College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

Just a few highlights from the article that really stick out:

“You have to record your environment, you have to record the whole desk, under the desk, the whole room,” Molina recalled. “And you need to use a mirror to show that you don’t have anything on your keyboard.”

On top of that, if the wireless connection was disturbed during an exam, Molina said, students would receive an automatic zero — no excuses.

He said he didn’t realize he hadn’t sufficiently shown his notepaper to his webcam, or that his habit of talking through questions aloud would be considered suspicious.

“At the beginning of the exam, you leave the area for about one minute without explanation,” Merrill wrote in an email to Molina. She added that it looked like he was using his calculator for problems that did not require a calculation and that he solved certain problems too quickly. As a result, Molina was given an F in the course and his case was submitted to SDSU’s Center for Student Rights and Responsibilities, where he could appeal the decision.

Neekoly Solis, an SDSU junior and first-year transfer student, said each test-taker now has to verbally explain each of their calculations to their webcam every time they use their calculators during an exam.

Then, she had to show the camera her desk, and underneath her desk, with her bulky desktop computer. She realized she was in a pair of shorts, and her webcam was picking up — and recording — seconds of her bare legs that could be seen by her older male professor. She was creeped out.

“You have to do a crotch shot, basically,” said Jason Kelley, associate director of research at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy group based in San Francisco. He recalled watching a tutorial video from another proctoring system called HonorLock, horrified as he watched the video subject do a long pan of their body.

Some other unsettling parts about the data their collecting:

Respondus’s website states that the default data retention period for Respondus Monitor is five years, but the client can change that.

And worse yet, what about the appeal process? Not exactly in the students favor:

Molina appealed. But even well into the fall semester and over a month after the accusations were filed, the office had canceled his scheduled meetings twice due to coronavirus-related emergencies.

After the third rescheduling, Molina finally had the chance to explain himself. One week later, he received a letter of “no action,” meaning the university would not pursue disciplinary action against him. He forwarded the letter to his business administration professors and requested that he get the grade he deserved. He said he had already emailed the student ombudsman twice, and never received a reply. Merrill finally gave him his grade back, almost two months after he’d received an F in the class.

In conclusion, you have a dodgy software program, that's highly invasive to your privacy. It can take months to get your appeal figured out. In the meantime, you're left to twist in the wind. And worst of all, the company keeps your data for five years.

I agree at a high level, but practically speaking it's not realistic to expect colleges to completely reinvent their entire teaching systems for a temporary, 1-2 year remote learning period.

Now that we've been dealing with COVID for almost an entire year, it's easy to forget that at one point we thought this would all be over in a matter of weeks or months. The situation was also evolving in real time. Colleges were looking for the most efficient stop-gap solutions, not for ways to completely overhaul their learning experience.

> It is also practically impossible to prevent cheating.

It's a mistake to assume that because we can't eliminate all cheating, we shouldn't bother reducing any cheating.

The advantage of synchronous test taking is that everyone is exposed to the problem set at the same time. The obvious cheat with asynchronous test taking would be for one person to volunteer to take the test early and then send the questions to their peers, all of whom take the test at the last possible minute.

This happens whenever in-person classes offer two time slots for taking a test. The later time slot is always far more packed than the first and comes back with significantly higher scores. Adding the internet and screenshots/camera phones to the equation amplifies this because students can share the exact test, not just what they recall from memory.

> In an online setting however, people can face all sort of troubles in a few hour window in their home. Your internet might stop working, neighbor might be making too much noise etc.

Educators aren't oblivious to this fact. Working with students who have interruptions is just part of the job. Having someone lose internet isn't much different from having someone get a flat tire on the way to the test. It happens, we deal with it, and it's fine.

I also think you're not giving students enough credit. They're not dumb. If noise is a problem, they're going to use headphones. If internet is flakey, they're going to find a better location to take a test.

It's such a weird double standard to see HN champion work from home as unequivocally superior to working in an office, yet whenever the topic of learning from home comes up we get a laundry list of what-about possibilities that might make the experience worse.