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EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

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Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#261

Post by 101008 »

samkater wrote: post #248
soperj wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is silly. Make the exams open book and then the only thing you really need to worry about is the correct student taking the exam. If you're testing based on memorization of things in this day in age, then the course is useless.

I would add some nuance to this view. For nearly every undergraduate course I agree - the ability of knowing where to look for resources in a particular subject matter, synthesizing the available information to solve a reasonably novel problem, and presenting the information in a coherent way is a skill/art that should be one of the primary goals of the education. For advanced degrees, though, I'm not so sure. I expe…

My experience with people who are PhD is that they know things you expect to memorize just because they use it a lot. They learn formulas or whatever not because they spend 5 hours memorizing it, but because they needed it once, so they looked it up. The second time they needed it, they weren't 100% sure, so they looked it up again just in case. Every time they search for it, they need it less and less and at the end they know it by memory. That's how you learn most of the stuff these days and that should be for everything. Natural learning. Why memorizing things you dont need to know?If you use it often enough, you'll end up memorizing it. Same for concepts or any type of knowledge.

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#262

Post by c7DJTLrn »

tingol wrote: post #201
c7DJTLrn wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, screw those people for... needing to pay the bills.

Someone working at a high profile software company has problems paying bills? Yeah sure...

Even if nobody wanted to work for them, they'd just offer even better salaries until people did.

Punish the politicians who allow this unethical software. Punish the CEOs and managers who make it happen. But don't punish the guys on the ground just making a living.

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#263

Post by devoutsalsa »

dartharva wrote: post #2

I think the bigger issue should be how the University came to choose something like Proctorio. This has been the case with many colleges around the world; disconnected or ignorant authorities keep signing up to whatever the SaaS salesman pitches to them, without vetting the company's background and records, and not listening to the affected parties in their arrogance. My own college struggled with online exams, and t…

There's probably a market opportunity to replace testing w/ something better. Some actual measurement of competence that's win/win/win for the students, instructors, and universities. Maybe a company come up with an interesting idea & get funding YC to scale the solution to that hard problem!

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#264

Post by PragmaticPulp »

kbenson wrote: post #241
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think people here are underestimating the volume of cheating in school. Not defending Protorio here, but I didn't really understand how rampant cheating was, either, until I became friends with someone who works at a University. Growing up, my friends and I would never dream of cheating and would fear the consequences of getting caught, so the entire concept feels foreign. We also grew up in the era of in-person…

We can't stress the importance of school and how it will affect the rest of their life, and then not expect them to do whatever it takes to make sure they do well there. For some, it might be a matter of making sure they have an excellent record, for others, it might a case of keeping them in the system at all if they didn't get there though merit, or feel like they can't keep up enough to stick around. I imagine the…

> We can't stress the importance of school and how it will affect the rest of their life, and then not expect them to do whatever it takes to make sure they do well there.

That's basically what happened here: The school expected students to cheat and looked for solutions to address it.

I think it's very important that universities have very significant consequences when students are caught cheating. Cheaters don't generally start by hiring people to write their papers and take tests for them. They test the waters with little cheats here and there, pushing the boundaries over time.

If Universities made examples out of students who were 100% confirmed cheating beyond reasonable doubt, the amount of cheating would decline significantly. Instead, we're stuck with this game of half-baked anti-cheating systems which some students approach as game.

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#265

Post by LegitShady »

ModernMech wrote: post #226
LegitShady wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sound like a good teacher. My experience at university was that the good teachers were a minority. Most would do their research and the minimum for teaching.

I'm teaching faculty, so I don't do research. Research faculty are right to prioritize their research -- they are incentivized to do so by administration. Their tenure is predicated almost 100% on their research output and the grant money they bring in. Teaching ability is an afterthought when it comes to tenure and promotion. It doesn't make them bad people or bad at their job, it's just that their job isn't really…

I understand the incentives, but teaching is part of their job even if they need to do research, and from the student perspective they are bad professors. If all I needed was to learn it from the book/youtube/internet and take tests, there would be no need for professors and they wouldn't exist.

I've had professors that did more damage by 'teaching' (I use that term loosely) than if they had just said 'learn it from the book/online and show up for labs/tests/exams'. Mostly it was because they had no idea how teaching worked.

