Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

voiceofsandiego.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 317 posts

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

#121

Post by dghlsakjg »

0xffff2 wrote: post #79
jbob2000 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My partner recently finished her PhD and has started working as a medical writer. During her academic career, it was beat into her head don’t plagiarize, everything must be yours . In her first review after a few weeks on the job, her manager says that she takes too long to do her work; they just need her to take what the client says verbatim, fact check it, and then slap it in a document. She was treating her work l…

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.

Society treats university as a jobs training program. Observationally it seems like the universities (in Asia in particular, and the US to a lesser degree) encourage you to treat your diploma like a golden ticket to a good job.

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

#122

Post by thaumasiotes »

mercurialshark wrote: post #95
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…

> move to live oral exams. Written long-form essays. Yes. The application of principles, concepts and information is not terribly difficult to test in either a timed or take home setting.

Live oral exams can be an effective method of assessment. They can also be confounded by the testee's charisma. (See: any discussion of programming interviews, which are live oral exams.[1])

They do have the advantage of degrading fairly gracefully from in-person examination to remote examination.

They're also tremendously expensive compared to a test given en masse.

[1] Oral exams in a school setting would feel much fairer to people than programming interviews do, mainly because you know what to expect on an exam in a class you just took.

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

#123

Post by treis »

rescbr wrote: post #68
RegnisGnaw wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 wi…

I had my fair share of uncheatable open book exams, calculators allowed back in college. One I had on Calculus (or was it Linear Algebra?) was way harder than a comparable closed book exam. You really needed to know the subject to pass vs just memorizing a couple of formulas and plugging them in the right place. Another professor devised an exam that used your student ID as a variable of the first question, and subse…

> had my fair share of uncheatable open book exams, calculators allowed back in college. One I had on Calculus (or was it Linear Algebra?) was way harder than a comparable closed book exam. You really needed to know the subject to pass vs just memorizing a couple of formulas and plugging them in the right place.

You can always just pay someone to do it for you.

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

#124

Post by dghlsakjg »

RegnisGnaw wrote: post #71
rescbr wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had my fair share of uncheatable open book exams, calculators allowed back in college. One I had on Calculus (or was it Linear Algebra?) was way harder than a comparable closed book exam. You really needed to know the subject to pass vs just memorizing a couple of formulas and plugging them in the right place. Another professor devised an exam that used your student ID as a variable of the first question, and subse…

> I had my fair share of uncheatable open book exams, calculators allowed back in college. One I had on Calculus (or was it Linear Algebra?) was way harder than a comparable closed book exam. You really needed to know the subject to pass vs just memorizing a couple of formulas and plugging them in the right place. We're discussing this in relation in relation to COVID, so no large gathering. This means no open book i…

If someone can figure out how to cheat on an exam where each answer depends on the previous, and the original seed is unique to each student, wouldn't it show a pretty thorough mastery of the subject matter?

I think the larger point is that it is fairly easy in any subject to design a test that is very hard to cheat on. It is much harder to find the resources in modern education to grade that test since each submission is likely unique.

Tests that are easy to grade (like multiple choice), tend to be tests that are easy to cheat....

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

#125

Post by easton »

ev1 wrote: post #2

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…

> This all seems absurd to me, it's been much easier to just write a one-liner inline script to hook blur, focus, visibilitychange, and onkeydown and log the userid when the event happens.

If you're curious, this is exactly what Canvas does to detect foul play (although they don't advertise it for that, it just goes into the log)[0][1]. Schools don't think it's good enough, so they spend thousands on these more invasive solutions.

[0]: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I... [1]: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/blob/master/public...

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

#126

Post by philsnow »

frenchy wrote: post #112
CamperBob2 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could just set the speed limit appropriately, at a level that most drivers will naturally conform to. This optimizes for both expediency and safety, but, sadly, not for revenue, or for readily-available probable cause to pull over essentially anyone the police want to pull over.

> Or you could just set the speed limit appropriately, at a level that most drivers will naturally conform to. The problem is that such a limit would not be a safe one, you would basically be replacing the limit with a sign that posts the rate that people like to drive at.

There is a real difference, in both actual safety and perceived safety, between divided roads and undivided roads with the same number of lanes. Wider lanes seem (and are) safer than narrower lanes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming for more.

Reasonable drivers conform their driving habits to the environment.

Unreasonable drivers should not be allowed to drive.

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

#127

Post by throwaway5752 »

pdkl95 wrote: post #53

> At the self-described “heart” of the company’s monitoring software is Monitor AI, a “powerful artificial intelligence engine” that collects facial detection data [...] to identify “patterns and anomalies associated with cheating.” > "... people who have some sort of facial disfigurement have special challenges; they might get flagged because their face has an unexpected geometry.” So this company is extrapolating "…

It's clearly just looking for people looking at another computer or otherwise glancing elsewhere before entering answers. It's not phrenology. It may not be effective, either, and I don't want to be put in a position of defending this company. But it shouldn't be interpreted as they analyzing if someone looks like a cheater.

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

#128

Post by b0rsuk »

ht_th wrote: post #31
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…

And that would somehow be bad? Maybe the sooner current system explodes, the better? After Thatcher, practical schools were closed and there has been pressure to make as many people earn a university degree as possible. Universities are lowering standards and churning out people that have no business studying at a university. Most people go to a university because that's what society, and employers, expect.

How many students do you think Plato, Aristotle, Jesus etc. had? Teach the brightest and the ones with genuine interest in the subject (I don't use the word "passion" because after adoption by corporations it no longer seems to mean anything). The rest will be fine with a high school/secondary school education. Most people retain only a fraction of that knowledge anyway.

Maybe it's time to stop treating (higher) education like an assembly line?

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

#129

Post by chillwaves »

frenchy wrote: post #112
CamperBob2 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could just set the speed limit appropriately, at a level that most drivers will naturally conform to. This optimizes for both expediency and safety, but, sadly, not for revenue, or for readily-available probable cause to pull over essentially anyone the police want to pull over.

> Or you could just set the speed limit appropriately, at a level that most drivers will naturally conform to. The problem is that such a limit would not be a safe one, you would basically be replacing the limit with a sign that posts the rate that people like to drive at.

Do you have any evidence of this?

My understanding is that speed limits have been largely unchanged for the past 50+ years. Car safety, on the other hand, has increased by a great deal.

It seems likely to me that speed limits are conservative when it comes to safety.

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

#130

Post by selectodude »

frenchy wrote: post #112
CamperBob2 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could just set the speed limit appropriately, at a level that most drivers will naturally conform to. This optimizes for both expediency and safety, but, sadly, not for revenue, or for readily-available probable cause to pull over essentially anyone the police want to pull over.

> Or you could just set the speed limit appropriately, at a level that most drivers will naturally conform to. The problem is that such a limit would not be a safe one, you would basically be replacing the limit with a sign that posts the rate that people like to drive at.

The speed limit is (in the USA) supposed to adhere to the 85th percentile rule, that being the speed at which people drive on a free-flowing road with no traffic and no enforcement. Most freeways have speed limits that are probably closer to the 0th percentile than the 85th percentile. I know driving the speed limit on some roads in my neck of the woods would be utterly hazardous.
Post reply on HN