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

#221

Post by 908B64B197 » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 2:26 PM UTC

_8091149529 wrote: post #23

908B64B197 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Else you might as well call the degree "rote" because that's what you measure. > maybe fails in intro courses If someone cheats their way through intro courses they are up for a bad surprise since the upper level courses assumes a mastery of the intro classes!

Interesting, thanks for the replies. I'd still point out that the system is not robust against: - Working in groups. (Bad if tests are supposed to assess individual performance.) - Asking outsiders for help. Also, your downplaying of "rote" learning feels misguided, no matter how advanced/abstract/high-level the domain in question is. Cue the Bruce Lee quote about 10,000 kicks..

> Working in groups.

Students hate carrying dead weight so to speak. Sure they might be tempted to swap favors (A helps B for a certain subject and the reverse is true for an other one). If the exam is properly constructed you might be able to detect plagiarism however.

Rote is absolutely necessary for a well rounded education, but I really feel the need to overcorrect in the opposite direction because testing for rote is the lazy approach. Over time a lot of testing has the tendency to shift to simply measuring rote.

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

#222

Post by 908B64B197 » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 2:36 PM UTC

_8091149529 wrote: post #49

impendia wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was an undergrad at Rice where we had a very strong honor code. Unsupervised exams were common, and to the best of my knowledge cheating was very rare. If you were accused of cheating then you went before the Honor Council, which was run entirely by students. I considered this an enormous success. It created an atmosphere where we were treated with respect, and where we were expected to treat others in the same way…

> How is this achieved in practice? Wish I knew. I think my take-home from this discussion is that the honor code can be made to work in the right circumstances that exist, at least, at Caltech, Rice, etc. At the same time, I believe it is impossible to induce the requisite "cohesion" in other contexts such as 100% remote learning or high-stakes mass testing (entrance exams etc.), even if the student body stayed the…

> high-stakes mass testing (entrance exams etc.)

That's because it's done wrong.

There are countries where they simply sort by descending scores on whatever standard test they came up with to admit. As if the test was perfect and results could be compared at an infinite decimal place (hint, stats and physics disagree with that!).

So the test basically becomes a measure of how someone is good at taking the test and you start to see min-maxing behaviors. It's a contest to see who can pour the most time into maximizing its results. The incentives for cheating are simply so high. The downside of cheating is that you don't really learn, but since the only skill these tests teach you is taking the tests, you are really robbing yourself of a skill that becomes useless 3 minutes after the test.

My advice is to throw these tests in the trash.

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

#223

Post by powersnail » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 2:45 PM UTC

hansvm wrote: post #156

powersnail wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of cheat does it prevent? I imagine it wouldn't be terribly hard to run the machines so that only one full-screen window is shown, or a user for whom the internet is disabled. Is that not enough?

> What kind of cheat does it prevent? Not much. When lockdowns first started I remember seeing _tons_ of first and second hand accounts of all the ways anti-cheating software failed when exposed to the real world. > I imagine it wouldn't be terribly hard to run the machines so that only one full-screen window is shown, or a user for whom the internet is disabled. Is that not enough? It can be a little tricky. We put…

Now I come to think of it... Reminds of when I was in middle school, we used a bug in Chinese IME to crash the software used to control our machines.

The webcam solution also seems entirely bypassable if the student is determined. (Speaking from my experience as a TA, students who cheat are usually pretty determined) Just put a phone to the level of the monitor, and there's nothing a webcam can do.

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

#224

Post by grishka » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 2:57 PM UTC

powersnail wrote: post #138

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…

What kind of cheat does it prevent? I imagine it wouldn't be terribly hard to run the machines so that only one full-screen window is shown, or a user for whom the internet is disabled. Is that not enough?

At my university in Russia, we had a special testing classroom with these weird Sun thin clients that only ran Firefox in a very minimalistic window manager in a unix system of some sort. Said Firefox would only open the website of the testing system.

So, obviously, everyone just used their phones for cheating lol.

