[HN Gopher] Remote scan of student's room before test violated h...
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Remote scan of student's room before test violated his privacy,
judge rules
Author : hecubus
Score : 187 points
Date : 2022-08-26 06:56 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| madsbuch wrote:
| We are definitely in the period where we are seeing the limits of
| scalability of current technology. Google et al. eliminated
| customer service, schools are educating on a massive scale, etc.
|
| We always have the option of oral onsite exams as has been custom
| for many years, and accept that education does not scale
| excessively.
|
| We can also keep developing surveillance tech and other AI
| solutions to the problem and handle the ethical issues.
|
| In the end it will probably become a balance.
| webmobdev wrote:
| > _Google et al. eliminated customer service_
|
| Google not choosing to provide customer service is not
| something either businesses or consumers should look forward
| to.
| janekm wrote:
| Or we could accept that in this day and age, expecting kids to
| recite factoids broadcast to them by a "teacher" doesn't make
| any kind of sense any more, with google in everyone's pocket.
|
| And testing in the typical style that fails when a student can
| use a textbook or google makes just as little sense.
| necovek wrote:
| In university, I was notoriously bad at "remembering" things
| (iow, I was lazy to learn things by heart). I was pretty good
| at making connections, and I could prove theorems from only
| knowing a couple of definitions and simpler theorems in
| advanced math courses. I generally scored average in tests,
| but I rarely failed (though I occasionally had "original"
| solutions that teachers commended on even though I failed to
| reach maximum scores).
|
| But I was never under the illusion that this constitutes
| working knowledge. I was able to come up with solutions for
| some problems only because I had some basic knowledge
| memorized, which allowed me to effectively manipulate ideas
| and concepts which I did know of. Even then, I used to semi-
| joke how the hardest thing in theoretical math is all the
| memorization required.
|
| If you've ever explored any scientific field deep enough,
| you'll know that it's festered with tricks found by accident
| and roundabout ways to get to a solution that, if you haven't
| seen it before, you have no hope of applying in practice.
|
| Or you might think that consulting a book or two (or
| Internet) will allow you to prove Fermat's theorem while you
| are being tested for 2h.
| janekm wrote:
| Well... I have deeply explored a scientific field (in
| computer science, not math) the way you are talking about.
| By reading other's research papers, implementing what they
| proposed, trying to improve upon it, coming up with novel
| solutions etc etc.
|
| Very little of what I used on a day-to-day basis came from
| rote learning, a lot came from the deeper understanding
| that I got from actually actively engaging with the
| concepts.
|
| I'm not proposing doing away with schooling completely, but
| the model should change (much in the way more progressive
| schools are doing anyway, just a shame that not many
| parents can afford to send their kids there).
| necovek wrote:
| > Very little of what I used on a day-to-day basis came
| from rote learning
|
| The question is not how much non-rote learning is
| required to adequately perform any task, but whether rote
| learning is a necessary component of it.
|
| By engaging with research papers (often requiring
| multiple readings), you "accidentally" also memorize a
| lot of the material (even if not for ever and ever),
| which makes it possible for you to "try to improve it"
| etc.
|
| So all I am saying is that rote learning is a necessary
| component of applying any suitably advanced material.
| Whether that happens organically by engaging with the
| material deeply enough or on purpose by simply rote-
| learning is orthogonal to the need for that knowledge to
| be there.
|
| At issue here in this thread is whether testing for such
| knowledge is signalling anything of value. I still
| believe it is because you'll have that knowledge with
| either approach, even if only one of those approaches
| will gain you more functional knowledge: basically, such
| a test is a proxy for you having engaged in the material.
|
| Which is why I suggest a mixed approach in a sibling
| comment: test for knowledge of "factoids" to simplify
| test development _and_ application of such knowledge
| where you are required to manipulate "learned" concepts
| (so only part of the test is hard to create and keep
| consistently hard/easy).
| lbriner wrote:
| This is a common rebuttal but despite the fact that everyone
| does have google in their pockets, clearly a lot of people
| never use it to learn and only use it for entertainment so
| testing what they know off by heart _does_ still matter imho.
|
| When we locked down in the UK, millions of people were
| furloughed for 6 months+. How many of those people retrained,
| studied etc.? Not as many as we might hope because education
| is firstly about motivation and secondly about information.
| Xylakant wrote:
| The rebuttal is not aimed at ,,everyone can learn", but at
| ,,you can look up things that you required to memorize two
| decades ago." I can look up any important constant to
| hundreds of decimal points, find explanations for almost
| all publicly known algorithms, way more information than I
| could ever memorize. Tests often still pretend that knowing
| this is important. But what's more important is knowing
| what to look for and how to transform the general knowledge
| you can read into a solution. That's a skill and it needs
| training and it's the skill that's important and should be
| tested for.
|
| But those tests are harder to design, harder to grade and
| you cannot reuse them - since someone will just post the
| solution on the internet. And you need to prevent students
| from just sharing the solution during the exam.
| bitwize wrote:
| The irony is, Paul Lockhart could only see the beauty of
| geometry -- and thus write _A Mathematician 's Lament_ --
| because he learned his times tables and other fundamental
| mathematical techniques by heart. Abilities that can be
| acquired _only_ through drilling.
|
| Drills and memorizaton aren't the only thing in education,
| but they are key.
| Sophira wrote:
| The problem with that is that our brains work a lot better
| when it finds patterns - when it recognises things. And for
| that, you need to know these things.
|
| We have access to a lot of knowledge at our fingers, it's
| true. But if the data is all stored there instead of our
| brains, then we won't be able to recognise that fact A (which
| we just read) is similar to fact B (which we read a long time
| but didn't bother to remember because we could just look it
| up anyway). The implications of that depend on the context,
| of course, but in a general sense, I think it'd slow our
| development as a species down.
|
| Exams are generally supposed to test your understanding, not
| your recollection abilities - with some exceptions, of
| course, but in general that's supposed to be what they're
| for.
| madsbuch wrote:
| This is definitely a discussion I will leave to those
| researching teaching.
|
| That said, for many years I shared the view. Some time ago a
| convincing argument for "memorization" was presented, and I
| am slowly changing to the view that it is a reasonable way to
| learn and to become more creative.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I challenge you to do wny intellectual task without knowing
| the basics by heart. For example, try writing a large program
| in APL today - you can easily Google the symbol for any
| function you want.
|
| Memorization, while not sufficient, is an absolutely
| necessary part of learning. No amount of googling can help
| you become skillful at something.
|
| Note that searching for new information or old information
| that you may have forgotten the specifics of is also
| perfectly normal, and an important skill in itself. But even
| there, Google will usually be more of a tool for recall (what
| was the order of those two parameters? What was the name of
| that substance that they use for liver issues?) then
| completely new fact finding.
|
| For example, if I ask you what is the complexity of finding
| an element in a red-black tree, it would be OK to quickly
| Google the speicifc answer. But if you have to Google what
| complexity means, or what a red black tree even is, or if
| you're not sure whether the complexity is better or worse
| than searching a linked list, then it's clear you don't have
| working knowledge of red black trees.
