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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

#221

Post by bzbarsky »

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.

One option, if you have a reasonably low student-to-instructor ratio: make it an oral 1-1 exam for each student. A video call with the instructor and the student; you ask questions, they answer. If you have 20-ish students, it will eat up half a work-week or so, which is more work than grading 20 exam papers, but not _that_ much more.

Of course if you have 50 students per instructor this is not going to work...

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

#222

Post by colechristensen »

interestica wrote: post #213
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…

What's most insane to me with a degree system: Everyone who has the same 'degree' could have had wildly different classes. What's the point? Maybe we need to dial it back to more of a 'certificate' based approach? Instead of the letters-beside-your-name, list the completed certificates. And this also gives the opportunity to better upgrade skills in the specific problem area. And maybe it can encourage more interdisc…

I don’t agree with this approach, the biggest value of a university degree is teaching someone how to think and learn in combination with some domain knowledge. Unless you are going for higher degrees, the specialization isn’t of prime importance. i.e. what one engineer/scientist/scholar learns within their field in undergrad compared to another is really not so important for their ability to do things related to that degree. You don’t need to be exclusively prepared for your exact job.

We have accreditation boards to determine what is required for a common base.

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

#223

Post by higerordermap »

cambalache wrote: post #220
JadeNB wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Why does foreign matter?

Because it is another way for OP to say "brown"

Why does everything has to end up into white supremacist vs. SJW crowd arguments?

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

#224

Post by stevesearer »

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…

One professor of mine let us bring books and notes into our written exams knowing that if you didn't actually do any of the readings or take any notes, those resources wouldn't really help you anyway.

But if you had adequately prepared, the books and notes could really help you craft an excellent written response.

In this scenario, it took the focus off memorizing things and instead focused on understanding the content and being able to communicate something worth reading.

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

#225

Post by higerordermap »

justin_oaks wrote: post #24
perched_robin wrote: post #21

Burn the universities to the ground.

Interesting strategy. What after that?

That's a knee jerk reply.

But there's a point to that.

Democratising education is great for literally every industry except education industry itself.

There should be some way to do that.

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

#226

Post by [deleted] »

cambalache wrote: post #220
JadeNB wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Why does foreign matter?

Because it is another way for OP to say "brown"

[deleted]

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

#227

Post by colechristensen »

Analemma_ wrote: post #217
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…

> 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. In defense of the students, they're just following the incentive gradient in front of them. For all the romantic notions about how college should be optimized for exploration and "real learning",…

Oh absolutely, little blame can be fairly put on students, though everyone participates in the system and deserves some (and eventually everyone responsible was a student themselves at one time).

> To fix the universities, you have to fix the incentives

Who better than the universities to drive change? That is sort of their fundamental purpose is it not?

If you need to lead a university around with a carrot, it really has failed to be much of a university.

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

#228

Post by bzbarsky »

ghaff wrote: post #47
ht_th wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Have at most ten to twenty students per teacher. Then the teacher can spend a couple of hours per student to assess their understanding. Unfortunately, in education quantity seems to be prioritized over quality. When you have over 50 students, let alone over 200 hundred, good luck grading authentic open-ended projects or papers in just two weeks. As a result, most tests consists of multiple-choice questions and…

> Then the teacher can spend a couple of hours per student to assess their understanding. That sounds as if you're steering close to a whiteboarding interview which a lot of people will claim isn't great. Take home tests aren't perfect but I had plenty of them in school. And even when I didn't I don't think I had just about any engineering class that didn't assign problem sets that counted for a decent portion of you…

> That sounds as if you're steering close to a whiteboarding interview which a lot of people will claim isn't great.

One major difference is that unlike a whiteboarding interview there are presumably clear expectations as to what one is expected to have learned in the class and therefore what topics the discussion will cover, and at what depth.

Another issue with whiteboarding interviews, specific to computer-related subjects, is being asked to write code on the whiteboard, which is a severely unnatural act in all sorts of ways compared to the way one normally writes code. But an in-person assessment in a proofs-based math class, for example, would not have that problem. Similar for a CS (as opposed to software engineering) class.

And in a software engineering class, the concept of "test" is pretty odd, for the same reasons that whiteboarding interviews are; I'd expect longer-term projects to be closer to the right evaluation tool.

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

#229

Post by oh_sigh »

JadeNB wrote: post #201
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.

> 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. Why does foreign matter?

No legal recourse, and cultural differences. An adult male in Japan propositioning a 13 year old for sex is legal in their current system, whereas that doesn't really fly in America.

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

#230

Post by cowmoo728 »

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?

If you have a linux computer you can boot from usb or a second drive to run windows. That's what I did when I had to take exams using Proctortrack.
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