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College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

voiceofsandiego.org

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

#101

Post by ativzzz »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #50
andreilys wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scholarships, internships and grad school spots are a scarce resource. 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…

> 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. This is definitely not the reason why most people cheat. > Morality aside, if you pursue a cheating strategy your pay-off will be much higher As with any kind of lie, you will have to cheat more and more to compensate for previous cheating, and eventually…

The first part certainly is why they cheat; higher grades allow easier admissions to jobs and better schools.

> As with any kind of lie, you will have to cheat more and more to compensate for previous cheating, and eventually your little web of lies will come back and bite you in the ass.

Completely disagree. People cheat to climb the ladder of life without having to put in the work or having the resources required to do bypass that ladder. However, once you climb the ladder high enough, it is much harder to fall back down.

Sure you're not going to be a good doctor if you cheat your way through med school but if you cheat your way through undergrad and get into a better program with better resources, more driven peers and better professors, you are better off regardless.

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

#102

Post by mshumi »

ege_erdogan wrote: post #7

I see online synchronous 1-2 hour exams as a mistaken result of the "let's emulate in-person teaching in a remote setting" mindset. You don't succeed in remote teaching and learning by trying to make it as close as possible to the in-person setup. You have to treat it as an entirely different problem. Consider the synchronous exam. It is a perfect method of grading in-person. It is hard to cheat and all people take t…

Crazy idea in this space. Eye-tracking will eventually be standard on consumer VR headsets that can be had for $300. As someone following the industry closely, I believe that the Oculus Quest 4 or a device like it will certainly have eye-tracking support. Obviously if one were to take their test in a VR environment with their eye-movements tracked it would be almost impossible to cheat. Eyes also provide a good biometric identifier. Mirrors, screens, exploits, etc can be foiled using software locks, HMDs cameras and imu data. Of course I'm not advocating a testing system like this, but it would put a hard stop to cheating on synchronous exams, enforce some level of standardization, and should be accessible to every student in the 1st world. Understandable privacy and ethics issues with something like this. It is probably better to address why people cheat in the first place and make education less reliant on exams. (continuous low-impact variable feedback vs discrete high-impact fixed feedback)

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

#103

Post by souprock »

At least the online class cheating increases fairness. Now you can cheat without having the money to purchase a bogus disability claim. For many years now, all the well-off schemers have been taking tests with twice as much time as normal. Nobody in academia dares to push back at this fraud, out of fear that they might be pilloried for failure to accommodate. Honest students usually aren't even aware of just how unfair the system is. It affects high school, college admissions tests, and college.

The whole system is put at risk by the fraud. Grades become less meaningful because we've added a randomish negative signal. That devalues everything.

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

#104

Post by 908B64B197 »

nlh wrote: post #86

I found myself brewing with rage while reading this article. The approach of closely inspecting a student's words & physical actions while taking a test just feels...dated. Ancient. Anachronistic. Embarrassing. In the real world of 2020+, almost everyone has a portable Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in their pocket. Let people use calculators. Heck, let people use Wikipedia! If they copy an incorrect fact from Wiki…

Folks are doing take-home exam wrong.

Caltech had tremendous success with a culture of honesty and take-home exams.

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

#105

Post by 0xffff2 »

njarboe wrote: post #85
0xffff2 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would she take a job as a glorified typist after completing a Phd? Why is the company hiring a Phd to be a glorified typist? Academia was never meant to be a jobs training program. The fact that many students treat it as such is not really the fault of the institutions.

Unfortunately each faculty member produces about 30 PhD students in their career (one per year). The number of faculty positions has been close to flat since the 1970's. So one in 30 PhD's will get to be faculty member. She probably took the job because she wants/needs a job and the company likes to have the status of PhDs doing the work.

Sure, so what? Anyone smart and dedicated enough to complete a Phd is smart enough to realize this going in. Surely the vast majority of people getting Phds don't expect to ever become academics and have some other plan.