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

#225

Post by FuckButtons » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 3:02 PM UTC

Findeton wrote: post #154

FuckButtons wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought in the US people paid money for going to university, so that classes are well-funded enough... /sarcasm

Berkeley is a public university, so many students qualify for federal aid and wind up paying very little or nothing at all,the full cost of in state tuition to those who can afford it is about $6000 per semester.

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

#226

Post by NewOrderNow » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 3:59 PM UTC

powersnail wrote: post #138

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…

What kind of cheat does it prevent? I imagine it wouldn't be terribly hard to run the machines so that only one full-screen window is shown, or a user for whom the internet is disabled. Is that not enough?

Can't they have a KVM switch connected to a second computer that could cheat while seemingly appearing like one is still using the test computer?

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

#227

Post by NewOrderNow » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 4:04 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #209

Fnoord wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I am not from USA, supposedly in USA people also care about privacy. My opinion as a parent matters in the context of my child (as I am legally responsible), and in the end what matters is the law (which is above "don't care"). I'm very curious if this is even legal, and if so, in which jurisdictions. If I don't give my child permission to have a camera active in my private space, what is going to happen?

> If I don't give my child permission to have a camera active in my private space, what is going to happen? Your child will not be allowed to take the exam.

I am curious about people like you. We know the outcome answer they want, but someone like you chimes in an claims it can't be been done.

Can you explain this defeatist attitude to me and what purpose it does providing the already known negative outcome?

To me, the language you used suggested that you are already bought, sold, and controlled.

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

#228

Post by maerF0x0 » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

iso947 wrote: post #180

chillwaves wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A person taking a test more slowly has no effect on the people who finish more quickly.

If I’m employing someone I don’t care if they look up a few things in google or ask for occasional help. If they take 2 days rather than 2 hours though, that’s a problem.

This is a bit of a topic a little too large for this thread, but there's definitely a philosophical and societal question if education is only, or even primarily for career. So there are many reasons why analogizing to a job would be insufficient for making decisions in education.

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

#229

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 5:35 PM UTC

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #214

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

History is certainly a better example, but dates DO matter - You can't talk about cause and effect if you don't know when things happened. Now perhaps the minutiae isn't quite as important - but what better way to learn the chronology than knowing the dates? It's fundamental to it. > to see that most people can’t do it because it’s taught and tested poorly. Or they just don't want to learn it. Some people don't like…

> There are certainly cases of that being the truth, but if you look at the time constraints and all other details, it's hard to just blame the system. How do you actually fix the system?

Yeah, given all the constraints, I agree completely. My complaint is that there is a giant emphasis on testing in really scalable manners that take people and dialogue out of it. So which constraint is the system (the way things are taught and tested) most sensitive to? I expect that it's teacher to student ratios, which my thesaurus says is a synonym for money, simultaneously the easiest and hardest constraint to change :-(

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

#230

Post by centimeter » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 5:56 PM UTC

weehoo wrote: post #124

centimeter wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The great grandparent to your post (the one who initially brought up the necessity of rote learning) is a quant at a market maker. Anecdotally, my favorite professor from undergrad (born in China, PhD from the best department in his field [my personal opinion]) said he thought the reason for Russian/Chinese dominance in certain areas of math was due to how those areas benefitted very much from rote practice. He advis…

> It’s much easier to go over something and declare “this makes sense” than it is to come up with that something in the first place.

Obviously, but that’s not what we were talking about. We were comparing memorization to understanding, not inventing to learning.

If you’re good at math, you should be able to re-derive any formula or procedure quickly (up to, say, constant factors) without having to memorize it (after the derivation has been explained to you).

If you run into a problem that you can’t solve because you didn’t drill the steps hard enough, you don’t actually understand the problem. This isn’t necessarily your fault - many math courses teach by symbolic manipulation without the conceptual grounding required to actually re-derive the symbolic procedures yourself. Few students will seek that understanding on their own outside of class, in which case they’re stuck with memorization.

> the reason for Russian/Chinese dominance in certain areas of math was due to how those areas benefitted very much from rote practice.

I think this supports my point - these “certain areas” are small. There is a relative paucity of mathematical/physical innovation from China (especially per capita!). The west still dominates mathematical invention.