same umbrella as other less used
| surveillance software.
| blueflow wrote:
| Its a dumb, but critical question. I enjoy the question as it
| is, as it inspires some good thinking.
|
| For me, it made me realize that the word 'dystopian' in the
| title adds no facts to anything, its just a judgement. A
| negative one.
| closeparen wrote:
| People are pretty enthusiastic about spyware that helps parents
| control their children.
| goodrubyist wrote:
| I, for one, love the people who would be proudly installing this
| because they have "nothing to hide" while chiding those who are
| (appropriately) concerned.
| robotburrito wrote:
| A while back I had a remote job interview that required me
| install spyware on my computer and turn my web cam on so it can
| record my face while I was doing some computer science puzzle.
|
| It made me not want to work at the company anyway. If they
| treated me like that during the interview, imagine your day to
| day.
| xtracto wrote:
| A friend of mine told me about this Crossover company who
| screened their remote workers minute by minute, taking photos
| with their webcam and monitoring their every mouse move and
| keypress.
|
| Sounds quite depressing if true.
| jellinek wrote:
| > The whole notion of online proctoring seems pretty whack to me
| also: what world are we training and testing people to live in?
| The real world has internet, you can search for stuff, you can
| work from home and take a break.
|
| I agree! I wish more institutions viewed the world as Stanford's
| Honor Code does. It predates the Internet by many decades:
|
| > Open-book Requirement: As stated in the Interpretations of the
| Honor Code, "If take-home examinations are given, they should not
| be closed-book examinations..." Open-book exams place no
| limitations on the materials or resources that a student may
| access during the exam.
|
| https://communitystandards.stanford.edu/resources/faculty-an....
| indymike wrote:
| Unpopular take: ProctorU is trying to solve an unsolvable
| problem. The only way they can make it work is by dictating the
| configuration of the device taking the test, and even then they
| are going to have lots of technical problems with false positives
| and incompatible software. This leads to impractical outcomes
| like, "Oh, just borrow your friend's computer" and unsafe
| situations like, "oh, just allow us to scan your computer for
| content we don't like" and so on.
|
| This is the digital equivalent of forcing students to be naked to
| take a test in person.
| t-writescode wrote:
| This is my general stance, as well.
|
| Impossible requirements have been placed on at-home exams and
| proctored testing; and this company stood up.
|
| Are they violating many moral and reasonable privacy codes to
| do it? Absolutely. It is a huge breech of ethics.
|
| But universities and their professors asked for it.
|
| Plenty of online educators already know how to (edit: lead)
| classes and give tests without it; but many, too, are either
| lazy or overburdened and have asked for this.
| indymike wrote:
| > But universities and their professors asked for it.
|
| It is interesting that institutions that often have
| "department of ethics" are the first to be OK with awful
| products like online proctoring software.
| user3939382 wrote:
| I spent years running a school and am an edtech developer:
| education needs to (and probably will) evolve to suit the nature
| of remote learning. We're in this weird phase where we're trying
| to shoehorn models and constraints from the in-person learning
| paradigm into remote learning.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| If this will involve getting rid of closed-book exams, I think
| the world can only benefit from it.
| chaosite wrote:
| Sure, and I think it's hard to find someone who is perfectly
| satisfied with the status quo.
|
| Coming up with a replacement is the hard part.
| david_allison wrote:
| Prediction: The replacements will come from adult education,
| not from traditional academia.
| beauzero wrote:
| My wife has taught for 3 years at an online only state charter
| school (US). The single most difficult issue to solve (waste of
| time) is integration between foundation school management
| software such as Infinite Campus (where grades are kept) and
| third party learning packages (where assignments come from).
| user3939382 wrote:
| Funny you mention that. My work is building course content
| and assessment delivery systems that can be plugged into any
| LMS. It's the leading (modular) solution to this exact
| problem.
| devwastaken wrote:
| I've seen it done successfully at some uni's. Zoom for the
| lecture, and a far less invasive proctoring tool for the tests.
| You can even have in person and remote in the same class if the
| material is made available online.
| miki123211 wrote:
| The use of Proctorio seems to mostly be a U.S. issue.
|
| I have never seen it used over here (Poland). My friends from
| other European countries haven't either, at least when I asked
| them.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if GDPR prevents them from collecting
| most of that data. The fact that most colleges here are state-run
| might also contribute.
| schroeding wrote:
| Yep, the GDPR saves us here, thank goodness for that.
|
| There are better ways anyway, IMO. At my (german) university,
| most exams are so personalized (random exercises from a pool in
| random order, student ids used as const values in calculations,
| groups A / B / C, etc) that cheating is pretty hard.
| hospadar wrote:
| The whole notion of online proctoring seems pretty whack to me
| also: what world are we training and testing people to live in?
| The real world has internet, you can search for stuff, you can
| work from home and take a break.
|
| I'm not good at things because I'm always able to magically
| materialize the right answer out of my mind inside an anechoic
| faraday chamber, I'm good because I get the right answer in a
| reasonable amount of time using all the tools available to me
| (the internet, my brain, books, whatever).
|
| I get that there are a few professions where you're really going
| to need to know the right answer quickly without looking it up
| under high-pressure situations, and it seems like testing and
| certifying doctors and lawyers is important enough to society
| that we can arrange to proctor those tests in person (and still
| maintain covid safety, disability/poverty access, etc). That
| level of extreme proctoring security seems pretty dumb for random
| exams WHERE school <= undergrad.
|
| If you elaborately cheat your way through all online classes all
| the way through undergrad, that seems mostly bad for you
| Siira wrote:
| Doctors and lawyers frequently consult their references.
| kevincox wrote:
| In my mind (I know nothing about the universities' threat
| models) the biggest concern is not looking up some reference
| online, but paying someone for a couple of hours to take the
| test for you.
|
| I agree, if you can look at available resources and competently
| perform the task that is likely not an issue in the field.
|
| However paying someone to tell you all the answers to a test is
| cost effective for an exam that takes a couple of hours but
| will not get you by in the field. The university doesn't want
| to be known to give out degrees to incompetent workers so they
| need to prevent this case.
| advael wrote:
| Having been through a lot of school and gotten a lot out of it,
| I am strongly convinced that the current society-wide policy of
| treating university education as expensive vocational training
| is a horrible and costly mistake whose main function for the
| overwhelming majority of students right now is to saddle people
| with debt. Universities primarily exist to train and employ
| researchers, and serve a secondary purpose of providing a
| broad-based education to members of the public. Anything that
| is useful vocational training in this process is basically an
| accident, and useful vocational training can be done in a much
| more time- and cost-efficient way.