| nulbyte wrote:
| > I challenge you to do wny intellectual task without
| knowing the basics by heart.
|
| So, in other words, you propose a test. Presumably it's
| open-book, since you are testing an ability to apply
| knowledge and not an ability to merely remember it.
|
| This sounds less like a rebuttal and more like a
| validation.
| necovek wrote:
| The GP comment is specifically referring to "reciting
| basic factoids", but they are the "basics" that you need
| to know by heart to manipulate them.
|
| While testing for "reciting" them is certainly
| suboptimal, it's cheaper to prepare a test of the sort
| than a test where you are effectively putting that
| knowledge to use.
|
| A balanced test would do a bit of both (so it does not
| take ages to prepare and grade, yet ensures you know the
| basics and can apply them in some problems).
| pksebben wrote:
| it's situations like these that make me think perhaps we
| _shouldn 't_ be scaling quite so large. That is to say, quite
| so high.
|
| Scaling past a certain size puts you kind of further and
| further outside of what your environment can optimally sustain.
| Think if a fish in a bowl never stopped growing.
|
| Add to this the particular challenges that orgs with
| centralized decision making face when scaling (inertia,
| homogeneity, single-point-of-failure) and it becomes really
| hard to see the current big-fish trend as even remotely
| sustainable.
|
| Perhaps only semi-related, but I like the gore-tex model,
| myself. Scale out and shard.
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303803687_Working_W...
| DocTomoe wrote:
| As a mid-career engineer, I had to renew a professional
| certification during the Covid-19 times. That recertification was
| set up as a proctored online exam.
|
| After 15 minutes of removing random stuff from my desk, under my
| desk, on my walls, including but not limited to disassembling a
| wall-mounted TV set, as instructed by the proctor, I gave up. I
| rented an office at a co-working place that was sterile white.
| Then they tried to accuse me of using camera-modifying software
| to add a background, because "no room is that clean".
|
| If we do keep up this proctored test-at-home system, we need to
| have a workable way to make sure the testing room still works out
| as a living space after the test.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| I don't believe it can be "you can take the test remotely if
| you let us search the room first" (that judge put an end on
| this, so it cannot anymore at least in the US). It is
| impossible to prevent cheating in this context, no matter how
| hard you try. Their paranoia in your case was foolish.
|
| What they could do is letting people take written test in a
| lightly controlled environment (just a webcam with audio, no
| 360/scan before tests), and then complement it with a Q&A part.
| Yes, that's probably more time consuming and more expensive.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _that judge put an end on this, so it cannot anymore at
| least in the US_
|
| That was a public school, so the impact is probably scoped.
| lbriner wrote:
| There is often a lot of criticism of "learning by rote" and often
| the blanket rebuttal is "we all have access to Google" etc.
| however there is a very big difference between someone who knows
| something and someone who has to look it up, which is why I will
| never accept a job candidate who will "learn what they need to
| learn".
|
| How long would an experienced dev honestly take to learn a mid-
| level amount about e.g. Kubernetes or Go or Rust? at least months
| and months of common usage, not something that is comparable with
| someone who already knows stuff and can get cracking on day one
| and already avoid lots of the footguns that exist in our industry
| that you normally only learn the hard way.
|
| Let's stop pretending that the internet is a replacement for
| education, in most cases it is far too unstructured, which is why
| people still take courses and why education and school still
| exists.
| urschrei wrote:
| > an experienced dev honestly take to learn a mid-level amount
| about e.g. Kubernetes or Go or Rust? at least months and months
| of common usage, not something that is comparable with someone
| who already knows stuff and can get cracking on day one
|
| I'm not sure how this is relevant? You seem to be trying to
| make a point about hiring people with specific skills vs
| candidates with proven ability in the field, broadly speaking,
| before committing an apparent non-sequitur in which someone
| (it's not clear who) is "pretending that the internet is a
| replacement for education". Do you often interview candidates
| who learned K8s (or Rust!) as part of their education? I assume
| (given your apparent strong feelings on the issue) that you
| have some familiarity with CS curricula, but perhaps not.
|
| As a related issue, you're certainly sending a strong signal to
| the candidates you're hoping to attract, judging by your
| profile. Whether it's a positive one is left as an exercise for
| the reader.
| trashtester wrote:
| > I will never accept a job candidate who will "learn what they
| need to learn".
|
| That's funny, because I would say the opposite, if they do NOT,
| "learn what they need to learn", I would find it problematic.
|
| I'm not a Java programmer, but it happens regularly that when
| java programmer truly get stuck, I go through their code and
| find the bugs, learning what I need to learn on the fly. Let's
| say they're having problem with network connectivity, I can
| learn how that should be done, reason about fault tolerance and
| teach myself how to look at the traffic in wireshark.
|
| I'm not a infrastructure operations person, but if there are
| strange behavior in the trace, I can sit down with those who
| are, understand the network topology, and understand where and
| why the tcp connection may have issues, teaching myself what I
| need as I go.
|
| Then I bring the network person and app developer together, go
| through the findings, explain to the developer what this looks
| at from the network side and explain to the network infra
| person what that means for the programmer. If there are some
| kinds of network instability that is irreducible, I can show
| the developer design patters that ensure that the code he's
| writing is resilient to that kind of problem.
|
| I'm also not a Data Scientist, but when the Data Scientists are
| having problems, I can sit down and look at their problem,
| learn about the methods they're using, find patterns they did
| not see, prerequisites that were not met, or find errors in
| their math.
|
| The key is to have both deep and broad knowledge of the basics
| of the technical and mathematical fields. THOSE I do mostly
| know pretty well, from half a lifetime of being curious and
| taking the time to really understand things, instead of just
| memorize them. If you know the foundations well enough,
| learning a given application can be learned very quickly.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| This has been eluded to by a few other comments already, but I
| think it's worth stressing: Maybe the problem is that our
| definition of "cheating" doesn't make sense anymore.
|
| Our methods of teaching come from a worldview in which the
| information stored in your head is your only resource. That
| wasn't true in the past where you could consult colleagues, look
| things up in books or call experts - and it's certainly not true
| now that everyone carries the entire knowledge of humankind
| around in their pocket.
|
| So what is the point in artificially creating a test situation
| where the student is isolated from resources she'll have at her
| disposal in real life? How about instead, we create (whatever the
| plural of curriculum is) that teach you how to use these
| resources efficiently and test you on how well you perform using
| all the tools that will be at your disposal in your actual job as
| well?
| wil421 wrote:
| Most if not all of my upper classes in school were open book.
| Even my beginning CS classes for Java was open book. There was
| no way you had enough time to finish the tests if you look up
| every answer. You would have to learn topics on the spot if you
| didn't study, it was near impossible to do with the time
| constraints.
|
| Most of my upper classes were heavily weighted towards group
| projects anyway.
| _steady wrote:
| Curricula
| Alex7845 wrote:
| In online tests, students cheat by asking the answers to other
| people online (eg. chatrooms with other students in the same
| class) or by having someone else do the test.
