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An Exam Surveillance Company Is Trying to Silence Critics with Lawsuits

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Re: An Exam Surveillance Company Is Trying to Silence Critics with Lawsuits

#31

Post by saagarjha »

908B64B197 wrote: post #30

I wonder if the real issue is the format of the exams itself. Caltech had take-home exams for a long time and students still adhere to the honor code. We have pretty good tools for plagiarism detection. It's time to shift from rote learning exams to another format (essay, lab assignments for computer science). Else it's simply an arm race for cheating (soon some kid will just get an e-ink display in a picture frame a…

Caltech in general probably selects for students who are pretty self-motivated.

Re: An Exam Surveillance Company Is Trying to Silence Critics with Lawsuits

#32

Post by saagarjha »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #22
gruez wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That isn't to say these remote proctoring solutions will necessarily prevent cheating either (and having now used one of these services, I think cheating would have been relatively easy), but it at least should make test takers think twice. Sounds like security theater. >I think we can all agree that an in-person exam would have been better, but the state of the world made that untenable. Why not? Just rent out a la…

> Sounds like security theater. I think a bit of security theater is exactly what's called for in this scenario. This isn't like hacking into a computer network, or bringing an explosive onto an airplane, where one dedicated bad actor can defeat the system for everyone. It's much closer to something like shoplifting, where your goal is to make instances of bad behavior as low as possible, given other constraints. A s…

Security theater doesn't apply evenly, however. I know a couple students who could pretty blatantly cheat without getting caught simply because they owned a second computer they could position in the right spot, and had a hardware disconnect on their microphone. People that aren't well-off or tech savvy are going to be at a significant "disadvantage" here.

Re: An Exam Surveillance Company Is Trying to Silence Critics with Lawsuits

#33

Post by 908B64B197 »

saagarjha wrote: post #31
908B64B197 wrote: post #30

I wonder if the real issue is the format of the exams itself. Caltech had take-home exams for a long time and students still adhere to the honor code. We have pretty good tools for plagiarism detection. It's time to shift from rote learning exams to another format (essay, lab assignments for computer science). Else it's simply an arm race for cheating (soon some kid will just get an e-ink display in a picture frame a…

Caltech in general probably selects for students who are pretty self-motivated.

They do.

But at the same time, if you have to put draconian measures to discourage cheating as the last resort, maybe it's because the school is turning into a diploma mill and should review it's admission standards.

Re: An Exam Surveillance Company Is Trying to Silence Critics with Lawsuits

#34

Post by Wowfunhappy »

gowld wrote: post #28
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little more sympathetic. I took the GRE this summer. Because of the pandemic, I used ETS's new (and temporary) at-home testing option. Someone from ProctorU watched me through my webcam the whole time, and it felt totally invasive and creepy. But, what else was the ETS supposed to do? For a high-stakes exam like the GRE, I don't think "trust people to not cheat" is a viable option. That isn't to say these remot…

Why is a webcam more invasive and creepy than holding your entire body hostage at a testing location? Only because you haven't taken the time to make sure your personal testing location is prelared for public viewing, since usually you don't have to worry about that.

It's a fair point. I don't actually have an issue with the webcam so much as the monitoring software they installed—it's a giant black box with admin permissions that I don't understand at all. (And, using a virtual machine was explicitly not allowed, for understandable reasons.)

I assume it hasn't left behind a giant security hole or explicit keylogger—and I did make a time machine backup before the test which I restored afterwards...

Re: An Exam Surveillance Company Is Trying to Silence Critics with Lawsuits

#35

Post by gowld »

908B64B197 wrote: post #30

I wonder if the real issue is the format of the exams itself. Caltech had take-home exams for a long time and students still adhere to the honor code. We have pretty good tools for plagiarism detection. It's time to shift from rote learning exams to another format (essay, lab assignments for computer science). Else it's simply an arm race for cheating (soon some kid will just get an e-ink display in a picture frame a…

How do you prevent someone from outsourcing an essay or computer science lab assignment?

