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Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

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Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#111

Post by notRobot »

Avi-D-coder wrote: post #109

At what point can we stop pretending most universities prepare you for the job market? If your a professor that cares about Google give a rapid oral exam. If your a college professor giving multiple choice or other memorization based formats, what value are you providing over free online courses? Frankly, if your institution "has" to use this sort of software, it's not worth attending.

While I agree with you that most universities don't generally prepare you for the job market (especially when it comes to CS), this is not an option for almost all students:

> if your institution "has" to use this sort of software, it's not worth attending

Because of the sheer number of applicants in many places, whether a person has a relevant college degree and how much they scored in college is often the first "filter" jobs apply while sorting candidates, and if you can't get past that, it's essentially impossible for you to get a job.

Students will stop going to college for courses that don't prepare them for the job market when the job market stops requiring them to do so, which definitely isn't the case right now.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#112

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #101
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t get intelligently conversant about a thing without having the key bits in your mind, you’re right. But you don’t need to have as much memorized as we’re were tested on when I was in school (90s-early 2000s). And you need a lot more than just memorization to reach real understanding. Every few years I need the quadratic formula for something, and I just derive the thing instead of remembering or looking it u…

> and I just derive the thing instead of remembering or looking it up. Most people can't do this or have a very hard time learning much easier things. I find that the crowd that talks about "pointless learning/testing/education" are often either ones that struggled mightily and were never really that smart, or they are so smart that they are above it.

That’s a bad example I guess. For something I struggled more with, take history. When I was in school it had a huge focus on trivia like dates, while I’m now fascinated by it, focusing on the cause and effect of things. But you can’t easily assess someone’s understanding of that side of things in a standardized manner, so it gets short shrift. Success is defined by the factors that least matter, and students, wanting to spend their efforts efficiently, will focus on the measures that define success.

As for the “most people can’t derive the quadratic formula,” you might be right about my blind spots, but I think it’s equally likely that I’m right and have the necessary point of view to see that most people can’t do it because it’s taught and tested poorly. Both explanations would equally explain it being easier for me to derive the formula than memorize it.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#113

Post by 0_gravitas »

whoisburbansky wrote: post #107
throwaway3699 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there not an in-between? I used to be very good at maths, but a year out of practice and I might struggle at some topics. I still retain the intuitive understanding and that grants me a rapid path back to being able to solve problems.

The intuitive understanding that you still retain was only built up by repetition and memorization in the first place, no?

Repetition to wire up thought processes and logic (why do X instead of Y) != Arbitrary memorization of trivia (X formula or Y proof)

The difference between learning X and understanding X

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#114

Post by 3np »

Green_man wrote: post #92

Online classes really emphasize how irrelevant closed book/notes/neighbor tests have always been. In cute terms, this environment is the strongest possible counterexample to "you won't always have a calculator with you!". All students are literally doing the test on a computer with internet access in the present tense. Their connectivity is considered so robust that a student may lose points or time if their internet…

Yeah, if anything the first thing this makes me think is "how could I circumvent this?", on a test I otherwise would have just gone with and not even considered cheating. Maybe it's the hacker mind in me, or maybe these things actually induce more cheating than they prevent...

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#115

Post by centimeter »

smabie wrote: post #96
cloud5ir wrote: post #55

To me, this underscores notion that schools continue to test for the wrong thing. With the exception of professions/trades that require impulse application of knowledge, I don't know why I would want/need someone to memorize a concept in order to apply it. Productive members of our society/workforce think critically, they ask good questions, and they research and leverage the information at their disposal to make dat…

Memorization is absolutely crucial to getting good at math. In fact, I don't think there's any other way to get good at math besides memorization and doing problems, over and over and over again. It's rote, sure, but it has tremendous value. If you think you understand something, but can't actually solve problems without referencing anything, you don't actually understand it.

> Memorization is absolutely crucial to getting good at math.

I have a terrible memory and I excel at math (and majored in physics in undergrad) precisely because it doesn’t require memorization.

