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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

#231
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

+1 on the drilling specific techniques. Any skill is reinforced by consistent targeted practice, and to think that math is an exception where you can break through with pure genius is just deluding yourself. The only way I got through my undergrad math was by doing problem set after problem set until the concepts were second nature, and the courses that didn't have a sufficient breadth of exercises to drive home fund…

> break through with pure genius

Applying derivations that someone else invented doesn’t require “pure genius”; it only requires you to be able to follow the person who discovered it, which is a lot easier than finding it yourself.

> The only way I got through my undergrad math was by doing problem set after problem set

It sounds like you didn’t really understand what you were doing then. It’s hard to phrase this without just sounding like I’m bragging, but I never had to practice doing anything I actually understood. If I felt like I needed practice, that was a sure sign I didn’t get it, which I always tried to fix with careful thinking instead of repetitive memorization

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

#232
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Unless you have enough money/lawyers to fight it in court, there really isn't much option.

You take the tests, with the software, or you fail.

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

#233
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

patch is https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2012-03/msg021...

Thanks!

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

#234
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universities make accommodations for people who need to take more time.

You mean for people, like me, who know you can ask, feel no shame doing so, and believe it won’t hurt their reputation by doing so? Oh, and possibly pay for expensive third party testing. It would be better to just provide tons of padding to everyone.

It won't hurt your reputation, its confidential information coordinated by your universities office for disability services (or some variant of that name). they even have private testing facilities if you are more comfortable in that environment rather than the lecture hall.

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

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unless you have enough money/lawyers to fight it in court, there really isn't much option. You take the tests, with the software, or you fail.

What would you do in that situation if it were you. I would personally choose to fail and not be apart of a system that does this, but it sounds like you embrace it?

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

#236
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean for people, like me, who know you can ask, feel no shame doing so, and believe it won’t hurt their reputation by doing so? Oh, and possibly pay for expensive third party testing. It would be better to just provide tons of padding to everyone.

It won't hurt your reputation, its confidential information coordinated by your universities office for disability services (or some variant of that name). they even have private testing facilities if you are more comfortable in that environment rather than the lecture hall.

You are right, and it is a very good thing they do, but all that information is not something that at least as significant minority of students are going to know ahead of time. For those students, there is perceived stigma going to the administration for help, and that prevents people from asking for it, even if that perception is not reality.

Why make people ask for accommodations when we can just setup the infrastructure to make it unnecessary to begin with, at least in a wide variety of cases.

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

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you have enough money/lawyers to fight it in court, there really isn't much option. You take the tests, with the software, or you fail.

What would you do in that situation if it were you. I would personally choose to fail and not be apart of a system that does this, but it sounds like you embrace it?

To call it "embrace" is unfair to the parent comment. People get coerced to accept things all the time, especially when it concerns the future of their children. Very few people have an "all or nothing" kind of mentality when it comes to resisting establishment, especially when the cost of accepting is relatively minor. In this case, accepting the anti-cheat has a very low cost: enduring a crapware and spyware for a little while.

It's simply a compromise.

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

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you have enough money/lawyers to fight it in court, there really isn't much option. You take the tests, with the software, or you fail.

What would you do in that situation if it were you. I would personally choose to fail and not be apart of a system that does this, but it sounds like you embrace it?

I actually have gone out of my way to, and have mostly successfully avoided that situations, and have gone out of my way to point out to schools the damage they are doing.

However, not everyone has that option, is willing to take that option, or understands the ramifications of not taking that option.

I hate the current system. I also understand why people choose to follow it.

Edit 0: It looks like maybe this conversation has hit the maximum depth for HN? If you'd like to continue talking, please feel free to email me.

Edit 1: Turns out I was wrong. The reply timer just hadn't passed. Still feel free to email me if you like.

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

#239

The older I get the more absurd the years of my life wasted in schooling become. Being tested by people who mostly have never even worked the job you're supposedly preparing for using methods that don't represent the way you'll actually be working seems a complete waste of time and money. Increasingly the more talented individuals I'm working with in my job I see more and more that never even went through any of that…

> The older I get the more absurd the years of my life wasted in schooling become

The more time I spend working in my chosen field, the more I appreciate the time I spent studying unrelated subjects.

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

#240

The older I get the more absurd the years of my life wasted in schooling become. Being tested by people who mostly have never even worked the job you're supposedly preparing for using methods that don't represent the way you'll actually be working seems a complete waste of time and money. Increasingly the more talented individuals I'm working with in my job I see more and more that never even went through any of that…

> The older I get the more absurd the years of my life wasted in schooling become The more time I spend working in my chosen field, the more I appreciate the time I spent studying unrelated subjects.

I dont think school would have done me much either way, but I really do wish I put more effort into learning certain subjects I wrote off as useless a teenager.
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