|
| I also think the way we test people is set up to be measurable
| rather than effective, and all this hand-wringing about
| cheating is an attempt to prop up a premise about pedagogical
| techniques that simply do not accomplish their goal (and a way
| to scam universities out of a lot of money for tools like this
| one). Most of the market for standardized tests is a racket
| built on market dominance and irrational beliefs about its
| value built on a (pervasive, policy-level) misunderstanding and
| subsequent cargo-cult style blind worship of metrics per se
|
| On top of all this, the sheer level of security and privacy
| violations the school system seems to tolerate for this dubious
| purpose is ridiculous, and speaks to a deep gap in knowledge
| about, or devaluation of these things that causes far more
| problems in our information-driven world than cheating on a
| dumb test possibly could
|
| I've gotten advanced degrees and consider them to have been
| overall a valuable experience, but even then most of the
| education system as we have it was pointless torture, and I
| probably would have quit school if this nonsense were around
| when I was in it
| 0x4d464d48 wrote:
| "... I am strongly convinced that the current society-wide
| policy of treating university education as expensive
| vocational training is a horrible and costly mistake whose
| main function for the overwhelming majority of students right
| now is to saddle people with debt."
|
| This is not said often enough and it is a shame.
|
| Universities are not intended to be vocational schools.
| They're research institutions where the value they generate
| is the knowledge they discover. Often frivilous and arcane
| with no real use outside of a very specialized subsection of
| a field of study. But it's also often knowledge that no one
| has practical use for at the time if discovery but windes up
| changing the world sometimes much later on.
|
| E.g. https://math.berkeley.edu/~gmelvin/math54f12/math110su12
| _gra...
|
| I don't think there's much more to add than Turchin's ideas
| of "overproduction of the elites" and it rubs me the wrong
| way when I hear intelligent people gripe about how university
| credentials and research have marginal vocational utility.
| The problem's with a culture that celebrates credentialism
| and elitism that gets people hopeing to avoid an impovershed
| future into crippling debt, not scholarship.
| romwell wrote:
| As a former educator, the only thing I can add on top of this
| is that training compliance, obedience, and mindless rule-
| following is a feature, not a bug of the education system.
|
| And I feel like it's drilled into instructors too.
| advael wrote:
| I strongly agree. I think this has been the case for all
| versions of the public education system in living memory,
| and the main ways this has changed over the last few
| decades are twofold:
|
| -More oversight and efficiency in this process is breaking
| down the unofficial means through which anyone got anything
| else out of it (e.g. real mentorship from educators who
| care that is not encouraged so much as tolerated by
| education policy, opportunities to engage with new ideas in
| a meaningful way, good reading recommendations, an
| incidental avenue into a social life)
|
| -The structure and function of public education is
| increasingly infecting university curricula, structure, and
| priorities
|
| I think this likely has the effect in broader society of
| creating less fluid competency and more blank-faced
| compliance, and this disproportionately affects people in
| key leadership roles as schooling becomes more of a
| selection pressure on people's career paths
| ravitation wrote:
| It's somewhat amusing to see someone write a lengthy rant
| against testing because memorizing information is archaic, when
| the ability to write, at least at the start, is learned this
| way.
|
| The most obvious example why you're wrong is learning a second
| language. Even learning a language outside of a classroom
| generally requires memorization of fundamental vocabulary (and
| sometimes a writing system); it therefore makes sense that a
| class teaching a second language would test students on this
| memorization.
|
| Now, other fields might not be so obvious, but they require
| many things to be quickly accessible, much in the same way that
| one might need quick access to a word or a character with a
| second language. A biologist needs to know and understand the
| central dogma, an engineer needs to understand mechanical
| stress, and a chemist needs to be able to read a structural
| formula; they need to be able to do these things essentially
| instantly (and understand them intuitively) to be able to even
| discuss more complex topics, because complex information builds
| on simple information. Hence it makes sense to make sure those
| pieces of information are understood and readily available
| before sending a student off to a more advanced topic.
| TomSwirly wrote:
| > t's somewhat amusing to see someone write a lengthy rant
| against testing because memorizing information is archaic,
| when the ability to write, at least at the start, is learned
| this way.
|
| Writing is a skill. It is NOT memorization. It is not taught
| or learned that way, even at the beginning, unless you are
| talking about handwriting.
|
| No one says, "Memorize this phrase, and now write it out
| again."
| sophacles wrote:
| > No one says, "Memorize this phrase, and now write it out
| again."
|
| No they say "Write this word 10 times to memorize it" then
| give spelling tests.
| lmkg wrote:
| Not everything _IS_ memorization, but lots of things _HAVE_
| memorization. You don 't write by regurgitating exact
| phrases, but your ability to write will be significantly
| impeded if you need to constantly look up word definitions,
| spellings, word order, syntax rules, and orthographies.
| There are certain fundamentals that need to be automatic,
| and it's fair to require internalization as part of
| acquiring mastery.
| ravitation wrote:
| I mean you are just wrong. You memorize what sound (well
| sounds) the letter "a" makes, which is of course
| fundamental to being able to write because English uses an
| alphabet. You might argue that reading isn't writing, but
| the two are interdependent (or at least writing generally
| dependent on reading).
|
| Not to mention memorizing how to physically write (i.e.
| what you're talking about with handwriting)...
|
| I assume you think I mean composition or something, which
| is of course extremely obviously not what I meant... But to
| develop that skill of "writing" that you're talking about
| requires memorization of the fundamentals... Which applies
| quite broadly to other disciplines...
| arpa wrote:
| It's not memorization, it's pattern recognition that
| really counts. What sound "a" mkes is irrelevnt if you're
| recognizing the relevnt pttern. So it's you who's in the
| wrong.
| ravitation wrote:
| You cannot reasonably intuit the sounds that letters
| make, or the meaning of combinations of letters without
| some underlying phonetic information. Your ability to
| recognize those patterns is built upon learning the
| meaning of words and letters as I described (not to
| mention whether what you're doing is pattern recognition
| or pattern memorization).
|
| You are just wrong in every possible way.
| robbyking wrote:
| Absolutely. I work at a well known tech company, and when we
| give potential candidates coding tests we give them the option
| to code in any language they'd like (including pseudo-code),
| and to use Google if they can't remember the name or syntax of
| something they want to use.
|
| There's not reason to fail a candidate just because they can't
| remember the signature of a method in a library they haven't
| used in a while.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| I largely agree with this. There _are_ some careers --
| firefighting is one of them -- where it is downright dangerous
| for the person to have a reliance on technology (technology can
| help firefighters but the battalion chief still needs to know
| the entry /exit points on a structure to direct crews, the
| drivers need to *know* the city they are in, backwards and
| forwards to get to the site quickly (they cannot rely on Google
| Maps)), but I'm not sure how many of those careers (air traffic
| control would be another) would have remote-proctored exams
| anyway.
|
| Having said that, I _do_ think that many of us have become too
| conditioned to having access to Google /the internet/the
| ability to always look stuff up, that it does become a problem
| (I am utterly incapable of getting around the city I live in
| without Google Maps, as an example), and that, I think is a
| negative for humanity. Having access to information and
| reference is great, but never taking the time to actually
| learn/memorize/understand concepts and content so that you feel
| confident doing something without checking the answer is still
| really important in lots of roles. There should be a balance.
