Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by xwolfi » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 8:58 AM UTC

olyjohn wrote: post #128

I feel so bad for the students that have to deal with this. I worked at a Community College in IT for a while. Students would come into a lab that was specifically set up for testing. The anti-cheating software was such total trash, it would crash, crash the browser, crash the whole system. Students would have to start testing over... At least twice a month, their systems would be down, and nobody could take tests at…

In my uni they d just give stuff unique and almost impossible and just let us try and survive. They d read every code and ask for comment, sitting next to each student for 30 minutes of explanation.

Once they gave one of their research subjet on dictionary optimization and "the best they could do themselves" compiled to show it was possible. I went far enough (we had to also be constrained to 16-bit memory addressing) and decompiled their stuff with IDA to find a few more tricks and got a little bonus for telling them and reimplementing them.

Another time they told us "do whatever with OpenGL and we ll grade you relatively", ensued an enormous competition between students to beat each other with my team ending up implementing a counter strike map renderer with skybox, full texture, fast enough to walk around, and we got the best grade.

The last project, on the 5th year, was a semantic web video search engine a la youtube, with fetching, indexing, auto translation, knowledge graph, for a team of 40 students who had to split in various department with one team acting as product owners, for a few months.

I think there are ways to do exams that are meaningful and actually make you interesting in job interviews.

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

#192

Post by tremon » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 9:26 AM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #187

auscompgeek wrote: post #186

A random tidbit I've heard floating around: Examplify (yet another proctor) will think that you're running in a VM if you have WSL installed.

You sort of are. The main OS is virtualized too under WSL2. Both it and WSL2's kernels running on top of hyper-v.

That doesn't apply only to WSL2. As soon as you install the Hyper-V role (for WSL2 or to virtualize other VMs), your main OS becomes a VM with special hardware privileges (the Root Partition, in Hyper-V parlance), on top of the Hyper-V hypervisor kernel.

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

#193

Post by cute_boi » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 9:33 AM UTC

nl wrote: post #142

poulsbohemian wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely curious to learn your option on cheating - does it actually matter? What I mean is - certainly you don't want to harm the reputation of your school, and you want your students to have actually learned the material and be prepared for whatever they do in life that requires that knowledge... but what I'm wondering is... if there's presumably some tiny percentage of a class that is going to actually cheat…

> presumably some tiny percentage of a class that is going to actually cheat or act in ethically questionable ways According to the International Centre for Academic Integrity, from 71,000+ US students surveyed between 2002 and 2015 at least 68% of students admitted cheating in some way. https://www.academicintegrity.org/statistics/

Other 32% lied /s

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

#194

Post by LudwigNagasena » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 9:34 AM UTC

FuckButtons wrote: post #130

acbart wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will never work because it absolutely fails to scale, at a time when we have a complete lack of computing educators. Customized projects for each student? I have 159 students in my CS1 this semester, and I can barely keep track of them with the massive amounts of data I collect. The idea of making individualized assignments is beautiful but unrealistic.

So much this: cs61a at Berkeley for example has almost 2000 students in a single class, the idea of personalized anything with that many students is total unfeasible.

This is ridiculous. Why do Americans pay thousands of dollars for a bit fancier version of MOOC? When I studied we had 200 people on a course sitting on lectures, 30 on practical sessions and everyone could have a personal session during the professor’s office hours.

There is some kind of a massive waste of money going on.

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

#195

Post by aaplok » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 9:38 AM UTC

lakecresva wrote: post #151

As bad as all of the proctoring software seems to be, I wish we had it. I'm a 1L at an American law school that's doing entirely unproctored exams. I didn't come to the state with any connections, nor am I friends with any upperclassmen. I already know I'm going to get fucking annihilated by people who are cheating with their 2L/3L buddies, because there's literally zero risk of getting caught. In light of how heavil…

I am really sorry this is happening to you. The situation is deeply unfair, and it affects the fair and square overwhelmingly.