Re: An Exam Surveillance Company Is Trying to Silence Critics with Lawsuits

#36

Post by gowld »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #34
gowld wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is a webcam more invasive and creepy than holding your entire body hostage at a testing location? Only because you haven't taken the time to make sure your personal testing location is prelared for public viewing, since usually you don't have to worry about that.

It's a fair point. I don't actually have an issue with the webcam so much as the monitoring software they installed—it's a giant black box with admin permissions that I don't understand at all. (And, using a virtual machine was explicitly not allowed, for understandable reasons.) I assume it hasn't left behind a giant security hole or explicit keylogger—and I did make a time machine backup before the test which I res…

In the new world our test fees will include delivery of a test machine.

Re: An Exam Surveillance Company Is Trying to Silence Critics with Lawsuits

#37

Post by gowld »

rootusrootus wrote: post #14
coldcode wrote: post #3

Why anyone would pay these folks anything is beyond me. While cheating is certainly a thing, and easier to do online, violating people's personal space and trusting in some average behavior BS to flag things as suspicious does not seem worth the cost. Add in ridiculous behavior by the company, if I were an educational institution I'd stay far away from these people. I remember reading about something similar being us…

> Why anyone would pay these folks anything is beyond me. Because they are worried about reputational damage from cheating. Even with tools like Proctorio, ProctorTrack, HonorLock, etc, the cheating rate is pretty high in programs like OMSCS.

The solution to that is so stop investing degrees with imaginary credibility, and hire people based on the hirers own assessments.

Re: An Exam Surveillance Company Is Trying to Silence Critics with Lawsuits

#38

Post by 908B64B197 »

gowld wrote: post #35
908B64B197 wrote: post #30

I wonder if the real issue is the format of the exams itself. Caltech had take-home exams for a long time and students still adhere to the honor code. We have pretty good tools for plagiarism detection. It's time to shift from rote learning exams to another format (essay, lab assignments for computer science). Else it's simply an arm race for cheating (soon some kid will just get an e-ink display in a picture frame a…

How do you prevent someone from outsourcing an essay or computer science lab assignment?

With these there's always a big chance the essay will be plagiarized (ie, the person who did write the essay modified an existing one and resold it).

A quick follow up call where the TA or teacher asks questions regarding the essay should make it obvious someone isn't the original author.

Re: An Exam Surveillance Company Is Trying to Silence Critics with Lawsuits

#39

Post by Nasrudith »

908B64B197 wrote: post #33
saagarjha wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caltech in general probably selects for students who are pretty self-motivated.

They do. But at the same time, if you have to put draconian measures to discourage cheating as the last resort, maybe it's because the school is turning into a diploma mill and should review it's admission standards.

Isn't the issue more that administrators are panicking over the loss of control from the pandemic causing a norms break and are pushing dubious anti-cheating software on everyone out of do-somethingism more than any amount of cheating sufficent for dillution of graduate quality?

Granted the "value evaluation" gets a bit silly to begin with given that either they trust the name enough to use it as a filter regardless of its merit or lack of it or they ignore it entirely and go based off of their own assessment measures with their own sets of issues.

Re: An Exam Surveillance Company Is Trying to Silence Critics with Lawsuits

#40

Post by Nasrudith »

gowld wrote: post #37
rootusrootus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why anyone would pay these folks anything is beyond me. Because they are worried about reputational damage from cheating. Even with tools like Proctorio, ProctorTrack, HonorLock, etc, the cheating rate is pretty high in programs like OMSCS.

The solution to that is so stop investing degrees with imaginary credibility, and hire people based on the hirers own assessments.

That solution is existentially terrifying to them both in the "job depends upon not understanding it" sense and their very ideas of how they feel the world works/should work so are institutional non-starters until they are replaced one way or another (generationally or competition rendering them irrelevant).
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