|
| But none of this excuses the malware/spyware that ProctorU and
| other systems employ. Frankly, people who are that committed to
| cheating will cheat anyway.
|
| I've heard of similarly dystopic sorts of bullshit even when it
| comes to remote job interviews, often (but not limited to) code
| tests. I cannot imagine any job that would be worth me
| installing spyware/malware on my personal machine for the
| interview. Even for a university exam, I would push back hard
| on this sort of thing (or at least the onerous requirements and
| access it has) or demand the school issue testing laptops or at
| the very least re-think how/why they proctor exams the way they
| do. Individually, students don't have a lot of leverage, but if
| enough people complain -- especially in high dollar degree
| programs like a MSc -- universities will rethink their behavior
| -- or at the very least, force the software firms they pay
| millions of dollars to to support a fucking Chromebook.
| halostatue wrote:
| Firefighting is actually a really awful example. The
| practices involved require in-person practica, and there are
| stages of growth expected.
|
| Additionally, for any structure of sufficient complexity, the
| "lead" firefighter will _absolutely_ be requesting and
| receiving building plans to direct the firefighters to the
| appropriate locations. Also, like London taxi drivers, fire
| truck drivers probably have to train on the streets they are
| protecting. (That said, I do recall stories of firefighters
| getting lost due to bad GPS directions.)
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| That's exactly what I said. I said firefighting is an area
| where you cannot rely on just googling something. You need
| to know the information, period. I wasn't talking about in-
| person or online tests, I was responding to OP who said
| that that style of testing where you can't have access to
| materials is incongruous with how most things work.
|
| Quoting myself:
|
| > but I'm not sure how many of those careers (air traffic
| control would be another) would have remote-proctored exams
| anyway.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > and it seems like testing and certifying doctors and lawyers
| is important enough to society
|
| Lawyers spend most of their (billable) time researching. And
| the great majority of lawyers never see a court room. No quick
| reaction time needed.
|
| Doctors... The average doctor follows a script to triage the
| easy 80% of problems. And the average doctor stops at that.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| I don't want my emergency room doctor looking up a fairly
| common disease on the internet. And I ding interview candidates
| who have to look up basic syntax like a for loop (I have no
| problem if they need to reference random APIs or advanced
| syntax though).
|
| Being fluent in your professional vernacular is very important
| for productivity. And a closed test is the best, scalable way
| we have to test this.
| sgustard wrote:
| I've been coding for 30 years and I still have to look up
| syntax for case/switch statements. You ding me?
| bruce343434 wrote:
| I'm sorry, but what?
| filoleg wrote:
| They have been coding for quite a while and are saying
| that they still look up the syntax for case/switch
| statements, because they cannot remember it off the top
| of their head. I am in the exact same boat, except with
| about a third of their experience coding.
| xerox13ster wrote:
| Seriously, that's just not super valuable information to
| have stored in your mind like that.
|
| Sure I could, it'd be fine, but why store the entire syntax
| structure in my mind rather than a pointer to the location
| where I can find it in its most updated form?
| [deleted]
| lostlogin wrote:
| > I don't want my emergency room doctor looking up a fairly
| common disease on the internet.
|
| That ship sailed a long time ago.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| You won't succeed on any advanced test, with or without
| reference materials, if you haven't mastered the underlying
| basics. There would be too much to look up. You can't
| simplify fractions in a reasonable time if you need to look
| up everything in a multiplication table, for example, and
| it's true for everything that builds on that. It's the same
| for any topic: there comes a point where you can't succeed on
| Google alone.
| number6 wrote:
| You can Look up Mathematical induction but if it's the
| first time to solve one in the exam you won't succeed.
| ehnto wrote:
| Shoot, some syntaxes haven't even been around long enough to
| have a for-loop documentation page hit the front page of a
| google search of "{language} for loop". As an agency
| developer I've got like 6+ languages/markup syntax knowledge
| required of me any given year, they just keep making new ones
| and I have to keep learning them.
|
| My current requirements, just this month, are:
| * Python * PHP * Javascript * React and Vue
| * TypeScript (but not in every JS project!) * Blade
| templating * Liquid templating * Whatever Algolia
| uses for it's inline templating * Bash * C#
| (games!)
|
| And if you want you could throw in arbitrary configuration
| syntaxes for all the infrastructure as code insanity that
| comes with it all, some of those have loops.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Sure, but why is someone asking you to use Algolia
| templates in an interview?
| ehnto wrote:
| It was just to illustrate how much arbitrary knowledge is
| required in modern stacks. We could be talking about
| totally different industries though, perhaps you're
| hiring senior C developers and it'd be weird if they
| didn't know the syntax yet.
|
| For apps and web development, I wouldn't fuss too much
| about specific language syntaxes since if I were to cull
| my applicants based on language experience I'd be
| throwing away plenty of talented developers. I'd hire a
| talented Python developer for a job writing JS for
| example, if they're applying then they're willing to
| learn it.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Fair enough. In my interviews I tell candidates to code
| in the language they're most familiar with. Hopefully
| someone has memorized a for loop in their go to language.
| ehnto wrote:
| Aha, that's a pretty fair approach then.
| anaphor wrote:
| Doctors google rare disease symptoms sometimes, however, and
| it's seen as a legitimate thing to try if you're truly
| stumped by a mysterious illness.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| And just as often they don't. I went to the ER for a
| seizure, and basically after paying $5,000 the advice I got
| was "well that drug has seizures as a side effect, so
| stopping take it and find a new one." Absolutely no
| investigation in to why this happened, if there's a class
| of drugs I should avoid, nothing.
| jerf wrote:
| The business world has a jargon term, "solutions
| provider". The idea is that they strive to not just
| provide you a tool, but to fully solve your problem, to
| make it entirely go away. It's often just a buzzword, but
| like most buzzwords, there's a kernel of useful truth in
| the middle of it.
|
| The medical industry is not a solutions provider. You
| should view them as a useful tool, but one that still
| leaves you with the responsibility to utilize the useful
| tool to solve your problems.
|
| I am not making a normative claim here; I'm making a
| descriptive one. The medical system is an incredible
| toolset, but you need to be ready to assemble it into a
| solution. Maybe it _should_ be a solutions provider.
| Maybe it 's really discriminatory against the people who
| won't or can't operate this way. No argument. But it
| observably isn't a solutions provider today, whatever
| "should" be.
|
| In this particular case, if you care you should have
| scheduled a followup with a different doctor. ER doctors
| don't do that sort of analysis.
| crygin wrote:
| Huh, sounds like you might have been better off if
| "[your] emergency room doctor [looked it up] on the
| internet".