|
| Teachers don't care about students looking into their
| books/pdf, what they want to prevent is them getting the
| answers from a snapchat group.
| ookdatnog wrote:
| Even if all tests would be open-book, there's still a need to
| make sure that the person who is being tested is actually the
| one taking the test.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > So what is the point in artificially creating a test
| situation where the student is isolated from resources she'll
| have at her disposal in real life?
|
| I can envision many scenarios where a person needs to be quick
| on their feet and does not have time to look things up.
| Drivers, pilots, doctors, etc. Certification provides a lot of
| value to society.
|
| The other point of testing is to separate wheat from chaff. To
| see if someone is disciplined enough to learn the material or
| see a task through. There are issues of going beyond the ideal
| amount of testing here, but not totally useless in my opinion.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| True - and there's certainly a line to be drawn between core
| knowledge and wider knowledge. A programmer, looking up what
| an if-statement is each time won't do well, regardless of the
| resources at their disposal.
|
| But I'd argue that realistic test conditions correct for this
| automatically.
|
| If your test is "write a program that does X within two
| hours" the programmer lacking core knowledge will fail.
|
| If your test is "recite 20 programming paradigms from memory"
| you will have to check for "cheating"
| antipurist wrote:
| Those scenarios can be better tested through simulations.
| E.g. to pass a driving exam you are presented with a road
| situation, and given only a few seconds to respond -- this
| completely eliminates the possibility of looking things up on
| the internet. A similar approach can be used for other
| disciplines.
|
| > separate wheat from chaff
|
| Wheat can demonstrate/use the knowledge, chaff can't. Why
| does it matter whether the knowledge is internal or external,
| assuming results are the same?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Because you do not know if the results are the same before
| making the decision to go with person A or person B. There
| are time costs in figuring out if someone can do something
| or is capable of learning how to do something, so test(s)
| of various kinds are used as a proxy.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Tests are supposed to test your knowledge of a concept. If you
| have to look it up then you don't know it.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Well, it depends.
|
| A big part of the valuable experience comes from having
| memories of similar situations, and thus a shortcut to the
| solution. In IT it can be similar to "indexing", like I may
| remember reading a relevant stackoverflow question and I know
| how to find it again, but I don't remember the exact solution.
|
| But the catch is, to index something you first have to crawl
| through it. In medicine for example, there may not be much
| point in holding every single extreme-rare disease in memory,
| _but_ having memorized them once and mostly forgotten them will
| lead a good doctor to know about it enough so that he /she can
| look it up on the odd chance it gets relevant. It will be only
| possible when he/she memorized it once back then.
|
| My point is, there is a point in memorization (especially that
| it improves memory all-around - one will remember facts much
| easily after extensive learning), what should be better
| distinguished is facts that are to be learnt for life vs those
| that are only needed for a given test. It's like unknowns vs
| unknown unknowns - the latter can be much worse and you don't
| want someone like that as a colleague.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > [...] memories of similar situations [...]
|
| I'm going to claim that memory is only one part, maybe 1/3,
| of what I would like to examine for. Certainly in a job
| interview, but I also like university exams that include the
| parts below.
|
| There's another huge part, *problem solving skills*. Working
| long enough to figure out which pieces of knowledge that you
| have apply to the situation.
|
| There's another part, *making it work*. Software engineers
| deal with failures in practice (debugging) as well as theory
| (don't know how to do it). Sadly but interestingly, sometimes
| this is the point of failure for a student/examinee when they
| possess plenty of knowledge but don't know how to use it.
| tremon wrote:
| _in the past where you could consult colleagues_
|
| Perhaps tests are to make sure that you are a going to be
| colleague worth consulting then? Yes, pure memorization and
| recall of facts is less valuable now than before, but knowing
| how to apply the facts available to you is still a skill worth
| having, and similarly worth testing. Those skills can also be
| assessed using written tests, and the potential for cheating is
| just as on memory tests.
|
| _what is the point in artificially creating a test situation
| where the student is isolated from resources she 'll have at
| her disposal in real life_
|
| Let's take language learning as an example: do you consider a
| foreigner with a dictionary to be just as expressive as a
| native speaker? Perhaps there is value in testing the immediate
| knowledge of the student rather than their lookup skills?
| flanderspost wrote:
| Language learning is actually a good example.
|
| Words are rarely restricted to their denotative (dictionary)
| meanings. There are often abstract, connotative meanings
| attached to them by speakers. For example, consider the
| following list of words.
|
| Hello. Hi. Hey.
|
| These words all have the same basic denotative meaning.
| They're all a greeting. Yet, there is a subtle connotation of
| formality which is rarely described in a dictionary.
|
| These types of connotation are not often understood by
| beginning language learners. It's something they acquire with
| time and experience in using the language. While a teacher or
| search could share about the formalities, the language
| learner is still going to require time in applying those
| words in different contexts to fully understand these
| subtleties.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| > Let's take language learning as an example: do you consider
| a foreigner with a dictionary to be just as expressive as a
| native speaker? Perhaps there is value in testing the
| immediate knowledge of the student rather than their lookup
| skills?
|
| You may be well aware of this, but you've essentially
| converged on the classical Chinese Room thought experiment
| [0]. It's usually applied to the philosophical question as to
| what does and does not constitute intelligence in the context
| of AI, but it's interesting how it is also applicable to what
| does and does not constitute knowledge in the context of
| learning.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
| wolframhempel wrote:
| I want to test their ability to perform a task - rather than
| how well they memorized things. Which is not to say that
| memorization is not important, but it's just one piece of the
| Puzzle. So when it comes to language tests, rather than
| having the candidate fill in prepositions into blanks, let's
| have an actual conversation with them in which they apply
| their combined skills.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| I actually adhere to this philosophy when hiring candidates
| as well. Rather than having them explain how to reverse
| binary trees on a whiteboard, I have them sit down and do a
| mini version of the actual task they will have to do in
| their job later. And, unsurprisingly, knowing how well they
| do the actual task is a much better indicator of how well
| they perform at doing the actual task later.
| nano9 wrote:
| I understand what the halting problem implies, what
| complexity is, what Turing machine means and why they are
| an abstraction for algorithms, and the basic common memes
| of programming such as using a stack and a heap, IEEE 754
| floating point numbers, 2s complement binary numbering,
| and so on and so forth.
|
| Yet I don't know a lick of Go. If I were to open up a
| Hello World tutorial for Go during the interview, would I
| honestly still have a shot?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I think people who are really into "do the job for an
| hour" interviews don't understand this. Some skills
| (particularly programming languages) are just really easy
| to learn. I learned go in a week for a consulting job. If
| I had to do an interview in go, I would not have gotten
| the job.
| philipov wrote:
| I think this is a good philosophy for hiring employees,
| but when it comes to education, we wish to go beyond
| training employees, and what your capabilities are is not
| the only thing that matters. We should test practical
| capabilities, but we should test more abstract skills
| like how many facts you've ingested as well.
