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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

#181

Post by visiblink »

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.

I haven't used any essay-checking or exam-taking software yet.

Even so, based on what I've heard from my immediate superior, I'm flagging somewhere between 10-20% of all of the plagiarism and cheating cases in my faculty.

It's not hard to detect (generally good writing mixed with bad on essays / the repetition of similar phrases by different students on exams), but it does take a bit of time to confirm and you need to write a some policy-consistent boilerplate to make it simple to take action.

Some here have suggested that we need to write the equivalent of "open book" exams for the online environment. I'm not sure that would be beneficial. It's still important to exercise your mental faculties. People who can recall information and reason for themselves are still more valuable than those who can cut and paste. Or to put it another way, you need to understand the math in order to wield a calculator well.

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

#182

Post by throwaway201103 »

posguy wrote: post #171
syshum wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (w…

Most colleges offered correspondence courses in the pre-internet era. You did everything by mail. There was no proof that you did the work yourself; it was just a matter of trust. I took a required writing course that way because it never worked out to schedule it as a regular class. I think for some of the classes that had exams you maybe went to a local exam center where a proctor would check your ID and you'd take the exam. I don't know what they did if there wasn't an exam center conveniently nearby.

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

#183

Post by throwaway201103 »

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…

What if you only have linux computers at home and can't run their spyware?

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

#184

Post by da_big_ghey »

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.

I remember some math classes that did it well: send students home with original assignments to do proofs. I guess it's theoretically open to having someone else do the assignment, but so are lots of other things. Because I could just sit and attack the problems like problems, without massive time pressure and my every action monitored, I enjoyed those assignments and exams.

Similarly, in CS classes, I always enjoyed assignments where I got to go write a program to do something. Again, it could be cheated, but so could lots of other things.

The fact that some students cheat shouldn't ruin classes for everyone else. Since cheaters do lower the value of a degree, maybe universities should start taking legal action against them instead. Provide a huge disincentive without messing everything up for the majority of students.

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

#185

Post by ouid »

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…

The main problem is that receiving a credential and receiving an education are very different things that we do at the same time out of tradition and convenience. When testing was easy, it made sense to lump it in with teaching, but now that testing is impossible, I say we ditch it for the time being.

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

#186

Post by uhartelightning »

throwaway201103 wrote: post #183
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…

What if you only have linux computers at home and can't run their spyware?

This is precisely what I said to one of my professors this semester and thankfully they were reasonable and didn't use Respondus for either of the exams like they had planned.

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

#188

Post by waterhouse »

silly-silly wrote: post #156
chillwaves wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I imagine because they are catering to the lowest common denominator, the human behind the wheel.

I suspect it has more to do with the incentives faced by those who set the speed limits.

I don't know exactly how it goes. If it's chosen (or heavily influenced) by politicians, I suspect politicians can win some votes by saying they'll improve safety by lowering speed limits (particularly around schools or other places where children might be); while they'd be less likely to win as many votes by saying they'll raise the limits (exposing them to the risk of their opponents calling them reckless/irresponsible). If it's chosen by non-elected officials, that's less of an issue, but something like it may still be there; or it may be that raising the limit and then there being a fatal accident will damage your career, while lowering the limit and irritating everyone will not damage your career.

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

#189

Post by colechristensen »

Fuck grades.

They were already a problem in universities and this is their final and worst form.

University systems have the major problem that a significant portion of students are only there for a degree, and their participation is playing the game in order to get that piece of paper, and the GPA number rating them.

The core of this problem is the question “will this be on the exam?”

Testing of course can be an important part of learning, but making that the metric by which you decide to hand out degrees substantially damages the value of testing as a teaching tool, and damages the value of a university as a place for research and learning.

Another way needs to be found to sort students into degree worthiness.

Raising humans for the first quarter of their lives in a dystopian police state is not what anybody should strive for. We need to figure out how to measure people less.

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