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Well I can't find any information on the general internet
| about this, beyond what the doctor said. One would most
| likely have to synthesize several different areas of
| knowledge to come up with a plausible hypothesis.
| bmj wrote:
| And in the days before the internet, they likely had a
| bookshelf full of reference manuals.
|
| True story: when I became a programmer in the 1990s, I used
| to buy the printed manuals for the Java APIs as they were
| released. At one of my first interviews (for a Perl job), I
| was given the Camel Book as reference for the (handwritten)
| programming test.
| mavhc wrote:
| I assume the doctor is having all your symptoms recorded, are
| you against that being automatically put into an expert
| system to list possible diseases? One that knows the failure
| rates of tests so can give more accurate chances of having X
| Y but not Z is actually something that has X Y and Z, but the
| Z test is only 90% accurate?
|
| By scalable you mean cheap.
|
| An actual test would be: design a whole system/experiment to
| do a thing, in 3 hours.
|
| Can't look up basic things, you'll be too slow.
|
| But then it can't be auto marked, so isn't cheap.
|
| Exams: The very last time in your life you won't have
| internet access.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Then you can test on time. If it is expected to remember the
| term without internet give them few second after showing the
| question. Remembering the answer in 30 seconds is not better
| than being able to google it.
| 5faulker wrote:
| It's mostly bad because it'd be you cheating yourself I guess.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I don't think that is an effective life strategy because you
| actually solve problems more slowly if you have less knowledge.
| If you've learned skills and committed things to memory, your
| brain can synthesize information much more rapidly. If you have
| to google everything, its like running your 2.5GHz PC at 10
| MHz, and it is highly unlikely your brain will produce new
| information on the spot.
|
| Edited for snark removal.
| grishka wrote:
| For me personally, I just can't memorize stuff on demand like
| exams expect people to. My brain refuses to do that, period.
| But when I do use some information often and many times, I
| somehow end up memorizing it eventually. APIs, phone numbers,
| addresses and routes, even people's faces.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| > I just can't memorize stuff on demand like exams expect
| people to.
|
| Unless things have changed in the 30+ years since I was in
| college, I seem to recall exams happen after weeks of study
| and not "on demand". Part of learning is memorization.
| There's no way around that. It sounds more like you aren't
| cut out for the pace of high-caliber institutions which
| move very quickly. I have two friends with literature
| degrees, one from UCONN and one from Dartmouth. The
| Dartmouth friend had to read 4x the number of books than
| the UCONN friend in the same period of time for the same
| degree. C-students still need jobs! Just because you aren't
| a straight-A doesn't mean you can't still be a serviceable
| employee.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Following your lead:
|
| Thinking is not "answering questions".
|
| In order to build a mental model of a problem, you need a
| _rather good_ model of the environment _in your mind_ , and
| this comes from memory and the habit of thinking (which is
| what drill exercises facilitate).
|
| Rote learning is an essential tool in being able to create
| adequate models of the environment.
|
| The problem is lots of people think it is useless because "I
| did not need to memorize", when the issue is that "they are
| sufficiently able to memorize that they do it unconsciously".
| But most people need to put the effort.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Life is an open-answer problem, not a sequence of questions, so
| the "answer" is neither unique nor necessarily easily
| expressible as a sequence of statements.
|
| Memory is useful because it is the very basis of _reasoning_.
| Rote learning is important because intellectual _habits_
| facilitate thinking.
|
| Google has not all the answers, but especially: it does not
| have any questions.
| [deleted]
| ModernMech wrote:
| I took the approach of just letting my students have unfettered
| access to the internet during the pandemic, even for exams. You
| may think this would lead to everyone getting an A, but it
| turns out the grades were normally distributed with a B-
| average, which was pretty typical for my courses per-pandemic.
|
| What I did was ask them to write real code. It's a course on
| programming. If you can get the computer to accomplish the
| given task in whatever way you know, including gluing together
| parts and libraries from online, then that's a demonstration
| other learned something!
|
| And as it turns out, C and D quality work is still submitted
| even when students have all the time and resources in the
| world. The internet is not a magic wand to solve all problems
| for you. For example, my final project is to write a file
| server. Yeah you can find tutorials for how to do this on the
| internet, but it's still going to have to be customized to use
| my specific protocol. For someone who knows what they are
| doing, they can do this assignment in 10 minutes leveraging the
| right tools. For others, they might write it from scratch as we
| discussed in class. Others still will barely get past writing a
| makefile, even with step by step instructions and examples on
| how to do it. So in the end the grades worked out as they
| usually do, distributed normally with a B- average, and about
| half a letter grade stdev. That's just the way it is.
|
| So this fear that access to the internet will lead to rampant
| cheating is only relevant if the questions are easily gamed:
| like definitions, facts, and contrived math problems. Well it
| turns out this is like 90% of prepared materials for the low
| level intro classes.
|
| I mean, if you can get through a number of semesters of college
| by looking up answers on Google, the problem is not with
| Google, it's with the curriculum. Because what value are these
| courses really adding if they are just cramming facts into your
| brain and then you regurgitate them, and promptly forget?
|
| Take chemistry for example. All of chemistry should be in a
| laboratory setting. All of it. It's a perfect hands on
| discipline, yet the standard sequence is just year after year
| of memorizing facts and definitions with very little comparable
| lab time.
|
| And I get why this isn't done, it's probably not practical and
| there does need to be an acquisition of fundamental knowledge,
| but that isn't really done by going through prepackaged web
| content (that can't be resold) with all the answers available
| on Chegg, as is the case for a great many 100 and 200 level
| courses in all major disciplines at most universities.
| ravitation wrote:
| >Take chemistry for example. All of chemistry should be in a
| laboratory setting. All of it. It's a perfect hands on
| discipline, yet the standard sequence is just year after year
| of memorizing facts and definitions with very little
| comparable lab time.
|
| I mean this is just... Incorrect. High school chemistry
| (generally the first time it's called chemistry and not
| science) is often taught in a lab (I assume mainly a function
| of whether lab facilities are available). Undergraduate
| general chemistry and organic chemistry generally have a
| required lab component that is required to be taken
| concurrently (this is even true at community colleges). Using
| general chemistry as an example, the lab portion is usually 1
| three hour (at least) class per week, while lecture is 3 one
| hour classes per week (organic chemistry is essentially the
| same). More advanced chemistry might not have lab components
| (e.g. physical chemistry), but the foundations are almost
| always at least combined with a lab.
| ModernMech wrote:
| I mean all of it, even all the way down to the math
| requirements. I envision a chemistry degree with zero sage-
| on-the-stage, or maybe in this case, sage-in-the-page style
| content delivery.
| ravitation wrote:
| Ok... I was responding more specifically to...
|
| >the standard sequence is just year after year of
| memorizing facts and definitions with very little
| comparable lab time
|
| And I compared the lab and lecture time... and they are
| very similar (essentially equal)...