|
| When I tell people a story about the history of the
| french revolution or something, I don't have the
| opportunity to go research it beforehand. I've already
| done that research, and I've already thought about those
| events for months or years, which gave me the opportunity
| to synthesize an insight or opinion I wish to share.
|
| You don't get that if you don't know things in your head.
| thayne wrote:
| As a physics student in college, almost all of my (physics)
| exams were open book to some degree. Some were even take home
| tests where I had a few days to complete it, and was allowed to
| use software like Mathematica and Matlab.
|
| I definitely think that is a better way to test.
| tarakat wrote:
| Being able to look things up, even in seconds, is _not_
| equivalent to knowing them. When someone suggests "let's do
| X", you cannot reply with "but that would cause Y", if Y is
| buried in some pdf file on your computer, or one Bing search
| away - how do you know you should search for Y, when there are
| infinite other things you could search for.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Right but you shouldn't be tested on things that can just be
| "looked up". You should be tested on your ability to apply
| what you know, and teachers should be taking the time to
| write globally unique problems for every single test (gasp)
| wruza wrote:
| _When someone suggests "let's do X", you cannot reply with
| "but that would cause Y"_
|
| This is reasonable. E.g. sure a person can google how to
| build a house, but also sure that at planning phase they'll
| mess and conflict with a half of good rules of thumb. Or
| forget them right after reading, because there is no habit
| nor knowledge in their head, and all that info is pretty
| transient. Pro is not the one who has read an article, but
| the one who can tell a couple of their own notes about it.
|
| Otoh, gp is also correct that tests should check how you are
| doing in a real life situation. So maybe use both ways of
| testing?
| rntksi wrote:
| The way I used to write/set-up tests when I was teaching is
| that you could use a limited set of online resources to
| answer, but if you have to search every question you won't
| have enough time to do it. So it also tested your ability to
| quickly locate the information you need should you not know
| it right away.
| forgotusername6 wrote:
| Back at university one of the first things we were told about
| being an a good engineer was: "You don't need to know
| everything, but you do need to know where to look it up".
|
| It's a statement that I agree with. There is just too much
| knowledge to know it all. These days there is a very real
| skill in knowing how to search i.e. a second order version of
| the above statement "you need to know where to find out how
| to look this up".
| nolroz wrote:
| Yep, my dad used to sum this up as "All Engineering school
| does is teach you where to shit." I guess I may have gone
| with "where to eat" but he had a flair for the dramatic.
| tester756 wrote:
| But still, there's "minimal required knowledge".
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Like how to use google
| tester756 wrote:
| Nope.
|
| I wouldn't want to go to doc that has to Google basic
| stuff.
| epgui wrote:
| Underestimating the amount of knowledge required or of
| importance to know (yes, even when google exists) is just
| another form of the infamous Dunning-Kruger.
| arcbyte wrote:
| There's a HUGE difference between looking something up to
| reactivate sleepy memories and learning something new for
| the first time.
|
| There are some really technical things ive done in the pasy
| that I couldn't do without a reference right now, but once
| I've got the reference I don't need to be reminded about
| low level details or edge cases or gotchas - it's all still
| there in my head I just need to see the road map and it
| will all come back to me.
| jononomo wrote:
| It is a lot faster to have things stored in your head than to
| look them up. You can just put a time limit on the test and
| tell people that they can either spend a year before the test
| starts learning the material and getting it into their heads,
| of they can try to learn biochemistry from scratch using
| Google after the 40-minute timer for the test starts.
| willio58 wrote:
| The thing is, if you search for something enough you will end
| up learning it. It's a natural way to learn things.
|
| This is how people become software engineers these days. They
| _constantly_ look stuff up, watch videos, and learn by doing
| that. Yes, you can still go to college and take tests that
| require you to "know" things, but honestly the vast majority
| of what I "knew" in college turned out to be short-term
| knowledge stored for tests.
|
| By searching and learning, you
| godshatter wrote:
| A person can certainly become a software engineer without a
| college education, but I worry that constantly learning
| things just in time for using them will give them
| disconnected snippets of knowledge in a lot of areas rather
| than a good concept of how the underlying system functions.
| I guess it depends on if they are studying computer
| architecture, complexity theory, and whatnot in those
| videos or if they are just copying snippets of code from
| SO.
|
| I learned by doing, initially, because I started learning
| programming with minimal resources before going to college
| and had to unlearn or restructure a lot of the knowledge I
| had gained up to that point once I did. I would probably
| have gotten there in the end, but it would have taken me a
| lot longer. The world was different then, though. Instead
| of easy access to info before going to college I was lucky
| to find a book somewhere that someone threw out that talked
| about things in a peripheral way that I needed to know, or
| ran into someone I could discuss things with that were as
| info-deprived as I was.
|
| That's where my skepticism of this approach comes from, I
| guess. But I didn't live in a world where knowledge was at
| my fingertips from a very early age, so who knows?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| That's one of the main points of The Shallows by Nicholas
| Carr and I think that I agree.
|
| Long term subconscious memory is where a lot of the
| connections happen. If your long term memory only knows where
| to find things without knowing them then that ability is
| stunted.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| This could be done with tests, by having open book tests.
|
| The point of a test is to check if you are capable on your own,
| and not piggybacking on someone elses intellect or hard work.
|
| It is true, that in the real world, the resources available to
| use are infinitely larger than a classroom or a teaching
| setting. But your idea springs from lack of understanding about
| the true purpose of education, i.e, to groom children to think.
|
| Alas, modern education has become a cesspool of rote learning,
| atleast in my country, India.
| jrpt wrote:
| That sounds nice in theory, but how would you write a test for,
| say, basic physics, when every type of question can be Googled?
| Even if you make brand new questions, it's still just generally
| available categories of problems, like inclined planes and
| stuff. It's even worse with algebra, because there's software
| that can both solve it for you and show the steps (which you
| can then copy onto a test).
|
| Unfortunately, in order to progress to more advanced topics,
| you need to understand the basics yourself. It's not sufficient
| to just be able to research it online. This is true in every
| field I can think of. That's why you can't just give people
| online access for every kind of test.
| Cerium wrote:
| I had a basic physics teacher that allowed notes and gave us
| a chest sheet of his own which literally listed equations,
| described variables and explained the situation you might
| want the equation. People still failed. In a basic
| thermodynamics class the teacher said it was open everything
| but the person next to you: laptops, internet, the book etc.
| For fun I took the test without either book or laptop and did
| just fine. Others found it hard. In both cases the problems
| required thinking about the situation posed and which basic
| principles should be used to evaluate the problem.
|
| In my opinion, cheating from internet access or outside
| resources is not the problem, cheating by gogling exact
| problems is.
| comfypotato wrote:
| I believe the issue has more to do with the accreditation of
| learning institutions. "Untimed power tests" are the gold
| standard for testing, and in the modern world this includes own
| internet access. Everyone acknowledges that these are better at
| assessing knowledge, critical thinking, etc.. The problem is
| that these tests are very difficult to make and logistical
| nightmares concerning cheating. A timed, closely proctored,
| closed book/internet exam is much easy to create and
| administer, and it halfway (better than nothing) assesses
| whether or not the student has learned the material.
