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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

#141

Post by whatshisface »

mumbisChungo wrote: post #107
whatshisface wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It won't solve speed limits as a civic policy issue, but it does solve the specific thing the question was posed to ask: the morass of trouble created by trying to write discrete rules for continuous phenomena.

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

#142

Post by 908B64B197 »

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.

At some point, when GPA is used exclusively to filter-out and rank students instead of as one of the many factors in an application, you get that metrics gamification.

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

#143

Post by brewdad »

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…

We lost power (and internet) 45 seconds before my son's Physics final last spring during remote learning. He had to quickly scramble to take his testing materials outside and used his cell phone to access the exam.

It worked out for him but easily could have been a disaster. We live at the edge of the school boundary and it was a localized outage due to a car hitting a pole, so he was the only student in his class that was affected. Good luck convincing the teacher if you don't have alternate access to the test.

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

#144

Post by hacknat »

I’m skeptical that you could train an DNN (or any AI) to detect cheating except maybe in browser usage patterns, but recognizing facial patterns!? What data set could they possibly have found to detect such a thing and what proof do they even have that it’s detectable?!

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

#145

Post by t-writescode »

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.

Let's roll this back and ask a different question: Are the students learning the material in a way that they can display mastery outside of an exam setting / on the job?

If so, who cares if cheating numbers / grades have been inflating?

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

#146

Post by t-writescode »

TrackerFF wrote: post #38

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…

While some of it may be lazy professors, it may also be that professors don't know how to create exams in this new world, or they're not being given the appropriate resources.

What do you think it would take to bring educators up to this new standard that is very different?

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

#147

Post by dghlsakjg »

RegnisGnaw wrote: post #134
dghlsakjg wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It depends on the subject. I studied computer science and econ.

Computer science: Solve a complex problem in code. Include a git history. Be ready to defend your program design if I get suspicious.

Econ: Long answer question: Pick 5 concepts that we learned about that you think are most important. Explain them as you would to a ten year old.

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

#148

Post by 908B64B197 »

bruceb wrote: post #115
908B64B197 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Folks are doing take-home exam wrong. Caltech had tremendous success with a culture of honesty and take-home exams.

Caltech is also smaller and extremely hard to get into, hardly representative of avg college student.

Moreover, they select students that want to learn, and value honesty.

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

#149

Post by theonemind »

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 problem is that posting a lower limit doesn't really stop most people from driving faster. Then, some people will obey the speed limit and they become hazards. Other people might believe the posted speed limit tells you about the speed you can expect cars to go on the road. It doesn't.

The main safety increase I can see is with respect to commercial trucking. Not all vehicles have the same acceleration and braking ability. But the fact that people just ignore the speed limit is a hard problem.

So, yes, as far as is practical, that's the idea. We just post the speed people are driving at.

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

#150

Post by TheDong »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #127
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.

It's still not far off.

My dad had a pretty severe lazy eye, and I have no doubt eye tracking software would think that he was looking down at his desk constantly.

I stare off into the distance (usually sideways) when I'm thinking.

Those sorts of things are common and barely conscious.

So, what's left for the AI? Trying to detect if people seem nervous? Well, I've got friends who have nervous twitches under normal conditions.

What is normal behavior varies wildly person-to-person. Trying to figure out "is someone glancing somewhere before answering" vs "does someone nod to themselves when they think they got an answer in their head" doesn't sound like something AI can do.

Figuring out "is this person cheating" from a recording of their face sounds pretty close to phrenology. Determining personality from skull-size, determining cheating from facial-motion... they both sound bogus, and like someone's trying to create a correlation that cannot account for the variety of human behaviors and shapes.

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