|
| I didn't choose to respond to your overall ideas about a
| chemistry degree because that would require convincing
| you that there is quite a bit of fundamental information
| needed to make those labs useful (and efficient) and
| there was already a great misunderstanding regarding the
| amount of time chemistry students spend in the lab.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > that would require convincing you that there is quite a
| bit of fundamental information needed to make those labs
| useful
|
| Well you don't need to convince me of that since I admit
| as much in my original post!
|
| > and there was already a great misunderstanding
| regarding the amount of time chemistry students spend in
| the lab.
|
| I can only speak to my experience advising dual CS and
| Chemistry majors. The ratio of lab to class hours for
| them is 1:2, and worse when you add electives. So that's
| the basis for my statement. YMMV.
| ravitation wrote:
| >Well you don't need to convince me of that since I admit
| as much in my original post!
|
| Ok, I guess in your degree program the only difference is
| that you sit around in a lab instead of a lecture hall
| learning those fundamental things then? Because I'm not
| referring to some trivial amount of fundamental
| information... I'm referring to, roughly, the amount of
| information covered in 3 one hour lectures a week.
|
| > I can only speak to my experience advising dual CS and
| Chemistry majors. The ratio of lab to class hours for
| them is 1:2, and worse when you add electives. So that's
| the basis for my statement. YMMV.
|
| Ok, I'm citing directly from my university's course
| catalog (and also the courses I took at several
| universities) so YMMV.
| imilk wrote:
| > I get that there are a few professions where you're really
| going to need to know the right answer quickly without looking
| it up under high-pressure situations
|
| I agree with the premise, but I think you're downplaying this
| quite a bit. Pretty much any job that you're not doing
| asynchronous work in front of a computer would apply here.
|
| > If you elaborately cheat your way through all online classes
| all the way through undergrad, that seems mostly bad for you
|
| Well it's more than bad for just you. It's bad for the
| university and everyone else with a degree from there since you
| are degrading the value of having that degree.
| julienb_sea wrote:
| I completely disagree. Knowledge recollection of school
| taught concepts is irrelevant to practically every job. Yes,
| most jobs require you to remember various work-related
| things, but those are not taught in school, they are taught
| and reinforced on the job itself.
| imilk wrote:
| What this tells me is that you may not have gotten the most
| out of your education. Sure there are specific tasks that
| you learn how to complete for particular jobs, but the
| structure of how you approach problems should have been
| helped quite a bit by what you learn in school.
|
| Personally I found studying philosophy extremely helpful to
| solving business problems. Not because there is an exact 1
| for 1 concept match. Rather it teaches you how to frame and
| break down problems so that you can be more adaptable and
| efficient when faced with various unknowns.
|
| There's always going to be domain specific learning needed
| for any position. But to dismiss any tangential knowledge
| as useless is extremely short sided.
| rembicilious wrote:
| You said "studying philosophy" rather than "being tested
| on rote memorization of philosophy text books".
|
| I agree that "studying philosophy" is a worthwhile
| endeavor, but I align more closely with the parents in
| regards to memorizing the semi-random litany of data bits
| that show up in a typical exam. The information is
| ultimately forgotten and is usually only relevant in the
| context of the current textbook chapter. Nearly every
| useful concept that applies to my two separate careers
| was learned on the job. The time spent in the classroom
| is nearly irrelevant and could have been replaced
| entirely by several weeks on the job.
| imilk wrote:
| I just gave an personal example to flesh out my post. But
| if, for example, you are a structural engineer who has to
| consult on site with clients, you certainly need to
| recall a litany of data/concepts (random or non-random)
| pretty quickly if you don't want to look like an idiot.
| You cannot learn this knowledge from a few weeks on the
| job because the client would be able to see through your
| bullshit in minutes.
|
| This applies to pretty much any position that needs to
| communicate in real time about a base of knowledge
| (doctors, lawyers, logistics, any type of management
| position). If you believe that any career can be
| substituted by "a few weeks on the job", you're not
| really aiming that high for yourself.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| I'm curious about the proportion of careers which are not
| adaptable to asynchronous/remote work, that _is_ best tested
| through rote memorization (think multiple choice questions)
| versus active demonstration (think like having an instructor
| see you do CPR on a dummy)?
|
| Just a thought about how it's weird we argue about how
| testing should be done online, but not the fact we test
| online things which are not really online in their nature.
| imilk wrote:
| Pretty much anything that requires real time communication
| involving a deep base of knowledge. I'm not going to list
| out hundreds of possible roles that this encompasses - but
| I'm sure you have the imagination to think of a few.
| tomphoolery wrote:
| Conan O'Brien went to Harvard, so we've already degraded the
| value of having a degree in general.
| imilk wrote:
| He seems to have had a very successful career doing
| something that he enjoys. I don't really understand your
| point.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| I think Conan would like this joke. Sounds like one Andy
| would make at his expense back in the day.
| vlunkr wrote:
| > Pretty much any job that you're not doing asynchronous work
| in front of a computer would apply here.
|
| It's lame to ask for examples, but do you have any? Because
| honestly I don't think it applies to many jobs, unless it's
| something that a) puts you in high pressure situations, and
| b) requires specific in-depth knowledge. There aren't that
| many jobs like that, and for the ones that do exist (medical,
| military), you don't get in just by doing a bunch of multiple
| choice tests.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I'd argue that a lot of jobs have time that is stressful,
| high pressure and requires one to have the knowledge
| immediately.
|
| A truck driver, a crane operator, a musician, a teacher, a
| chef.
|
| Danger doesn't have to be physical. Embarrassment,
| potential failure etc are all reasons to need to know
| something without looking it up.
| halostatue wrote:
| None of these can be tested by an online-proctored test
| necessitating the installation of a rootkit.
|
| The first two have specific government licensing
| requirements that require in-person examinations in use
| of the equipment in question.
|
| The third has no need of any sort of proctored test.
|
| The fourth _may_ need some sort of proctored test, but
| most teaching licences require in-person or otherwise
| monitored practica--and those are far more viable than
| anything proctored. Teachers should _often_ be ready to
| turn to books, depending on what it is they are teaching.
|
| The fifth also doesn't need a proctored test, and the
| type of immediate no-book knowledge required when
| preparing something is something that isn't readily
| memorizable, but is instead only something that is
| achievable via long experience. Most chefs work from
| recipes and plans.
|
| I don't think that any of the examples you have given fit
| the mold.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I think you are underestimating the amount of regulation
| and qualification that is required for various roles.
| Health and safety, code compliance and best practice are
| tested and assessed for a vast number of professions
| where I am. Certainly teaching, driving, food safety,
| building etc. I struggle to think of a profession or
| trade that has no testing or legal requirement for
| standards (and associated proof of compliance). Many
| companies require online training to get their own
| policies across.
|
| Probably a key detail - I'm in New Zealand, and Health
| and safety is taken increasingly seriously. Company
| directors face stiff fines/imprisonment for H&S failures
| and while things have a long way to go, they have also
| come a long way in a short time.
