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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

#161

Post by munk-a »

silly-silly wrote: post #153
brewdad wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Are modern teachers really that robotic that they dont understand that 'things happen' outside of their limited domain of expectations ?

I think this is a pretty big miss on where the issues with these sorts of systems are - I'm sure some teachers are phoning it in but the student in the article (Molina) was immediately awarded an F and then had to go through a two month appeal process to get that undone. Once he was talking to a person things moved pretty quickly but the backlog of cases results in a lot of unnecessary stress on students.

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

#162

Post by smabie »

908B64B197 wrote: post #106
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.

Uh, okay. This is kind of a weird take on the whole thing.

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

#163

Post by smabie »

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.

People like to drive at the rate that is safe. Humans are pretty good at measuring risk.

I've driven on many roads in countries that don't have any speed limits. The overwhelming majority are driving a speed that makes sense given the road, driving conditions, etc.

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

#164

Post by munk-a »

mshumi wrote: post #102
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 biome…

My wife, who has issues with motion sickness, would absolutely love this approach - she'd be effectively barred from taking exams due to getting headaches and throwing up whenever she attempted it.

Anyways, I'd prefer an approach that led to less invasive face tracking - even if it suffered from a lower detection rate.

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

#165

Post by godelski »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #139

I wonder if all disciplines have this problem. Most of my engineering higher level classes were open everything not electronic. If you don't know how to tackle the problem, you're not going to finish on time.

This is honestly the better solution. In my upper division physics classes most exams were take home.

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

#166

Post by toomuchtodo »

withinboredom wrote: post #158
low_key wrote: post #108

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 wou…

Here’s the thing, if you want to cheat, you’ll find a way to cheat. This won’t stop anyone, it just stops casual cheating at a pretty hefty price. Hell, just reading this article, I thought of various ways by having someone off screen listening to you read aloud and a projector mounted after the test starts, on the ceiling by another person who’s off screen. You could have a kvm switch to a whole different computer,…

Picture in picture monitor with multiple sources. Credit to someone who mentioned this in a previous thread.

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

#167

Post by ericd »

proverbialbunny wrote: post #119
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…

When I was in college in 2005 I had classes that could be taken online. When tested we were given a deadline, usually 24 hours after the test had been handed out. We could start whenever we wanted, take breaks, work throughout the day, as long as we had it in before the deadline. It seemed to work fine.

Yeah, take home tests were awesome. The problems on the ones I remember were ridiculously hard (specifically thinking about an algorithms take home that we were given a week for), but that spurred us to do some of our best thinking and learning.

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

#168

Post by scollet »

souprock wrote: post #97
happynacho wrote: post #12

Comp Sci majors are the ones that are definitely beating the system though. Speaking from experience.

Ah yes. Did you use Ghidra, IDA Pro, Binary Ninja, Hopper Disassembler, Radare2/Cutter, or something else? How many bytes did you have to modify? Put it on your resume.

Sounds like intercepting the video buffer in kernel-space would be a good start.

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

#169

Post by vangelis »

smabie wrote: post #162
908B64B197 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Uh, okay. This is kind of a weird take on the whole thing.

It's a valid complaint.

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

#170

Post by Anon1096 »

withinboredom wrote: post #158
low_key wrote: post #108

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 wou…

Here’s the thing, if you want to cheat, you’ll find a way to cheat. This won’t stop anyone, it just stops casual cheating at a pretty hefty price. Hell, just reading this article, I thought of various ways by having someone off screen listening to you read aloud and a projector mounted after the test starts, on the ceiling by another person who’s off screen. You could have a kvm switch to a whole different computer,…

Most proctoring software that records the student would trivially root out the cheating method you mentioned about reading aloud the questions to someone else. They usually record audio as well, and if the software detects significant microphone input, will flag the test.
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