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College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

voiceofsandiego.org

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

#171

Post by posguy »

syshum wrote: post #133
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

PragmaticPulp doesn't seem to have a grasp on how college systems work. From what I have seen UW, Oregon State, Seattle Colleges, etc were already employing question banks and timed test windows rather than resorting to poorly functioning half measures like Respondus LockDown Browser and its ilk.

Many colleges were already fully capable of distance learning in multiple forms, whether through correspondence courses (what WGU often pitches, complete the project or test and bypass the class, though some of their certificate partners abuse test takers with Respondus or similar) or online learning with systems like Canvas.

Decent colleges offer a mix of these, I can attest to the quality of these programs at Seattle Colleges (specifically North Seattle College & Seattle Central). There is little value in building a panopticon of surveillance in higher education, especially when these divert resources that would otherwise enable students to better master the subject.

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

#172

Post by waterhouse »

whatshisface wrote: post #87
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…

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. ;)

So, on a 65mph highway, driving at 66mph for an hour has the same fine as driving at 125mph for one minute? (Minus speedup and slowdown time.) Don't think a linear scale would make sense.

I'm not sure if any scale would make sense, though. The true thing to be fined for should be "driving unsafely", of course, whether that means driving too fast, braking suddenly, swerving, changing lanes without warning, etc. The thing is, the unsafety of all those things depends in very large part on the cars around you and sometimes on the road. (Driving at 100mph on a straight, flat freeway with no cars nearby is safer than weaving between a bunch of 65-70mph cars to maintain a speed of 80mph.)

But it would be really hard to come up with an objective algorithm to calculate how unsafe a rule violation is, and even harder to implement it without a vast array of cameras. So ... they implement an enforceable set of rules even if it's not a good one. (On a related note, it bothers me that driving with more than some arbitrary blood alcohol level is illegal, but driving after e.g. staying awake all night is not, even though the latter is worse[1]. Likely this is partly because checking BAC can be done fairly directly with cheap equipment, while checking how recently someone slept is... I dunno, there might be ways to mostly do that with good equipment, but I assume it's currently impractical.)

[1] "Being awake for at least 24 hours is equal to having a blood alcohol content of 0.10%. This is higher than the legal limit (0.08% BAC) in all states." https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/about_sleep/drowsy_driving.html

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

#173

Post by gruez »

RC_ITR wrote: post #89
gruez wrote: 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…

> They would also argue that it is unfair to lay out complex rules like this in an opaque way because of the asymmetrical information advantage that a bank has. They wouldn't complain that the rule was enforced per se, they would complain that the rule (which is plainly anti-consumer) exists.

Doesn't that justify my point? If we go back to the speeding example, if the rule was that you can't go over the speed limit (within the capabilities of the measuring device), then everyone would drive a little more slowly. The only reason people 5-10 miles above the speed limit is that 5-10 miles over is generally accepted to be "fine". If anything strict enforcement of speed limits reduce the amount of room for abuse by law enforcement (eg. pulling over someone for going 1 mph over).

Also, at the risk of victim blaming, maybe it isn't such a good idea to have your deposits/withdraws lined up on the same day? Deposits can get delayed/withheld, and withdraws can be moved up unexpectedly. Leaving zero days between a deposit and a withdraw is just asking for trouble. I agree that reordering the transactions from largest to smallest is probably greed motivated, but at the same time expecting it to behave differently is optimistic at best and foolish at worst. It's the equivalent of relying on undefined behavior in programming (eg. assuming that reading one byte after the end of an array wouldn't cause a fault).

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

#174

Post by analog31 »

ebiester wrote: post #109
kart23 wrote: post #90

Voice of San Diego has been doing some great reporting. This is yet another example. Profs who use these things are examples of teachers who just don't care enough to revamp their courses to involve more project, critical-thinking assignments, or exams where cheating won't help. They don't want to do the work to adjust the course for remote learning, and just give the course that they always teach, and do whatever it…

What is the hourly rate that you would expect for a professor? Consider that a tenure track professor (ignoring adjuncts) making $60,000 is expected to teach 3-4 classes, write original peer-reviewed research, and perform "service" (which takes the form of helping the university run itself, external speaking events, and advising.) Each individual class takes 15-20 hours a week for a course they haven't taught before…

What professors? The proportion of college classes being taught by professors is below 50% and dwindling. Most college teaching is done by adjuncts.

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

#175

Post by waterhouse »

philsnow wrote: post #126
frenchy wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> There is a real difference, in both actual safety and perceived safety, between divided roads and undivided roads ... Wider lanes seem (and are) safer than narrower lanes.

> [Wiki] Traffic calming can include the following engineering measures ... Narrowing traffic lanes ... Converting one-way streets into two-way streets forces opposing traffic into close proximity, which requires more careful driving

What is happening here? Did the engineers forget that they were supposed to optimize for safety, and instead optimized for getting people to slow down? Does the net effect of this improve safety, or worsen it?

If everyone drives as fast as they can while meeting some perceived safety level, then does that mean these efforts are unlikely to affect safety and merely to slow everyone down? Is the best set of measures the maximally deceptive set, which looks as dangerous as possible while being as safe as possible?

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

#176

Post by bzb6 »

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.

It worked even finer for those who paid someone else to do the test for them.

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

#177

Post by bpodgursky »

My wife teaches CS (remotely right now) and I feel like a lot of the commenters here don't really understand what "cheating" consists of right now. The common vectors are:

- Finding an answer online (on Chegg), and copy-pasting it. For homework, this is super common. Unless you build every assignment from scratch each quarter, there will be an answer available online.

- Paying someone to take the exam for you.

"Let them use wikipedia" resolves like 0% of the problems people actually run into when teaching remote classes. The problems are when people cruise through a class with 0 actual effort, through a combination of looking up answers online, and getting someone to just sit exams in your place.

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

#179

Post by madhadron »

For those of us who went to University of Virginia, this seems truly weird. I was allowed to take my exam anywhere I wanted. In physics, a lot of us would just head up to the much more comfortable tables in the physics library to take our exams. If someone walked in wanting to talk, we would say, "Pledge" (that is, we were under pledge not to cheat on the assignment) and they would say "OK" and leave.

And then there were the take home, open book, open notes, you have three days to finish this exams...

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

#180

Post by ilaksh »

I haven't been buried on HN for awhile so I will go ahead and present my opinion.

It's clear that the proper execution of anti-cheating is critical to avoiding a situation where the cure is worse than the disease.

Having said that, I do think that it is needed and will improve college efficacy.

Cheating in college has been an epidemic, with a majority of students surveyed saying they have cheated, and a significant percentage of those saying that it's acceptable.

If the courses are too hard or curriculum irrelevant or course loads too high, then those problems should be fixed. Cheating is not the answer.

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