| xtracto wrote:
| When I visit a restaurant, I sometimes ask the waiter
| whether he knows if certain dish contains dairy. There are
| usually three answers: Bad waiters would
| just have no clue and won't know what to do.
| Mediocre waiters would offer to go to the kitchen and ask
| about it Great waiters will tell me yes or no, will
| offer me to cook it with X instead of Y, or give me one of
| the other options in the menu (they already know by heart)
| that do not contain dairy
| jackson1442 wrote:
| I'm glad I paid $40k to learn to be a great waiter.
| vlunkr wrote:
| I guess I should add "high stakes" to my list of
| requirements.
| profile53 wrote:
| > for the ones that do exist (medical, military), you don't
| get in just by doing a bunch of multiple choice tests
|
| As someone in the medical field, I would say upwards of 80%
| of the graded portion of a nursing license and it's
| certifications (trauma nursing, cardiac life support, etc),
| you're graded entirely on multiple choice questions. People
| die from mistakes, yet I meet a lot of people who proudly
| admit to having cheated or googled their way through a much
| of their studies. Some of them are good and quite a few are
| downright dangerous at their jobs.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > I would say upwards of 80% of the graded portion of a
| nursing license and it's certifications (trauma nursing,
| cardiac life support, etc), you're graded entirely on
| multiple choice questions.
|
| A lot of places won't let you take the exam without
| practical experience, under the supervision of clinical
| personnel. Harder to google your way through that.
| profile53 wrote:
| I can't speak to the certification exams, but for nursing
| school, there is a high pressure from administration to
| pass students as long as they can pass the standardized
| test, even if the teachers don't think the student is
| ready or safe for clinical work. So, although they do
| have practical experience, it is often limited in scope
| and students can fake their way through it to a
| surprisingly large extent (they're always paired with a
| licensed staff member). This is anecdotal, but consistent
| across what has been told to me by staff members of
| several nursing schools.
| space_fountain wrote:
| My suspicion is that for almost everything constantly
| having to google will be a problem. Maybe a timed harder
| test is the right way to filter that out and find the
| people with enough knowledge, but that's harder to get the
| balance right
| imilk wrote:
| And then you reach a point where you don't even know what
| you need to Google to solve a problem. I can't believe
| some people are under the impression that being
| successful at your job is only a matter of translating
| requests through the Google machine and spitting out
| answers. It tells me that they have not faced complex
| problems before.
| jmnicolas wrote:
| A good designed test shouldn't depend on rote memorization, so it
| would require much less intrusive spying.
|
| Example: design a database schema for a grocery store with such
| and such requirements... you either know or don't know how to do
| it but you won't find the answer on the web.
| [deleted]
| gzer0 wrote:
| Dartmouth medical school accused 17 students of cheating; they
| found over half of the accused students was due to erroneously
| generated data.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/09/technology/dartmouth-
| geis...
| babypuncher wrote:
| I think I would rather let a dozen cheaters "get away with it"
| than let even one innocent person have their academic career
| damaged by a false positive.
| cwdegidio wrote:
| They also are terrible at how they treat your local machine. I
| had to use them for a course I was in. I was having issues
| connecting because they kept insisting I used some Flash based
| tool. Their proctor started going into various settings on my
| Mac, clicking rather carelessly and what seemed like at random
| then declared the platform was unsupported. I immediately said
| "ok, so now your going to return my machine back to the state
| that it was in before you started messing around..." They
| immediately dodged the question and ended the chat. It took 3
| more attempts to even get the test started and like a week to
| find all the damage they did to my settings. Terrible company.
| masswerk wrote:
| Just as a small reminder what universities are all about: The
| dominant reason for the foundation of the Sorbonne was a surge in
| heresies. The principal idea was to prepare for the next heresy
| and being able to respond quickly to challenges yet unknown. The
| university is essentially about a wager on the future, not about
| mastering the present.
|
| Which brings us to what a university should be about:
|
| * Understanding principles
|
| * Being able to draw connections from principles to novel ends
|
| * Being able to argue your point
|
| * Being able to discern, whether a point is argued properly or
| not (according to these rules and the rules of the particular
| discipline/field)
|
| * Knowing about the current state of the art/ideas and their
| relation to principles
|
| Nothing of this includes a use case for spyware like this. It
| actually indicates that the institution does not manage at least
| one of those aforementioned goals. And it it's an indication for
| that institution rather answering to those challenges by a strict
| regime of established procedures, which is exactly what a
| university is all not about.
| fatcat500 wrote:
| I would probably buy a ~$200 HP Stream and use that...
|
| Unfair having to spend such money, but textbooks aren't that much
| more expensive, and you can use it for more than one course too
| abrookins wrote:
| For the certification program at Redis University
| (https://university.redis.com/), we previously used ProctorU
| because that's what other folks were doing -- proctored exams for
| certification.
|
| Buuut, after a while, we were like, why subject people to this?
| This is crazy. And why even charge for certs anyway? I'm happy
| we're done with proctoring!
| scandox wrote:
| You know I attended The University of Memcached but years later
| when I asked for a copy of my degree certificate ... well you
| know the rest.
| LambdaTrain wrote:
| The fact that a linux security course uses proctoru for exam is
| the entire sarcastic point.
| wespiser_2018 wrote:
| I'm another reluctant ProctorU user, and using it thrust upon me
| if I wanted to complete my online master in CS. It's spyware, and
| it really is that awful. At least for my tests, it's required
| that you buy an external camera, and scan the entire room before
| taking the test, it records you the entire time, and runs in the
| background (and foreground) with system level privileges. Taking
| a test this way is very stressful this way, compared to just
| walking into a building with just a pen and your phone on silent.
|
| Nearly every college student during the pandemic had to use
| ProctorU in order to complete their classes, or a similar
| alternative. Quite disturbing the experience is normalized, and I
| wish there were an official OS level feature for "report all
| activity on the system from time X to Y", without having to use a
| sketchy third party app.
|
| I wish the author the best of luck fighting the requirement to
| use ProctorU.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > I wish there were an official OS level feature for "report
| all activity on the system from time X to Y"
|
| Oh please don't. This type of espionage should be discouraged,
| not officially supported.
| smoldesu wrote:
| If you're using MacOS, this API already exists:
| https://eclecticlight.co/2020/10/27/xprotect-what-do-we-
| know...
| teawrecks wrote:
| The thing is, it still wouldn't be enough. Ex. I currently
| use magisk to tell Google Play and all apps that my phone
| isn't rooted, allowing me to use app features they would
| otherwise lock me out of.
| zuminator wrote:
| As a workaround, someone could buy a new laptop from a major
| retailer right before the exam, install the software, take the
| test, uninstall the software, then return the laptop for a
| refund.
