Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

voiceofsandiego.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 317 posts

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

#191

Post by mikem170 »

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 happened plenty of times before.

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

#192

Post by colechristensen »

visiblink wrote: post #181
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 t…

In a lot of disciplines, open book doesn’t help you solve problems all that much.

It might supply some of the pieces required to solve problems, but the ability to remember all of those pieces by rote vs. looking them up is really orthogonal to the ability to apply them to solving a novel problem. Indeed the ability to find the requisite information to solve a problem in a timely manner is an important skill in itself and more accurately represents the real world problem solving one is preparing for.

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

#193

Post by schoolornot »

colechristensen wrote: post #189

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 imp…

Got a BS/MS in CompSci in my twenties when I was immature as a person, now doing online classes for a non-tech major. As an "adult student" the system seems 10x more broken than it was when I was a high school graduate.

Being young and tuition-free it was easy to grind through the material just worrying about the next test in the next class. Now, here I am as a tricenarian trying to relax and understand hundreds of pages of anatomy material while everyone else seems to just binge seems so asinine. After 75 pages of reading, exams continue to be a black box. Here I am paying for instruction and the professors can't be bothered to tell me what's important to know for the career let alone the test.

I got one teacher to chat off the record and he basically said to "get through it." What a disservice to students. Why are there still weeding-out classes? How many doctors, surgeons, programmers, engineers would there be in the world if it wasn't for these classes? The Montessori education system and the like seem so superior. College should be pass/fail.

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

#194

Post by ARandomerDude »

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.

What do you mean by weird?

Sick, twisted? That's the complaint exactly.

Unlikely? Too many things like this happen to dismiss it.

Something else?

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

#195

Post by willhslade »

waterhouse wrote: post #172
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. ;)

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 th…

Momentum based tickets. The heavier your vehicle, total passengers and load, the higher the fine.

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

#196

Post by pushrax »

Anon1096 wrote: post #170
withinboredom wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just mute your mic in hardware?

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

#197

Post by foota »

colechristensen wrote: post #189

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 imp…

Fwiw I went to a no-name state school and found university to be invaluable. Classes, schoolwork, and exams gave me something to focus on and build the skills that I use routinely today. I believe my school was fairly balanced wrt the reasonableness of work expected and exams, but was overall a fairly typical education. I guess some people will benefit more than others from the enforced structure.

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

#198

Post by Ninjinka »

foota wrote: post #197
colechristensen wrote: post #189

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 imp…

Fwiw I went to a no-name state school and found university to be invaluable. Classes, schoolwork, and exams gave me something to focus on and build the skills that I use routinely today. I believe my school was fairly balanced wrt the reasonableness of work expected and exams, but was overall a fairly typical education. I guess some people will benefit more than others from the enforced structure.

I didn't see anything in his comment that implied university wasn't valuable.

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

#199

Post by lazyasciiart »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #117
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…

> 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…

In a college scenario, perhaps you can say that dealing with problems is the students responsibility, but for k-12 schools it is the responsibility of the school to provide education even to children with no internet or headphones.

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

#200

Post by lazyasciiart »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #152
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.

>The problem is that such a limit would not be a safe one, According to who? The minority who wants the limit set elsewhere. Things like "what speed is safe and reasonable" are matters of social consensus. The "experts" can pontificate all they want and the vocal minority can gripe all they want but the median or average person and society at large is always going to be right on matters of social consensus. It's a ta…

According to dead pedestrians, mostly.
Post reply on HN