| flanderspost wrote:
| This works for concrete knowledge (declarative, procedural)
| where simply knowing a set of facts or a pre-existing process
| is sufficient to perform the job. But when you most into more
| abstract, creative work, this idea falls apart quickly.
|
| You can easily find an answer to "how do I enable file sharing
| on Windows." You cannot easily find an answer to "how do I
| design a website for an engineering firm which wants to
| increase it's inbound leads by 25%."
|
| The former is a simple search away. The latter requires the
| integration of numerous abstract concepts which the shallows of
| a search engine cannot return.
|
| Further, such an approach also limits our ability to create new
| knowledge.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Can someone please describe this "scan" technology? The article
| didn't.
|
| I'm picturing a swarm of small hovering drones sweeping their
| blue laser beams over your bedroom office, before one of them
| finishes with an accusative scan of your retina.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| It's probably just a faculty asking the student to make a 360
| with the webcam, according to what they did in my country.
|
| That procedure is full of holes, though. There are so many ways
| to cheat when you don't take a test on-site, that it's not even
| funny. Those tests have to be performed with a computer on to
| begin with. I've heard that in some cases, there was testing
| software that would scan the computer too, similar to games'
| anti-cheat devices.
|
| Schools first implemented that procedure in a hurry then stuck
| to it, and they thought they could violate privacy "a little"
| because states and countries themselves adopted exceptional
| laws that limited human rights. That felt wrong to me when it
| happened, and I am glad that at least a judge in the US
| confirmed it was wrong.
| technion wrote:
| Before the test starts, you are directed to move the camera
| around the room, behind your chair and things like that. The
| Pearson proctor made me remove paintings from the wall to prove
| there was nothing behind them
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| It's hard to believe that a suitably motivated college
| student couldn't figure out a way of getting around that kind
| of scanning - what about papers in books, info on phone
| screen, even someone holding up posters at the window.
| ghusto wrote:
| First thing I thought of was taping the "cheats" the the
| back of laptop screen ;P
| jacquesm wrote:
| Hehe, the hacker mentality at work :)
|
| 'I spy with my little eye and it is 'white'' -> the white
| of your eyeballs.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I think the value here is testing _fluency_.
|
| If a student has easy to hand lookups and cheat sheets, then
| unsupervised they can appear more fluent. But someone sitting
| watching would obviously noticed and judge them more harshly than
| someone reading a completed paper.
|
| The obverse is something often complained about on HN - being
| forced to perform at interviews that do not measure fluency but
| are tests or other shortcuts to actually sitting with and judging
| someone
| aaron695 wrote:
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The problem at the core is _not_ spyware and "room checks", they
| are just a symptom - the question rather is how exams are
| designed and why schools and universities go to such drastic
| lengths to prevent cheating.
|
| Most tests are essentially nothing more than tests for the
| ability of rote memorization - they don't (really) check if the
| students actually understood the material and are able to apply
| it to new situations ("transfer of learning"), especially because
| it is way more difficult to create such tests and to fairly grade
| them. However, rote memorization tests are extremely easy to
| cheat on, which requires intrusive countermeasures.
|
| In the end, this is a "common thread" across most of modern
| academia - the focus has long since shifted from taking in the
| most gifted of society for actual academic research to providing
| a fresh herd of fungible graduates for large corporations to prey
| upon each year, and it shows everywhere from how admissions are
| handled over the sad and sorry state of frontal teaching to, as
| seen, dehumanizing exams.
|
| ETA: I've ranted about the causes in the past here, with the
| reply to my post being really worth the read IMO:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32383965
| Barrin92 wrote:
| are any of these criticims backed by evidence? Rote
| memorization is one of the, if not the most important backbone
| of excellence in any discipline. Pianists play scales, chess
| players memorize and repeat, athletes do the same, virtually
| any excellent programmer I've met shares one trait, they
| program _a lot_.
|
| frontal teaching to large audiences isn't dehumanizing, it's
| simply effective reflected empirically by the large amounts of
| excellent graduates coming out of countries that focus heavily
| on that style of teaching.
|
| I've never met a world class mathematician coming from a hippie
| waldorf school, I've met plenty coming out of the Soviet
| education system.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Pianists play scales, chess players memorize and repeat,
| athletes do the same, virtually any excellent programmer I've
| met shares one trait, they program a lot.
|
| They practice _applying the knowledge_.
|
| > frontal teaching to large audiences isn't dehumanizing,
| it's simply effective reflected empirically by the large
| amounts of excellent graduates coming out of countries that
| focus heavily on that style of teaching.
|
| LOL have you ever had the fortune of dealing with these
| "excellent graduates" in offshoring projects? As soon as you
| go one tiny step beyond what they were taught in "university"
| shit gets nasty. Applying abstract knowledge to a specific
| use case is what is important in IT, and those who never had
| to actually understand the topic fail miserably.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Almost all knowledge is tacit, there's no clear line
| between applying and learning, it's a feedback loop. In
| fact obsession with abstract knowledge has always been
| weird to me. How far does reading about swimming get you?
|
| The offshoring thing is literally just about that. The
| nastiness and cultural mismatch of that industry. The huge
| Chinese and Indian domestic tech industries show that they
| can build successful things, just not necessarily for
| foreign markets.
| davisoneee wrote:
| Rote memorisation is essential. Not _all_ there is to
| achievement, but as you say the other parts are difficult to
| test.
|
| Without memorisation ("Just google", as many comments seem to
| suggest), you are severely limited in what you can come up
| with, and how you can contribute.
|
| If you don't have foundational knowledge (memory): 1) you don't
| know what to google; 2) within a discussion concepts will go
| over your head so you can't contribute; 3) you don't have the
| components to play around with and mix and match in your head
| to generate new ideas.
|
| If your work is dreadfully formulaic, sure, you can probably
| get by with limited foundational knowledge and just searching.
| If your work in any way is knowledge work, then you need
| _knowledge_, not just access to a vast reference.
| efnx wrote:
| I think I agree and I can't help but think that we (as a
| society) have our priorities backwards.
|
| Who do these tests protect? Do they bolster the student? If so,
| why would they want to cheat? Is it because the information
| isn't relevant to their future and only the letter grade is? If
| a student cheats and then never encounters the natural
| consequences (like getting the same subject matter wrong on the
| job) - what was the point of the test?
|
| The pessimist in me thinks that we're protecting industries. I
| would guess that an industry wants a plethora of candidates
| that meet a specific bar to choose from, and the information
| the students must memorize is inconsequential for the most
| part.
| chowells wrote:
| The point of tests in higher education is for the student to
| get an assessment of where they are. The whole design kind of
| assumes that students want to learn, not just get a piece of
| paper.
|
| But that's the entirety of the higher education experience.
| It's all about presenting opportunities to learn and grow.