| LegoZombieKing wrote:
| This is my first comment on this site after lurking for a few
| years, I thought I would add my personal experience using
| ProctorU and how weird it feels to willing give up my personal
| privacy to take a test online.
|
| I go to UOPeople, which is a tuition free online school and I am
| getting a 4 year computer science degree (for like $5k which is
| crazy), anyway of the 40 courses you have to take only 11 are
| proctored. UOP offers 2 choices for proctoring, A) find a real
| life proctor, or B) use ProctorU. I don't have the luxury of
| finding a real person + with covid its more unlikely, so ProctorU
| it is.
|
| All in all its not the worst thing in the world, but when I first
| read the requirements for the ProctorU testing environment and
| technical requirements I almost quit school completely to look
| for alternative paths. Some of the crazy requirements include:
| Testing space must have nothing on the walls, or floors. You
| can't wear glasses while taking the exam. Your desk must be clear
| of everything besides the specific testing materials (calculator
| if your lucky, and maybe a pencil and paper) Your device needs a
| webcam, so that they can not only watch you for the entire 1 hour
| and 30 minutes where you take a test that determines 40% of your
| grade, but also so that you can show them each wall, floor and
| under your desk. And thats just the physical space requirements.
| I had to empty my closet and use my laptop to take this test
| because their is no way I just have an extra room for testing...
|
| The digital requirements were pretty intense as well, access to
| folders they had to right too, chrome settings and a whole bunch
| of wack stuff. I created a dummy account just to take tests.
|
| When you go into the program they have you download it acts like
| a 1 way mirror, you can hear the proctor(if you are lucky to have
| a human proctor) and they can watch you, your screen and hear
| you. I had some tech issues once and I was grateful to have a
| proctor with a sense of humor who was able to help me through it.
| I can't say my privacy is worth a cheaper degree, but I hope that
| this doesn't become normalized, because it is not a pleasant
| experience.
| consp wrote:
| > All in all its not the worst thing in the world, but when I
| first read the requirements for the ProctorU testing
| environment and technical requirements I almost quit school
| completely to look for alternative paths. Some of the crazy
| requirements include: Testing space must have nothing on the
| walls, or floors. You can't wear glasses while taking the exam.
| Your desk must be clear of everything besides the specific
| testing materials (calculator if your lucky, and maybe a pencil
| and paper) Your device needs a webcam, so that they can not
| only watch you for the entire 1 hour and 30 minutes where you
| take a test that determines 40% of your grade, but also so that
| you can show them each wall, floor and under your desk. And
| thats just the physical space requirements. I had to empty my
| closet and use my laptop to take this test because their is no
| way I just have an extra room for testing...
|
| Talk about security theatrics ... I'd just stick the answers I
| want on a piece of paper just under the cupboard in reach of
| your feet or with a tape on the bottom of your desk and get it
| off when scratching your crotch.
|
| > access to folders they had to right too
|
| Why? They are recording all processes and the screen already.
| Again just theatrics. And if you can hide it from that they are
| never going to find it anyway.
| mountainofdeath wrote:
| Yeah. I had to remove everything from the test taking room
| including furniture and a desk lamp.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| >You can't wear glasses while taking the exam
|
| How is that legal? My face would need to be less than 10cm away
| from the screen. So - there goes using the camera to monitor
| where I am looking.
| NtGuy25 wrote:
| I also had an issue with not being able to wear glasses. It was
| my fourth Sans cert and never had the issue before. The proctor
| also was sabotaging me by saying I requested "Technical
| support" 5 times during the exam, each time the timer running
| and some dude distracting me, despite me telling him I have no
| tech issues and to let me continue my exam. They would spend 5
| minutes verifying that I indeed had no issues and then leave...
|
| Very unprofessional, if not illegal due to discrimination and
| even though it was one of Sans's entry level certs, I barely
| passed, versus 90 + on all of their advanced ones without these
| issues.
|
| Their reasoning was "The rules say no facial obstructions, your
| glasses block your face.". They have to hire the dumbest people
| to do these proctors.
|
| I've never had any issues with other proctoring services, and
| things like pearson for Comptia and Microsoft were actually
| enjoyable. With proctoru each proctor seems to find some issue
| and you have to argue with them since it's completely
| unreasonable.
| tristor wrote:
| > You can't wear glasses while taking the exam.
|
| How is this not massively illegal? This is a clear ADA
| violation. I cannot see without glasses. Not like, things are a
| bit blurry, but like I have 20/800 vision that's correctable to
| 20/20 with glasses. Forcing me to take an exam without glasses
| is forcing me to fail an exam for a reason that has nothing to
| do with my academic abilities.
| seanc wrote:
| Yes, that's shocking. Many, many people are simply incapable
| of using a computer without glasses.
| coldcode wrote:
| I can't, why is this even a requirement? Are they worried
| about a Google Glass like thing?
|
| Actually surprised they don't require you to take the test
| naked.
| seanc wrote:
| My guess would be so their algorithm can ID my face. Same
| reason I can't wear glasses in my passport photo.
| cproctor wrote:
| Also no eating or drinking during the exam, just because.
| BossingAround wrote:
| > You can't wear glasses while taking the exam
|
| Don't know what class/proctor you took, but I took several UoP
| tests with ProctorU and never had issues with glasses.
| cwdegidio wrote:
| If it's anything like my experience it's luck of the draw on
| the proctor and their "interpretation" of things. I used the
| same room and setup for every exam with them. Second to last
| one, the proctor said my room was 100% unacceptable. I
| protested and was told that there was no way this very same
| room ever was considered acceptable. So I moved into a new
| space and finally moved on to the test. My last exam with
| them? Used the old room and had no issues.
| bo1024 wrote:
| I hate proctoring software with a passion and I will never ever
| ask my students to use it. But I think it's important to
| understand where the demand for this software is coming from.
|
| In the "old" days, 20 students walked into a room, sat down, and
| took a test in silence with pencil and paper while the instructor
| stood there. Now, 350 students go wherever they want, with
| classmates and many internet-connected devices around them, and
| take a test unmonitored.
|
| Sure, you tell them the exam can be open-note as long as the work
| alone, that's easy. But they can work together, and that's hard
| to detect unless they literally copy.
|
| The #1 problem is Chegg. They can screenshot and post the
| questions to Chegg and get answers back very quickly. And they
| do. To add to this, many schools have a large culture of
| cheating. Like > 10% of students or more will cheat on
| unproctored take-home tests.
|
| That 10-30% basically ruin exams for everyone, but most of all
| the instructor. You can't give people relaxed take-home exams,
| too many will cheat. You have to give a strict time limit. You
| have to put a ton of effort into making questions obscure or
| idiosyncratic, rather than just giving standard problems from
| years past. And remember you have 350 exams to grade, so you
| can't ask very deep questions.
|
| So I can't get that mad at my colleagues who use proctoring
| software. I can't really offer a reasonable alternative.
