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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can also think of many scenarios where group project-based assessments can be completely done by someone else. I've seen people pay others to physically attend as them, pre-COVID, literally hand over their student ID to be physically present and take a test. You can't really stop all of them.
That's no reason to lower the bar even further.
IMO, the problem isn't the software. It's how humans are using the software. The software itself shouldn't have any control over the student's grades. A person should have to review the flags and actually find some wrongdoing. Not just push 'yes' and walk away.
The software isn't suited to its purpose.
From the many students I know, I can tell you that cheating is rampant in online learning. The average GPA has gone up 0.3 points at my alma mater. I don't think people understand just how widespread it is. This software isn't ideal but there's no good solutions here short of major rethink of how these classes, and possible all of the college, is structured.
So one solution is to switch to open book take home exams as much as possible. The other frankly is to have an honor code and, at some point, recognize that some people will cheat but they're mostly hurting themselves.
I without question wrote every bit of this text. It's saying I plagiarized. I feel like plagiarism software isn't quite there yet.
1 thing is for sure though. I certainly don't use enough commas.
I have never once seen this software meaningfully work in any reasonable manner other than be a massive privacy violation and be a massive waste of time for the GSIs being forced to go through a timestamped log of every time a student blinked. How about writing open-book tests in ways that are impossible to cheat on if you don't understand the material? You've had almost a year to adapt. Why outsource student PII to…
>> How about writing open-book tests in ways that are impossible to cheat on if you don't understand the material? You've had almost a year to adapt. So in a remote test situation, explain how this is possible without use of these software. I can think of many scenarios where a second person can be in the room and doing the exam.
On a more constructive note, it seems pretty simple to require some portion of responses to reference the lectures such that only someone who attended the class in this semester would be able to correctly answer, for example "use the method we discussed in the first half of lecture 3, use the third of the four numbers I told you to write down that day as variable y, if you weren't in class that day instead do X" If a test comes back and someone claims to not remember the material from any classes but still got everything right, that warrants scrutiny. If someone currently enrolled in the class is helping a person cheat, you can use standard anti-cheating techniques like comparing answers.
IMO, the problem isn't the software. It's how humans are using the software. The software itself shouldn't have any control over the student's grades. A person should have to review the flags and actually find some wrongdoing. Not just push 'yes' and walk away.
Let’s say you’re only using the software to flag suspicious behavior, and bringing in humans to make the final decision. What happens when (inevitably) the software disproportionally flags people with dark skin because it is not trained to recognize dark-skinned faces? Or when the software disproportionally flags poor people, or people with families?
It means that those groups of people will be targeted by the (human) bureaucracy and tasked with defending themselves, when they’ve done nothing wrong. Humans will inevitably trust the algorithm, they will use the algorithm’s outputs to justify their own biases, and even investigations come with a cost.
There’s this meme going around that the “algorithm isn’t biased, it’s the data”, but that argument doesn’t really hold water—machine learning systems, by default, learn to recognize correlations, and correlations in the real world collected with real sensors contain biases. ML, by its nature, picks up and encodes those biases, and you must make an effort to remove them—you can’t just throw an ML algorithm at a pile of data.
From the many students I know, I can tell you that cheating is rampant in online learning. The average GPA has gone up 0.3 points at my alma mater. I don't think people understand just how widespread it is. This software isn't ideal but there's no good solutions here short of major rethink of how these classes, and possible all of the college, is structured.
Certainly I had many take-home exams in college and grad school. (Of course, I had many proctored in-person exams too.) So one solution is to switch to open book take home exams as much as possible. The other frankly is to have an honor code and, at some point, recognize that some people will cheat but they're mostly hurting themselves.
Students who cheat can secure a higher GPA with less effort. That effort can be redirected towards looking for internships and improving grad school applications.
So I fail to see how cheaters are only “hurting themselves”. Morality aside, if you pursue a cheating strategy your pay-off will be much higher when we consider the scarcity of resources available to students.