| People who treat it as mere credentialism are missing about
| 99% of the point. And yes, that includes a lot of faculty,
| students, and people pressuring students (to go either
| direction, really.)
|
| I don't see a problem with tests. I see a problem with people
| treating degrees as some sort of magic totem.
| squarefoot wrote:
| > Most tests are essentially nothing more than tests for the
| ability of rote memorization
|
| This a hundred times. If I had to hire someone for a job, I
| would rather hire someone who knows how to search online the
| answer to a problem than the one who repeats the book word for
| word without knowing what he/she is talking about.
|
| Exams are crap like that because better exams would require the
| use of one professor asking non trivial questions for each
| student, which costs money.
| davisoneee wrote:
| How do the candidates know _what_ to search? That's
| memorisation.
|
| How do you get creativity, how are candidates better able to
| combine idea together? By forming each idea into a memory
| 'chunk' that can be handled as a single concept, and then
| working to combine these chunks.
|
| If you hire people who can search google, then you get people
| who can search what is easily searchable, and who can create
| what has been previously posted online. If they somehow have
| 'internal' knowledge and capability, that's memory.
| squarefoot wrote:
| I used the wrong terms to describe skills like creativity
| and problem solving beside pure superficial knowledge. Of
| course I wouldn't hire anyone who can _only_ search Google.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > If I had to hire someone for a job, I would rather hire
| someone who knows how to search online the answer to a
| problem than the one who repeats the book word for word
| without knowing what he/she is talking about.
|
| Do you have hiring authority or have you ever had it?
| worldshit wrote:
| this has been my experience with college too... just a waste of
| time to satisfy the bureaucrats. They think that winning a
| silly exam proves anything but your willingness to waste your
| time memorizing answers.
| Alex7845 wrote:
| > The problem at the core is not spyware and "room checks",
| they are just a symptom - the question rather is how exams are
| designed and why schools and universities go to such drastic
| lengths to prevent cheating.
|
| You got the premise wrong. The main way that students cheat in
| online test is by communicating with other students/tutors and
| by having other people take the tests for them.
|
| Doesn't matter how perfect your exam is if the student has a
| friend coaching them during the exam and telling them all the
| answers.
|
| And it is far more common than you think. I have been tutoring
| for a for 5 years and there was a massive amount of students
| who tried to hire me to do online exams for them during the 2
| years of covid. I probably would have done it if I was still a
| student full of debt at that time.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| This sort of problem is trivially solvable by using an exam hall.
|
| Remote learning is bollocks Matrix pod shit. Just don't.
| fcatalan wrote:
| I had to hastily evaluate a bunch of online proctoring systems
| during lockdown. They went from dismal(1) to borderline
| scammy(2). I advised against using any, and got a lot of pushback
| from the department heads. Someone in the regional government
| must have seen the same as me, and after a couple weeks the
| regional education authorities had banned the damn things.
|
| (1) one of them systematically failed to do face recognition on
| females with particular haircut styles
|
| (2) Another claimed to be "AI powered" when it was pretty obvious
| after a couple meetings that they were just handing out the
| proctoring to real people quickly poring after the fact over a
| slideshow of the whole thing.
| Claude_Shannon wrote:
| It is terrible, but what is the alternative to prevent cheating?
| I had quite a few on-line exams by now and I've seen very
| creative attempts at cheating so far.
| p1necone wrote:
| Design better tests. If you can "cheat" on a test by just
| googling things/looking at notes then the test isn't testing
| anything but rote memorization anyway.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| A math professor (granted easier with math) at university
| always said, you can bring anything you want to the exam, if
| you can answer it with help he made a mistake designing the
| test.
|
| I see the same when I interview people online and I hear them
| frantically click their keyboard - but no help, I know before
| what Google returns.
| p1necone wrote:
| Trying to evaluate a software engineer without letting them
| use google strikes me as being similar to trying to
| evaluate a construction worker by making them dig holes
| with their bare hands.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| I'm not asking things that can be solved by Google [1],
| because they can be solved by Google, and I only gain the
| knowledge "Candidate can Google", I see this as given. It
| doesn't mean that not a lot of work at the job involves
| googling Stackoverflow - I do it myself all the time.
|
| [1] I don't ask API knowledge, if someone doesn't know
| some API I tell them just to invent the call they need.
| tpetry wrote:
| Add 1-2 questions which can be googled. I have seen
| enough engineers not earning the ,,can efficiently
| google" badge.
| saalweachter wrote:
| I got dinged on that test once. "Why didn't you just
| Google this question?" they asked, "Because I was taking
| a test," I said.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Best technical interview I ever had, they sat me down in
| front of an internet-connected laptop, gave me some
| problems on a piece of paper, and said "we'll be back in
| an hour, do your best". Just left me alone with Google et
| al.
|
| (Then I spent an hour-ish talking to swardley about 3D
| printing and its future impact on IP law, etc. -- this
| was back in early 2007, before it was generally
| available. That was the weirdest non-technical interview
| I've had.)
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Did any student show up with a 5G tablet and an earpiece?
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| No but there were some were I suspected someone was
| listening in and answering questions.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Ok how do you design a test that's so good I can't just pay
| someone else to take it for me?
| [deleted]
| rtev wrote:
| While preparing for a certification, I had someone DM me on
| the prep forums and offer to ship me an in-ear monitor and
| physical HDMI mole to coach me in real-time. Cheaters are
| nuts, there are few test formats that would survive an attack
| like that.
| gommm wrote:
| Exactly, I strongly believe that any test at a secondary
| education level should be open book. We should be testing for
| reasoning and capacity to apply knowledge not rote-learning.
|
| It's also why I believe that in most cases multiple choice
| questions have no place in any well designed tests because
| it's extremely hard to create multiple choice questions that
| actually test the application of knowledge versus the
| regurgitation of rote learning.
|
| When I was in university (grande ecole) in France, luckily
| all tests followed that format, they were open book, very few
| questions that needed deep detailed answers and were about
| interesting problems. Even finding tests from previous years
| and doing them was actually fun (tests were never reused).
|
| I did an exchange in the US at RIT and most tests had very
| boring rote learning questions. For example in a computer
| graphics class: Which company were voting members of the
| OpenGL Architecture Review Board? Which year was the first
| OpenGl specification released?. I still remember those
| questions because I was shocked by how utterly stupid it was
| to have those on a test but, in general, 25 to 50% of the
| points of any tests was on those completely irrelevant,
| useless questions that anyone can google for.
|
| Cheating is a problem for universities that never had proper
| testing standards. But that's a symptom of incompetence on
| the part of professors and of universities not making the
| choice to ensure that tests have to be well designed.
| p1necone wrote:
| I've seen some very hairy multi choice questions in
| Math/Computer science (think testing order of operations,
| which function gets called due to complicated polymorphism
| etc). I think it depends on the subject.
|
| Although I also encountered a few where multiple answers
| were technically correct. Then you have to guess at which
| answer the professor thinks is "more correct" which kinda
| sucks.