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

#106

Post by 908B64B197 »

iandanforth wrote: post #52

A few points: Their "powerful AI engine" is almost certainly just humans. It might have a few off-the-shelf components like face detection but most of what they claim to do is just so easy to outsource that almost all companies do it. If there is any delay between the system observing a suspect behaviour and the student being told to correct it then they are definitely using humans. An institution using a service lik…

> Their "powerful AI engine" is almost certainly just humans.

I wonder how parents feel that an anonymous foreign, most probably male, can watch their daughter in her room working on her exams and she can't opt-out else she'll be treated like a criminal.

Wonder if at some point we'll find a zip file shared among employees with screenshots of students from one of these outsourced proctoring vendors.

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

#107

Post by mumbisChungo »

whatshisface wrote: post #87
iandanforth wrote: post #52

A few points: Their "powerful AI engine" is almost certainly just humans. It might have a few off-the-shelf components like face detection but most of what they claim to do is just so easy to outsource that almost all companies do it. If there is any delay between the system observing a suspect behaviour and the student being told to correct it then they are definitely using humans. An institution using a service lik…

This is getting really far off topic, but the solution is clearly to make speeding fines a "dollars per mile per hour, per hour" system. It should scale continuously both with speed over the limit and with time spent speeding. Programmers who focus on discrete systems are too prone to forget about real analysis. ;)

This is clearly not the solution, unless it is accompanied by changes to speed limits in North America- which itself introduces a bunch of complexity and negative side-effects.

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

#108

Post by low_key »

I took an online class in 2015 that used Proctorio. Even at that time the proctoring/anti-cheat software was a nightmare. I was semi-accused of cheating because of "anomalies" during one of my tests. It was quickly cleared up by talking to the professor.

The software is a privacy disaster and any computer that has had any of this spyware installed should be considered compromised. I kept a separate hard drive and would swap it in to take tests.

To fix the problem, grading measures need to be changed to accommodate the new world of online classes rather than trying to shoehorn old test proctoring into a remote space. This software only stops bad cheaters anyway.

I'm already imagining the fights I'm going to have with my daughter's schools in the future when they ask us to install this malware.

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

#109

Post by ebiester »

kart23 wrote: post #90

Voice of San Diego has been doing some great reporting. This is yet another example. Profs who use these things are examples of teachers who just don't care enough to revamp their courses to involve more project, critical-thinking assignments, or exams where cheating won't help. They don't want to do the work to adjust the course for remote learning, and just give the course that they always teach, and do whatever it…

What is the hourly rate that you would expect for a professor?

Consider that a tenure track professor (ignoring adjuncts) making $60,000 is expected to teach 3-4 classes, write original peer-reviewed research, and perform "service" (which takes the form of helping the university run itself, external speaking events, and advising.)

Each individual class takes 15-20 hours a week for a course they haven't taught before (which is common). Some classes require managing a group of Teaching Assistants for classes of 500 people. Other universities may have a teacher responsible for as many as 70 students without a TA.

So, that ends up being a 60 hour week. (This is average; I've seen more.) So, without overtime, that ends up at a little more than $22 an hour for a 10 month contract.

(The summers, in which they are either paid a small sum for summer classes, are not included. However, that's also when they are expected to research and write and publish, all technically unpaid. If you consider that time as paid, drop the $22 to $20 an hour.)

So, when you talk about "not caring enough," consider that they do not get stock options for working another 20 hours a week.

Further, a large portion of their job is bringing prestige to the university. That is why their job is based on the output of their research rather than their teaching. As such, in the first 7 years of the job, they are being judged on their publications first and their teaching second. As such, you are upset with a professor because they are only working 60 hours and not dedicating more time to what is a secondary concern for promotion and, for pre-tenured professors, keeping their job.

If you want professors to care, you need more lecturers paid the same amount to teach fewer courses. However, that makes university more expensive. (Or, you end up hiring adjuncts making sub-minimum wage for the same workload, sans research.)

It's a hard problem that looks easy on the outside.

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

#110

Post by ebiester »

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.

How many students do you have and what's your teaching load? I think that's another primary consideration. Teaching a 3/3 (or god forbid, a 4/4) with 30 students in each makes for a rough grading experience.
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