| antisthenes wrote:
| I was taking a certificate exam earlier this year, and looked
| into taking it via ProctorU or the old-fashioned way, at a
| testing center.
|
| After looking at their system requirements and the draconian
| measures needed to just be able to take my exam (they also
| require you to have a webcam, which I don't have and to real-time
| broadcast your private room, where you will be taking the exam,
| which is a non-starter for me), I realized it would take me
| longer to set up correctly, than it would take me to drive there,
| take the test and be back home.
|
| I heard some people say we live in a high trust society, but that
| trust only seems to be going one way. If I don't trust a
| corporation, I have no agency or power to act on that. But if
| they don't trust me, they impose these insane draconian measures
| without any oversight that preclude me from progressing in life,
| professionally or otherwise. It's fucking insane.
| [deleted]
| dheera wrote:
| > Linux/Unix operating systems
|
| Well, I guess there's no way for me to use it anyway!
|
| > Virtual Machines
|
| It's my policy that closed source software gets installed in a
| virtual machine. Others need to abide by my policy if it's
| running on MY equipment.
| smoldesu wrote:
| All of these testing suites are absolutely intrusions of privacy.
| Proctorio had a portion of their EULA where they essentially
| stated that they will retain _all_ of your information (your test
| results, your webcam footage, your microphone recording, etc.)
| for an undisclosed amount of time, and if the Proctorio brand
| were to ever be purchased by another private entity, that footage
| would become their property by extension. Pretty unbelievable
| stuff, being forced to take a test in an environment like that
| would probably cause me to spiral out into a nervous breakdown
| after a few minutes.
| labster wrote:
| Don't read the EULA; just mindlessly click 'Agree' like
| everybody else. The corporations have already won, so there's
| no need to give yourself anxiety over it.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| It's not like you have a choice. If you refuse the EULA you
| will fail the class.
| phillc73 wrote:
| Relevant discussion from earlier today: The Magnificent
| Bribe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29154178
|
| > Surrender to the power of complex technological systems
| -- allow them to oversee, track, quantify, guide,
| manipulate, grade, nudge, and surveil you -- and the system
| will offer you back an appealing share in its spoils. What
| is good for the growth of the technological system is
| presented as also being good for the individual, and as
| proof of this, here is something new and shiny. Sure, that
| shiny new thing is keeping tabs on you (and feeding all of
| that information back to the larger technological system),
| but it also lets you do things you genuinely could not do
| before.....The danger, however, was that "once one opts for
| the system no further choice remains."
| MengerSponge wrote:
| My favorite moment when my institution was evaluating
| proctoring software was when a faculty member asked: "What if a
| student's naked underaged sibling/child walks into frame during
| the exam? What is your corporate policy on evaluation and
| retention of child pornography?"
|
| Shockingly, smarmy ed-tech hucksters don't have a good answer
| to this one.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| This sort of thing is why we sometimes need a platform regulator
| / "App Store".
|
| Customers can't defend themselves against such intrusions of
| privacy from their school/government.
|
| And employers too. They want you to respond to emails at all
| hours, and ask for way too much control over your device in
| exchange. This is slowly being changed with Android work profile
| and Apple "user enrollments", thankfully.
| chuckee wrote:
| I sure am glad we have Google and Apple looking out for us,
| instead of the traditional unions.
| [deleted]
| capableweb wrote:
| I don't really understand your point. ProctorU has apps on both
| Play Store and App Store, how does Apple and Google save us
| here? Seems they have no problem hosting software for ProctorU.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| What they have on the App Store and Play Store doesn't come
| close to the invasiveness of their desktop apps.
|
| > Seems they have no problem hosting software for ProctorU.
|
| The restrictions are on what their apps can do, not on who
| published it.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Or alternatively basic privacy laws that cover students, etc
| too.
| acdha wrote:
| It needs to be a legal requirement with teeth: these tools
| would never be allowed through the app store approval process
| but that's not a problem as long as they're allowed to simply
| say you have to buy a laptop instead.
|
| One alternate way to prevent this would be liability: if the
| institutions using this had to reimburse all of their users for
| every security hole in their mandatory software or the risk due
| to the security settings they require you to disable, it'd
| complete change the calculation for them.
| Siira wrote:
| App stores are actually an enabler for this sort of cancer;
| Apple is already speaking about reporting people to the police,
| they can obviously add an anti-cheat as well. And there will be
| no way escaping that.
| Debugreality wrote:
| It seems to me they should send each student a device for the
| test with it's own mobile internet so they can use it and turn it
| off / send it back after.
| Siira wrote:
| The student can just use an auxiliary device.
| negroni wrote:
| I had the same issue with ProctorU. Installing Windows on a 64GB
| USB and booting off that anytime I had to take an exam solved the
| problem to my satisfaction.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| I suppose I'm extra paranoid because I have a dedicated (older)
| computer for courses that require some sort of installed
| software, including Zoom. I don't want my unmounted hard drives
| available to the software.
| nisegami wrote:
| I suppose the alternative would be unplugging them, but your
| approach works too.
| sjcoles wrote:
| Still gives access to the EFI firmware. Hard pass.
| IceWreck wrote:
| Most of these proctoring software easily detect Virtualbox,
| VMware, etc.
|
| But QEMU/KVM which is the de-facto hypervisor on Linux is harder
| to detect. Even the others which I mentioned before can be
| hardened to evade detection.
|
| And if you do a little bit of tinkering and intercept traffic,
| you can make it so that all the cheating reports from the "AI"
| never leaves you computer. I've never played with ProctorU but
| have experimented with a couple of other similar software. They
| usually send regular reports every five minutes and some anomaly
| reports (some extra software running on your computer, another
| person in room, face not visible, etc) when something happens.
| You need to intercept and modify traffic to not send these
| anomaly reports. This is easier if its browser based, but you
| need to install systemwide certs if its install-able software,
| and a lot more work if they utilize certificate pinning inside
| binary install-able software. I have never encountered the last
| one though.
| 10000truths wrote:
| Most virtual machine detection boils down to checking the CPUID
| hypervisor bit and vendor string. Luckily, it is possible to
| configure VMWare, VirtualBox and QEMU to spoof those values in
| the guest machine.
| eulers_secret wrote:
| This sent me down the rabbit hole on defeating this... I
| cannot stand this sort of authoritarian horsesh...
|
| Defeating malware's VM detection is very interesting.
|
| Links for others if they're interested:
|
| https://github.com/a0rtega/pafish collects all the best-known
| detection methods into a test suite.
|
| This issue is interesting/has links for sure:
| https://github.com/spender-sandbox/cuckoo-
| modified/issues/45...
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| When I had to deal with Proctor-U, the software refused to run
| under a KVM VM. Detection of anything remotely VM hardware
| related, made it alert and the proctor refuse to continue.
|
| That's after fighting with the software to have it installed in
| the VM to begin with.
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