| gommm wrote:
| Yeah, another decent alternative I've seen was a test
| with a few multiple choice questions where each question
| needed quite a bit of reasoning and where you had to give
| the reasoning to get the points. The multiple choice
| question was a way for the teacher to quickly know if you
| had the correct answer and for the student to verify
| their answer against possible answers and see if they
| might have made a mistake but the teacher would still
| need to review the half a page of reasoning for each
| question.
|
| It can be done decently but it's much easier to write and
| much more common to see bad multiple choice questions.
| connicpu wrote:
| In one of my Math/Computer classes in college, part of the
| class was that along the way you were supposed to be
| implementing the mathematical concepts in code along the
| way, so that you would have your code available to run on
| the test questions when it reached the day of the test!
| Whether you programmed on a TI-89 calculator or your laptop
| was up to the student, but the tests were open note and
| open device and it felt very freeing. The actual methods of
| input and exact algorithms were of course carefully picked
| so that there would be no easy off the shelf code solution,
| but once you understood it the problems could be trivially
| implemented in any programming language with a BigInt type
| Alex7845 wrote:
| Students typically don't cheat in online tests by looking at
| their notes. What they do is ask other students or have
| someone else do the exam for them.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| It's not just googling . It's communicating with others. In a
| no checks environment you can have an a la carte team of paid
| consultants and helpfull friends solving the test with you.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Bingo! [Surprised I had to scroll so far to find this.] You
| can discuss the merits of rote learning and test design all
| day, but cheating exists within any pedagogic paradigm.
| Back in my day, most cheating was between students doing
| each other favors or taking a small commission.
|
| The way some teachers solved this was a 1:1 oral
| complementary exam, where students were asked to explain a
| random set of their solutions. This is drastically more
| difficult to cheat in real time, and you will almost
| certainly look like an idiot if you come unprepared. It's a
| stupidly simple solution, disincentivizing cheating through
| shame. Doesn't need any proctoring rootkits and rectal
| cameras, a simple identity check is enough.
| janekm wrote:
| and... where's the problem? That's exactly the kind of
| group problem-solving that is actually required in the real
| world.
| detaro wrote:
| that if I hire someone for skills with X, I dont want
| their skill to be "I can ask people with skills with X
| what to write".
| blitzar wrote:
| apparently 'im really good at google search' wasnt the
| answer someone was looking for in an interview
| tpetry wrote:
| One of the bests I had written in university allowed you to
| bring every non-digital material you want to have. All
| slides? The books? The former exercises? No problem! The test
| was designed to be built on 2 primitives:
|
| 1. If you need to lookup stuff in your waste of material you
| won't be able to finish everything. The time constraint was
| very hard. 2. It was not just repeating former things, you
| had to have understood them. Everything was a transfer
| knowledge exercise.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > If you need to lookup stuff in your waste of material you
| won't be able to finish everything. The time constraint was
| very hard.
|
| Reminds me of my school days. Tests with hundreds of
| questions and less than a minute to solve each question.
| They were essentially testing the student's time management
| skills as well as their physical and mental fortitude in
| addition to their knowledge. Extremely exhausting and
| anxiety inducing.
| matwood wrote:
| I hated take home tests in undergrad and grad school
| because they were the hardest tests I took. Memorization
| was _easy_ lol.
| NotOscarWilde wrote:
| > If you need to lookup stuff in your waste of material you
| won't be able to finish everything. The time constraint was
| very hard.
|
| Did you enjoy this exam? I am asking as I had a very
| similar experience in my undergrad:
|
| Our university allowed some basic courses to be studied at
| different departments, if they were equivalent. This means
| that there was a CS Major Algebra 1, but also Math Major
| Algebra 1, and you can take either.
|
| I took the Math Major Algebra 1, being a CS student, and I
| have passed everything up to the final exam, where I
| learned that the exam is literally what you describe. All
| the proofs and arguments needed follow from basic
| principles (as things in Algebra 1 tend to do), but there
| is a lot of questions and the time limit is strict.
|
| Thus, you have no time to actually do any deliberate
| thinking, you have to memorize and understand the basics so
| well that you can develop the arguments essentially in real
| time.
|
| (And it was not an open book exam, even, but as you
| describe, it would not have helped you too much.)
|
| I _hated_ that exam. I never took it out of principle,
| instead just quitting the course and doing it with a great
| grade a year later, in CS. I still dislike the idea of
| forcing knowledge acquisition through strict time limits.
| What if somebody is smart but has a slow start due to
| stress? Ugh.
| jonfw wrote:
| "Design better tests" is not useful feedback. It's just
| kicking the can down the road and blaming professors
| pabs3 wrote:
| Another question is; what is the alternative to tests, grades
| and credentials?
| Teever wrote:
| Take home tests are a thing.
|
| I've never had one, but from what I've heard they're the kind
| of thing that if done properly ends up being a better way to
| test people, but they're harder for instructors to implement.
| Claude_Shannon wrote:
| I guess so. Most of the tests I;ve taken at college were the
| same tasks as in previous years, just with changed numbers.
| ... or not. That also happened.
| blitzar wrote:
| Exam questions have to be approved, re-use the old one and
| it sails through. Write a new one from scratch ... takes
| time.
|
| Typically you just use the questions from ~5 years ago and
| rotate them through.
| smabie wrote:
| You've been able to take online classes for decades, why is
| this suddenly a problem?
|
| Moreover, if people want to cheat they can find some way to
| cheat regardless of any countermeasures you deploy.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| >which [why?] is this suddenly a problem?
|
| Because most of teachers didn't teach online class before.
| They are not used to design exams that would not be way too
| easy it suddenly becomes open book.
|
| I won't even say they're "lazy", coming up good take-home
| exams is super hard, especially when you spend your entire
| career not need to do that.
|
| > if people want to cheat they can find some way to cheat
| regardless of any countermeasures you deploy.
|
| I agree if it's online exam, it's kinda doomed either way.
| But it's more to act as a deterrent than total solution. And
| it does work to some "less-adventurous" students.
|
| Note: above is just directly replying to your questions. I
| don't support scanning student's room.
| titoCA321 wrote:
| Come on now, some of the college instructors weren't even
| teaching the offline classes. 200 students in a lecture
| hall and some random TA grading and assigning the tests. Do
| you honesty believe the TA knows each and ever student and
| that someone else didn't show up on exam day?!
| [deleted]
| PeterStuer wrote:
| At every university that l took exams photo id was
| required to sit the exam.
| swores wrote:
| I'd guess that people who are willing and able to afford
| hiring someone to cheat for them in an exam, can probably
| also order a fake ID with their name and the photo of
| their exam-taker.
|
| Though maybe an extra step of storing a copy of the ID
| with the exam entry and having a professor who knows them
| verify that it matches the real student would catch most
| of that...
| cguess wrote:
| Where? In the US I've never had to do so.
