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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

#131
post #102

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 biome…

Good luck wearing a VR headset for a full 2 hour exam. I get headaches if I wear one for more than 10 minutes, and the weight is uncomfortable and messes with my hair. More surveillance technology is not the solution.

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

#132
post #102

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 biome…

[deleted]

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

#133

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…

> 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. 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 ent…

Absent COVID, institution should have been (and many have been) embracing remote learning anyway.

This should have been an option all along, with out the need for a pandemic to force their hand.

>>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,

This problem has been largely solved for a long time, because as you noted it is generally impossible to give a test to EVERYONE at the same time.

Thus properly written tests will draw a random selection of questions from a larger pool, the ratio between Pool:Questions the better the security. (i.e a 25 question exam using a 50 question pool is not as secure as a 25 question exam using a 200 question pool)

This method is also used for standardized tests given at the same time, as it cuts out the problem of shoulder surfing or other in-person cheating methods.

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

#134

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. 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 submissi…

The problem is COVID. You can’t have a large gathering. So everyone is doing their exam at home.

Please tell me how you would structure such an exam without a proctoring system as described.

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

#135

This reminds of what Filtered.AI does. Except that it does it for some sort of automated job interview. When interviewing through them, I had to install a Chrome Plugin that recorded audio, video, and browsing activity at all moments. But I guess they're just trying to fix the software engineer interview process.

Gross. If someone asked me to install spyware for a job interview I'd blacklist the company as a place I'd never want to work.

Seconded. Who would want to work at a place that installs surveillance-ware on the personal machine of a prospective employee?

If you're technical interview team can't tell that I didn't do technical work myself within about 5 minutes , then there is a lot wrong with your whole organization.

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

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> They can also be confounded by the testee's charisma.

Agreed, but I don't think oral exams are the only type of effective live testing. Nor are live/timed exercises the only way to demonstrate knowledge.

Case studies, short/long form writing and creative exercises are all viable options. The primary concern seems regarding scaling grading and review, which with a little effort and ingenuity is solvable.

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

#138
post #89
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think a lot of people have problems with strictly enforced rules in finance They have problems with it because the rules cost them money, not because it's hard to understand or rigidly enforced. If the rules just resulted in a "transaction declined" they wouldn't really care either way. For instance, I don't think anyone thinks that it's unreasonable for your debit card to get declined if you don't have enough mon…

I think you missed the reference to reordering. In the case referenced, there were 3 transactions on one day, 2 of $10 & 1 of $20. User has $20 in account. Do you take the true chronological order of transactions (10/10/20) & charge 1 fee, or do you go highest to lowest (20/10/10) & charge 2 fees? A bank executive would likely argue why it's 'fair' to charge 2 fees because a business day is the relevant period for a…

Have you considered blockchain? /s

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

#140

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. ;)

The point is to immediately stop them from speeding and causing a big problem. Why is the world would you track them for miles or hours??

The ticket is merely an incentive to not do it in the future.

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