I don’t know anyone who is good at math who operates by memorization.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#116

Post by centimeter »

whoisburbansky wrote: post #107
throwaway3699 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there not an in-between? I used to be very good at maths, but a year out of practice and I might struggle at some topics. I still retain the intuitive understanding and that grants me a rapid path back to being able to solve problems.

The intuitive understanding that you still retain was only built up by repetition and memorization in the first place, no?

Absolutely not. I honestly can’t identify with your comments in the slightest. The only part of math that I ever learned by memorization was addition and multiplication tables in elementary school. Every subsequent revelation was based on pure understanding - zero repetition required. Up to what level of math have you studied? I honestly can’t imagine anyone thinking they’re good at undergrad-level math if they do it by memorization rather than understanding.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#117

Post by userbinator »

dheera wrote: post #54
cosmie wrote: post #9

Back in the good ol' days, you could just take the exam inside of a VM. The VM is locked down, but the host isn't. Looks like from ProctorU's docs[1] that they got around to probing for the (blatantly obvious[2]) signatures of a VM and stopped that trick. I wonder if those signatures exist in a Windows Sandbox[3] instance, or if you can detect/block the Enhanced RDP Session Windows leverages when running a Sandbox...…

I would be in favor of a VM that is indistinguishable from a non-VM host. Is there any project that helps bring such functionality to, say, VirtualBox? Not because I encourage cheating, but because I should never have to install proprietary software on my personal machine to take an exam. I will however on occasion grudingly be okay with installing closed-source software inside of a VM.

Malware often tries to do the same "am I running in a VM" checks to evade researchers' attempts to analyse it, and of course people want VMs in general to become indistinguishable from physical machines, so you're in good company.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#118

Post by userbinator »

ColanR wrote: post #33
lights0123 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to make the core device indistinguishable. It's the additional hardware that becomes a problem: QEMU/libvirt hardcodes its hard drive model to include the word "QEMU" (although there is an unmerged patch to make that configurable), and although I don't know how graphics work in a VM, it's far easier to create a higher-level graphics device than e.g. emulating Intel graphics.

I imagine a script could be used with qemu - given that patch you mentioned, which I would love a source for if you have it - to match the names of the virtual devices with names of devices on the physical host. Then there's no way for software to check the device names against a list of VM tools, since it always matches real, physical hardware. At that point, it seems to me that there isn't much left to distinguish…

I know of malware long ago that would attempt to time how long CPU instructions take, based on the theory that a VM would be significantly slower, but more recently, especially with hardware-assisted virtualisation, the differences have become close to indistinguishable.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#119

Post by sn41 »

cloud5ir wrote: post #55

To me, this underscores notion that schools continue to test for the wrong thing. With the exception of professions/trades that require impulse application of knowledge, I don't know why I would want/need someone to memorize a concept in order to apply it. Productive members of our society/workforce think critically, they ask good questions, and they research and leverage the information at their disposal to make dat…

I teach programming. What prevents students from colluding over their tablets/mobiles/laptops while taking the exam from another device? Can't the student mirror the screen elsewhere, leading to interesting possibilities for cheating?

Proctoring is not a solution that I am comfortable with. I do not want to peer into the private lives of students and their home environments. Not every student is well-off, and has a private space all to their own for 3 hours.

I think taking tests from home does not really work with any of the models I have seen discussed this year. Cheating is real. It has nothing to do with rote learning. I am out of ideas which are foolproof.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#120

Post by ylyn »

smabie wrote: post #96
cloud5ir wrote: post #55

To me, this underscores notion that schools continue to test for the wrong thing. With the exception of professions/trades that require impulse application of knowledge, I don't know why I would want/need someone to memorize a concept in order to apply it. Productive members of our society/workforce think critically, they ask good questions, and they research and leverage the information at their disposal to make dat…

Memorization is absolutely crucial to getting good at math. In fact, I don't think there's any other way to get good at math besides memorization and doing problems, over and over and over again. It's rote, sure, but it has tremendous value. If you think you understand something, but can't actually solve problems without referencing anything, you don't actually understand it.

This is absolutely backwards.

No amount of reference sheets will help you with mathematics if you don't understand something.

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