| geek_at wrote:
| > if people want to cheat they can find some way to cheat
| regardless of any countermeasures you deploy
|
| I was a Academic highschool teacher for 8 years and I agree
| with your statement but also don't think that we should make
| it too easy for them. At minimum a screen recorder so the
| students know even if they were not caught during the exam,
| they could later be caught
|
| Bonus anecdote When the first bluetooth phones hit the market
| we had students use their (pseudo) smart phones (that looked
| like expensive calculators with greyscale displays back then)
| to send each other the solutions during the physics exam. No
| teacher at the time had this as a threat model
| trashtester wrote:
| At some point, when a student find a truly novel way to
| gain an advantage, that can be seen as a kind of
| creativity, and may point to a strong career (hopefully
| within the law).
|
| However, if lots of students cheat in the same way semester
| after semester, the school has a credibility problem.
| yoro46 wrote:
| Take home tests that are difficult enough for the questions to
| not be easily answered on Stack Exchange or paid sites. This is
| fairly easy to do in upper-division undergraduate courses as
| well as graduate courses. Not so easy for lower-division
| courses. The closest I've seen for a lower-division class was a
| professor who made as much of the exam content based off
| examples from lecture material, but I always saw that as a way
| to punish students who ditched lectures.
| titoCA321 wrote:
| Students and teachers have been cheating before pencil and
| paper. Do you ever wonder why some college students have near-
| perfect SAT scores yet can barely rub two English words
| together?
| systemvoltage wrote:
| No, it is not acceptable that we have to give up privacy for
| some stupid exam cheating problem. There are going to be lots
| of problems and inconveniences like this. We have a legacy of
| 250 years of constitutional protection of privacy.
|
| Solve the fucking problem without violating privacy. If it
| doesn't get solved, fine, let it be. Accept those consequences
| and live with it.
| sh4rks wrote:
| The best way to prevent cheating in an online test is to set a
| strict time limit. That way its harder for them to look up the
| answers on Google etc. The problem then is that a student may
| experience technical difficulties out of their control. For
| cases like that, students should be able to appeal for extra
| time.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| They already do this with some tests, both online and in
| person. If it isn't generous enough, it generally harms folks
| that are being careful with answers while cheaters can cheat.
| The cheaters just have to be prepared.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| But this introduces a stronger bias for being fast regardless
| of wether you cheat or not. That is not always what you want.
| jamesrr39 wrote:
| This might work for things you have to remember off the top
| of your head, where you have e.g. 10 seconds to write answer,
| but it doesn't really work when you have longer questions
| requiring some kind of working which take more than a minute
| to work out.
|
| I also think that the "extra time for technical difficulties"
| is going to be very hard to prove or disprove and would lead
| to very arbitrary decisions.
| andrewjl wrote:
| What is the value of standardized tests in todays society? They
| measure only one thing: how well one can perform on an arbitrary
| test. They have no meaningful predictive value. Verdicts like
| this one make them a thing of the past? Good riddance.
| hecubus wrote:
| https://archive.ph/HYkGv
| hulitu wrote:
| > Remote scan of student's room before test violated his privacy,
| judge rules
|
| So what ? The only punishment is a slap on the wrist. "If we have
| to, we will try to comply"
| dosman33 wrote:
| Tape your notes to the lid of the laptop and it's out of sight
| from even the most complete "scan" of a room. If people can cheat
| during an in person exam it's not possible to enforce cheating
| restrictions off-site, it's a completely useless loss of privacy
| to enforce an unenforceable idea.
|
| I'm not pro-cheating, but this is just another example of tech
| trying to show that it can solve any social problem through even
| more technology and we already know this doesn't work. You must
| face the social issues head on, you can't just throw money at
| them in the form of more technology.
| happyopossum wrote:
| I've done online proctored tests where the selfie cam on your
| phone was held up to the laptop cam to check for this exact
| thing.
| josh_fyi wrote:
| This will mean more tests in proctored test centers like Pearson
| VUE.
|
| Many students and professionals taking tests cheat casually and
| without embarrassment: It is seen as simply an efficient way to
| maximize grades.
| paskozdilar wrote:
| Hopefully this will successfully separate _learning_ from
| _certification_ , which will prevent learners from being
| punished because of cheaters.
| titoCA321 wrote:
| Yes, lots of testing at Pearson VUE. Many State Licensing
| certificates and IT certification testing is conducted at
| Pearson Vue. Military and government agencies also do applicant
| testing at Pearson VUE. Candidates seeking to apply to Secret
| Service show up for Pearson VUE testing center, along with
| military recruits and folks needing to update Cisco
| certificates and college students that need to take a test here
| or there.
| blitzar wrote:
| > Pearson VUE
|
| I was so happy when the pandemic hit and the second part of a
| qualification I was doing could be remotely proctered -
| everyone from professionals to crack addicts were taking
| tests of some sort at the same time at the test centre.
|
| My concentration broke when the crack addict picked up the
| monitor and smashed it on the ground and stormed out, im not
| sure it they were doing a Cisco qualification or a driving
| test, but I dont think it was going well.
| wikfwikf wrote:
| How did you know the person was addicted to crack?
| klabb3 wrote:
| Guess who sold him the crack.
| bittercynic wrote:
| Not the person you're replying to, but...
|
| Of course there are other reasons they might act that
| way, but "crack addict" is a sometimes just shorthand for
| a person who's acting and looking a certain way.
| Integrape wrote:
| Could've been a jenkem connoisseur, but still apparently
| having a bad day.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Last time I had to take a certification test, I chose the test
| center over doing it remotely since I didn't want to install
| whatever spyware they wanted me to install on my work laptop.
| deepdriver wrote:
| I see this as a good thing. If you can self-learn remotely at
| your own pace and then show up once for a brief proctored (and
| by extension trusted) exam, it's still far cheaper and much
| more accessible than the traditional college or high school
| alternative.
| pksebben wrote:
| one sort of wonders what the value in standardized testing is,
| in a world with such easy access to information.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| Ranking and sorting, much like school. Testing on a
| standardized body of knowledge allows for sorting on
| intelligence and conscientiousness and subject matter
| knowledge.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| There are two main purposes:
|
| 1. You can't look for information if you don't know it
| exists.
|
| 2. Most standardized tests aren't used in the expectation
| that the testee's knowledge will matter in the future.
| Instead, the idea is that people who score higher will be
| generally more competent at whatever it is you want them to
| do.
| pksebben wrote:
| >2. Most standardized tests aren't used in the expectation
| that the testee's knowledge will matter in the future.
| Instead, the idea is that people who score higher will be
| generally more competent at whatever it is you want them to
| do.
|
| I fail to see how information retention maps to skill in
| this case. I guess it could be a vague indicator of the
| amount of practice done, but some folks memorize so easily,
| it makes this system incredibly easy to game.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I fail to see how information retention maps to skill
| in this case.
|
| It doesn't really matter if you understand why it works;
| the facts are what they are.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| None at all any more, but it would force everyone to a
| revolutionary project of re-thinking half of how our
| societies work - and there are _a lot_ of people with deep
| pockets and heavy interest in keeping the status quo.
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