251–260 of 317 posts
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Just mute your mic in hardware?
A lot of proctoring software will flag you for that as well. Then when the professor reviews the footage it will be obvious that you're talking to someone off screen.
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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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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 p…
It sounds like you are in a pre-med class? My SO once TA'd for a pre-med class. Holy hell, the students were something else as compared to other disciplines. They literally would not leave my SO's office until they had argued up their grades on every assignment. My SO had to get security to escort them out, I am not joking. If they forgot, say, to multiply by 2 and then got the answer wrong, they still argued for ful…
One apparently needs close to a 4.0 GPA, plus many extracurricular volunteer hours to qualify for medical school, plus glowing letters of recommendation. I also overheard a number of stories about pre-med students intentionally sabotaging other students by misleading them to think that private group tutoring sessions (to study for the MCAT) had been canceled.
That experience helped form my beliefs about the driver high cost of medical care in the US.
Specifically, that there is no shortage of people who are willing and qualified to be medical doctors, but that doctors and medical schools collude to artificially limit the supply of credentialed medical doctors as a means to increase doctor salaries.
As you alluded to, I think it also creates an adverse selection problem, where the people who become doctors are mostly not those with excellent diagnosis skills or bedside manor or ethics, but those who are the most cutthroat and desperate to get into a high-paying career.
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…
School boards here, and I'm sure many other places, decided to nix grades from March onwards after the pandemic hit. The announcement wasn't made until closer to the end of the term. I remember some parents being furious claiming that their kids "wasted their time" on remote school if a grade wasn't being assigned.
I've had this discussion many times, and as a university drop out, my opinion has always been similar to yours. One thing I've learned is that debating the merits of the higher education system is right up there with religion and politics in terms of topics to avoid at a dinner party.
People take great pride in their educations (read: pieces of paper). They can take great offense to the institutions and systems that produced those pieces of paper being challenged. These values have been passed on and hardened through generations. This is the first thing that needs to change before there's meaningful reform, and it's going to take time.
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What if you only have linux computers at home and can't run their spyware?
I've never dealt with this software but when I did my CS degree, several of the applications we worked with throughout the course were distributed as Windows binaries. If you'd ever done homework or study at all, you don't only have Linux.
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…
This seems like a false equivalence; most employers don't use surveillance software to ensure their remote employees keep their microphone and webcam on, continue looking at the screen at all times, etc. One of the benefits of working from home is that your privacy is _increased_ compared to working an office; if everyone needed to allow their boss or HR or whoever to demand microphone and webcam access to me as they worked (and no, this is NOT comparable to Zoom meetings), then of course they wouldn't be praising work as much.
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I had a lot of mental health issues and I registered with my school's accessibility services. I was surprised I could get extra time on tests, extensions, etc. so easily. Unfortunately, none of those accommodations were even helpful for me. An extension would just make me fall further behind on other work, and I didn't have test anxiety or a disability which would prevent me from taking tests quickly (though I was of…
Getting rid of accommodations in general is not the right thing to do, and I am very glad that you were able to get the sorts of support you actually needed, as opposed to just the cookie-cutter extra time on exams. That said, giving time and a half or double time on exams to anyone who takes the time and money to track down a compliant enough medical professional to diagnose them with ADHD is not the right thing eit…
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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 (…
I'm not sure you understood the example that GP gave; there was no mention of withdrawals. The idea was that you have $20 in your account, you buy something for $10, then later buy something else for $10, and then later buy something for $20, and the bank reverses the order of applying the transaction and says that you made two purchases after your account was empty, so you get charged two overdraft fees.
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…
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It's clearly just looking for people looking at another computer or otherwise glancing elsewhere before entering answers. It's not phrenology. It may not be effective, either, and I don't want to be put in a position of defending this company. But it shouldn't be interpreted as they analyzing if someone looks like a cheater.
It's still not far off. My dad had a pretty severe lazy eye, and I have no doubt eye tracking software would think that he was looking down at his desk constantly. I stare off into the distance (usually sideways) when I'm thinking. Those sorts of things are common and barely conscious. So, what's left for the AI? Trying to detect if people seem nervous? Well, I've got friends who have nervous twitches under normal co…