It's a very faculty-centric view because from a student's perspective, the teaching is 99% of the school. Very few will go on to research. They come to school to learn and earn a degree. If the University cannot provide good teachers, they are not a good university. If a professor cannot teach, they are not a good professor. That isn't a moral judgement, its just the subjective judgement from the other side of the school-desk.

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#266

Post by Miraste »

samkater wrote: post #248
soperj wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is silly. Make the exams open book and then the only thing you really need to worry about is the correct student taking the exam. If you're testing based on memorization of things in this day in age, then the course is useless.

I would add some nuance to this view. For nearly every undergraduate course I agree - the ability of knowing where to look for resources in a particular subject matter, synthesizing the available information to solve a reasonably novel problem, and presenting the information in a coherent way is a skill/art that should be one of the primary goals of the education. For advanced degrees, though, I'm not so sure. I expe…

It depends on the degree. If you're becoming a medical doctor you'll have to do a ton of memorization, but in other fields doctorates are the least memorization-intensive part of your education, because the focus is on generation and synthesis, on the assumption that you've already learned the rote knowledge. You don't need to memorize anything to write a dissertation but that doesn't make it easy (and you'll end up memorizing everything anyway).

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#267

Post by soperj »

isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote: post #249
soperj wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is silly. Make the exams open book and then the only thing you really need to worry about is the correct student taking the exam. If you're testing based on memorization of things in this day in age, then the course is useless.

Well, that's the problem. Someone can read out the question and receive results from someone else or be actively sharing their screen. It doesn't really matter what kind of test you have.

Honestly, any tests I took that were open book were long enough that if you were constantly looking things up you'd never finish. Same would occur if you were talking to someone and they were having to relay the info.

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#268

Post by ladams »

samkater wrote: post #248
soperj wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is silly. Make the exams open book and then the only thing you really need to worry about is the correct student taking the exam. If you're testing based on memorization of things in this day in age, then the course is useless.

I would add some nuance to this view. For nearly every undergraduate course I agree - the ability of knowing where to look for resources in a particular subject matter, synthesizing the available information to solve a reasonably novel problem, and presenting the information in a coherent way is a skill/art that should be one of the primary goals of the education. For advanced degrees, though, I'm not so sure. I expe…

I'm a physics grad student, and this is completely wrong. The purpose of graduate classes (at least in physics) is to teach you how to navigate a the standard reference texts. For example, the main thing I learned in my grad E&M class was where to find information in Jackson (aka "Classical Electrodynamics"). Classical mechanics was a mix of Goldsmith and Landau and Lifshitz. Quantum mechanics used Sakauri. And statistical mechanics used Pathria. Also, referring to these classic texts by author is very common, much moreso than by title.

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#269

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

fxtentacle wrote: post #5

In case you don't know who Proctorio is: (like me) Apparently it's a supervision software that students are forced to install on their private computer and (as expected) it'll do its worst to invade your privacy and flag "suspicious" things, based on which the university might punish you. "Suspicious" here means wearing glasses [3] or looking around in the room or blinking too much [4] or having eye and/or skin color…

>looking around in the room or blinking too much

>And I tend to close my eyes a lot because it helps me visualize the problem

Nvidia has added eye-correction feature to it's Maxine platform(SDK with set of ML features for video conferencing) it can correct our eyes in real-time to show that we're looking at the camera even when we didn't. When I first saw it's demo the first thing which came to my mind was these proctoring tools[1]. It's a matter of time before all major video conferencing tools add these features or 3rd party plugins/hacks which enable it.

I'm not against these proctoring tools, Especially since there are not many options during lockdowns but considering what's at stake they deserve all the scrutiny they can get and if a company threatens with lawsuits for genuine criticisms it tells a lot about their business practice; Sadly this seems to be very common in the e-education sector(Checkout unicorns claiming to have placed 10 year old in Google after taking their 'coding' class and the retribution faced by activists for showcasing the lies).

[1]https://twitter.com/heavyinfo/status/1381831802315177989

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#270

Post by [deleted] »

samkater wrote: post #248
soperj wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is silly. Make the exams open book and then the only thing you really need to worry about is the correct student taking the exam. If you're testing based on memorization of things in this day in age, then the course is useless.

I would add some nuance to this view. For nearly every undergraduate course I agree - the ability of knowing where to look for resources in a particular subject matter, synthesizing the available information to solve a reasonably novel problem, and presenting the information in a coherent way is a skill/art that should be one of the primary goals of the education. For advanced degrees, though, I'm not so sure. I expe…

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