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College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

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Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#31

Post by ht_th »

jccalhoun wrote: post #17

I'm a professor in the humanities so I can write tests that make it harder to cheat than some other fields. I cringe whenever I hear someone using these invasive kinds of software. There has to be a better way than making students install spyware.

Sure. Have at most ten to twenty students per teacher. Then the teacher can spend a couple of hours per student to assess their understanding. Unfortunately, in education quantity seems to be prioritized over quality. When you have over 50 students, let alone over 200 hundred, good luck grading authentic open-ended projects or papers in just two weeks.

As a result, most tests consists of multiple-choice questions and standard-format open questions. It is unclear to what extent they test students' understanding, and students do become quite proficient test takers, but at least theses tests can be executed given the current constraints of available staff, acceptable rigor, and student expectations.

Unfortunately, you cannot move these type of test to an online setting and expect students not to cheat at all. It is too easy to talk to classmates, look at the study materials, or even on the Internet for some hints to answers or even the actual answers. The only option many institutions saw was to move to a draconian proctoring solution because they just lack the means to roll-out anything else given the constraints they have to work with.

Ideally, they would re-evaluate their choices regarding quality versus quantity, but because they need the large number of students to stay afloat, nothing meaningful will happen.

Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#32

Post by Terrario »

klodolph wrote: post #19
wccrawford wrote: post #6

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.

This is an echo of the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument that has been going around for ages. 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 disproportional…

I think this misses the parent’s point.

The point is to not let the algorithm make decisions. The human bureaucracy is suppose to be there to determine the quality of the flags and analyze whether there is any discrimination at play. A company that lacks this human element is negligent and should be held responsible. Unless algorithms can be trialed and held accountable, they shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions.

Also guns don’t kill people, people do. Otherwise explain to me why it would be okay for certain institutions to be armed but not individuals. If guns are the problem, then no one should have them (including the military/police).

Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#33

Post by ryandrake »

jjk166 wrote: post #18
RegnisGnaw wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

What stopped people from having someone else do their take home tests before the pandemic? 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 yo…

> 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"

Then you are measuring class attendance rather than subject matter mastery. If someone has already mastered the year’s material by the third class, why penalize them for skipping the rest of the lectures?

Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#35

Post by Hongwei »

swiley wrote: post #8

There has to be a point where students will revolt against the abusive behavior of universities in the US right? Or is this just another social pathology that we need to rethink?

They can if they stop enrolling and paying tuition. There are plenty of options online for college-style certifications that most employers in my industry (software engineering) would accept.

I get that other professional training with certifications would be harder to do online, but those tend to be done in community colleges anyway. The most "abusive" shops are universities offering BS degrees to students swimming in debt.

Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#36

Post by huhnmonster »

wolfgke wrote: post #29
serjester wrote: post #10

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.

Make exams that are harder to cheat. For example: - oral exams via video call - written exams where students are distributed over a larger area (e.g. the university rents a warehouse for the examination time) so that the COVID-19 spreading risk is nevertheless kept very small.

This has been done in my last exam phase and has worked well. They cranked the AC to 11, which made it quite an unpleasant envirommemt, but I would rather wear a jacket than take online exams

Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#37

Post by RegnisGnaw »

parzivalm wrote: post #25

The thing that has always frustrated me about anti-cheating/anti-plagiarism software is that it almost always only hurts people that did something by accident or unintentionally. When I took the one kubernetes certification exam as part of an old job, you used software like this and at one point I leaned too close to the screen and the proctor couldn't see my face and that got me flagged. People that want to cheat or…

>> People that want to cheat or game the system will find ways, it isn't hard to do.

As someone who taught a college, that's a flawed statement. Let me propose this to you. You teach Calculus 1000 and there is an end of term exam. Your normal end of term exam is one where everyone sits in the same room, proctors are looking for cheats, things checked, etc. Instead this year you tell your students that this year it will be a take home exam with the following rules: 1) they have 2 hours to do it during the team home peroid; 2) no cheating by the honor system.

Do you think the rate of cheating will be the same? I mean by your logic, it should be.

Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#38

Post by TrackerFF »

This is, IMO, just lazy professors that didn't bother to make exams for the digital space. Instead, they invested money and resources in digital proctors - with all the invasive pains that come with it.

If you can't bother to make a proper exam, don't bother. Rather make the classes pass/fail on project work, or grade the classes on projects / home exams. Trying to bring a 100% replica of the physical exam space into the digital space is just a recipe for disaster.

Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#39

Post by cipherzero »

supportlocal4h wrote: post #34

If a prof needs a final exam to be able to assess a student's proficiency, they are doing it wrong.

Not saying you’re wrong, but what are you proposing as an alternative? How should comprehensive knowledge be tested? Weekly homework/projects?

P.s. love the user name.

Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#40

Post by throwaway0a5e »

klodolph wrote: post #19
wccrawford wrote: post #6

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.

This is an echo of the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument that has been going around for ages. 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 disproportional…

I don't think you meant to do this but you seem to have inadvertently made a very damn good argument for "guns don't kill people people kill people.

People are getting screwed because they are at the long end of an unbroken chain of crap. Crappy organizations buy crappy software and crappy professors take the results seriously. The fact that there exists a crappy tool that flags all the black people as cheaters (or whatever, point is that the false positives are unacceptable common and unacceptably distributed).

Blaming the gun (the software in this case) is tacitly condoning the unbroken chain of half a dozen people/entities that are failing to do the job they are being paid to do. The software developers shouldn't be building crap software. The companies shouldn't be selling crap software. The universities shouldn't be buying crap software. The professors shouldn't be using the results of crap software. To look at that situation and say "yeah the problem here is that this crap software exists" is beyond naive. The problem is that nobody is being accountable for the bad outcome. I'm not asking for a whipping boy or a scapegoat here, the problem is that when nobody can be held fully responsible it seems like nobody even gets held partly responsible.

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