If that is any consolation, keep in mind that both you and they have a long way to go before graduation. Exams at your level are meant to assess whether students are ready for advanced classes. Cheating on them does little more than removing that safeguard, which can very well backfire. You're doing the right thing if you focus on learning the basics.

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

#196

Post by KMag » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 9:39 AM UTC

Tainnor wrote: post #108

smabie wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this is only half true. Of course, if you want to be good at maths, you will have to remember things because you can't always look up or re-derive every smallest detail (and because you have to become good at pattern-matching at some point). But the memory tends to work best if it's activated by deliberate practice. For example, instead of memorising a proof line-by-line it's much better to try to remember th…

^ This. For my Mechanical Engineering undergraduate courses, almost all of the formulas (models, actually) could be re-derived from linear approximations on infinitesimal elements. Memorize and internalize how the model is derived, practice re-deriving the model, and you can re-derive the formula during the exam, and do a bit of hand-wavy intuitive double-check of your answers. If you've only memorized the formula, you're going to have a very tough time coming up with an estimate against which to check your formula's answer.

On a side note, I really wish we had more emphasis on the conditions under which the linear approximations broke down. I remember sitting at the front of the MIT 2.002 class, and there was a demonstration of metal fatigue using a hydraulic press at the back of the classroom. Professor Sanjay Sarma stepped up to the front row in order to better see the demonstration at the back, and so I asked him about my intuitions about which way the model diverged from reality under vibration frequencies high enough that the quasistatic assumptions built into the model broke down. He looked to both sides of us and told the students on either side of me not to listen because they might get confused, and then we had a little discussion about conditions beyond which the model applied and which way the model's error went under those conditions. It was simultaneously one of the best and most disappointing moments in my education. It was an exciting discussion, but I was sad that the world beyond the linear approximations was considered to be likely too deep a rabbit hole for most of the class. Sanjay (as he preferred to be addressed) was an excellent educator, and I'm sure his judgement was based on past experience... each semester has a given complexity budget, and the field of Mechanical Engineering is so broad (statics, dynamics, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, mechanisms, control theory/sensors/OpAmps, manufacturing techniques, design for mass manufacturing, numerical process control, destructive/non-destructive testing, etc., etc.) that undergraduates need to spread a limited complexity budget across so many subjects that they can each only be covered relatively shallowly.

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

#197

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

#198

Post by raxxorrax » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 9:45 AM UTC

sn41 wrote: post #119

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 p…

Probably out of scope due to time constrains, but having students explain solutions and code should give a glimpse about how well they understood the principle. So if you have some time to kill...

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

#199

Post by dmurray » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 9:52 AM UTC

gravypod wrote: post #136

acbart wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will never work because it absolutely fails to scale, at a time when we have a complete lack of computing educators. Customized projects for each student? I have 159 students in my CS1 this semester, and I can barely keep track of them with the massive amounts of data I collect. The idea of making individualized assignments is beautiful but unrealistic.

Most code reviews I've done at work take between 5 minutes to 10 minutes. To assume the worst possible case of 200 students, 20 deliverable per student, and a 10 minutes meeting per MR you'd be at ~28 days (~84 8hr-days). Get 1 TA and you now have 42 days of the semester dedicated to 1:1 time (35%) and the remainder of the semester dedicated to producing learning content. Learning content (lecture videos, etc) can be…

10 to 30% pass rate? And that was very high compared to other departments?

Do you mind sharing roughly where this was (country and quality of university)? I thought we were in an era of grade inflation where everyone gets an A.

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

#200

Post by Ekaros » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 10:06 AM UTC

0_gravitas wrote: post #113

whoisburbansky wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Training the common tools and pattern recognition for things algebra. At higher level you really need to have a repertoire of various tricks to apply to integrals and derivatives... I never properly learned these for University level.

Often the problems had some trick that you had to apply to solve it. And without knowing those certain tricks from routine finding right solution was pretty hard.