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Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

baneproctoring.com

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Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#111

Post by christophilus »

amitport wrote: post #53
christophilus wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spitballing here, but maybe exams need to be reconsidered. What if instead, the professor has a 1:1 conversation with each student, Socrates-style? You’d know pretty quickly whether or not the student was familiar with the material, and if not, where they were weak and needed more focus. Maybe systematizing everything about education is the wrong approach.

Of course, this, in the rare cases it is applicable. In my current course we have 400 students with 3 Prof. ... So it is not really applicable. Another thing to note is that undergrades' first job usually depends on having good grades. Some people will get lower grades and those will complain to the point of suing the university into having a more seemingly fair and unbiased process. (Note actually fair, but I'm pret…

I thought of this when posting. Honestly, universities are the educational equivalent of industrial farming. We need a rethink.

When I was in university (some time ago!), it was always the large courses that were easiest to game. They were also generally the subjects I was least interested in.

My small comp sci courses were amazing in contrast. Easily worth the cost of admission. I think the education system would be much improved if we had fewer, but significantly smaller courses.

So, you pay the same price, but instead of 100 courses of massive size, you get 25 courses of small size.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#113

Post by bitL »

ShroudedNight wrote: post #44
bitL wrote: post #36

Algo for teachers affected by cheating: 1) make questions brutal and unique (compared to previous year or current groups) if possible 2) make everything open-book 3) set a tough time limit 4) curve the results to a desired grade distribution (that is often imposed from above anyway) 5) use software that can the catch most obvious frauds (i.e. 360 degree room scanning, ban use of phones/second computers etc.) 6) if th…

Do you have personal experience finding success with #6? My limited experience with detecting code plagiarism has been that detecting re-use that has been non-trivially obfuscated is a rather difficult problem.

One of the Top 10 CS universities I studied at had some system for that, obviously it couldn't catch somebody who was a good programmer and could reshuffle AST with properly renamed variables. But it was still helpful for less-gifted students who cheated. Typically teachers had to set a threshold of similarity for their given assignments over which it was automatically reporting student names. The software scrapped GitHub as well.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#114

Post by moron4hire »

nicbou wrote: post #108
captainmuon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially at universities I don't see the reason for invasive e-proctoring. When I was studying (physics, early 2000s in Germany), we didn't even have a honor system, we had the assumption that everybody is there to learn something. If you cheat, you harm yourself. Progress was assessed by weekly excercise sheets where you were encouraged to work together with others, and to learn how to use the library to find solu…

I agree with you, but at the same time, it diminishes the value of a degree, because it no longer certifies that meet certain requirements.

They already don't certify competence.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#115

Post by 10000truths »

mkl wrote: post #109
accurrent wrote: post #87

When I was TAing last year we had to proctor the students via zoom (trust me its not fun for anyone). Quite frankly I found different professors approached things in different ways. All the exams were made open book, because its impossible to figure out if people are looking at their notes. One of the profs decided to make it impossible to cheat by basically making the exam so hard that even the A+ students would hav…

I think making the exam really hard is more likely to backfire and push people to cheat. One of the main drivers of cheating is the perception of unfairness. The time limitation is not really an obstacle if you're organised, just divide and conquer doing a subset of the questions each.

Almost every college and university course I took would curve grades to adjust for difficulty. I’ve even had professors tell me that top scorers in a test were only expected to get x% of questions correct.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#116

Post by undfg »

notenoughhorses wrote: post #92
undfg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We employed the method of mixing the order of questions, not giving question titles, and having a pool of subtly different questions (a negation or a different constant slipped in) What an awful burden to put on the shoulders of the already overworked and underpaid professors.

I pay over $6,000 a semester to attend a reasonably-priced state university. While the professors may be overworked and underpaid, from a student perspective, for the money I give the institution, the institution can invest a little in systems that do all this automatically. International students pay significantly more, and there are often 100 students or more in a class. So it’s also not a great solution to put the…

I posted this during EU time; I understand they are ripping you off, but your comment does not apply to what I'm saying.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#117

Post by heisenbit »

People who have to cheat to get through university and succeed doing so have cheating skills to succeed without having to invest the time and money for a degree.

People who would pass but cheat anyways because they believe grades matter are stupid enough that they will fail in any job.

We are all poorer for the importance we assign to grades and the resulting design for testability of education

Anyone here giving anything on grades when hiring? I know I never did.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#118

Post by hugey010 »

christophilus wrote: post #48
Negitivefrags wrote: post #6

I can see why universities want to use a system like this. A friend of mine is a University lecturer for physics and one of his students gave him an invite to the discord channel where half his students are in there sharing all the answers during the final exam. He basically told me there is nothing he can do about it. He talked to the head of department and they basically said if you have proof of specific people ch…

Spitballing here, but maybe exams need to be reconsidered. What if instead, the professor has a 1:1 conversation with each student, Socrates-style? You’d know pretty quickly whether or not the student was familiar with the material, and if not, where they were weak and needed more focus. Maybe systematizing everything about education is the wrong approach.

This is how technical screens are done, as a conversation. Cheating happens, but it's blatantly obvious.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#119

Post by ttonelli »

basisword wrote: post #103
gambiting wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, I think the problem is elsewhere. Where I'm from(Poland) cheating is rampant and universities have absolutely no trouble kicking people out over it. Got caught cheating? Good bye, apply again next year. It doesn't lead to litigation or messy PR. Maybe it's because all universities are free to attend so no one can argue that they paid for something they aren't getting - all they are losing is their own time.

I went to university a bit later in life. When I was in high school smartphones weren’t a thing yet and cheating in exams was difficult and not common. At university cheating seemed rampant and easy. It was easy to spot the potential cheaters but not easy to prove they were cheating so they got away with it. You just go to the bathroom (in a long exam they can’t exactly stop you from this) and you have all your notes…

Maybe making questions that you have to think about instead of just looking up the answer would help?

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#120

Post by maeln »

maweki wrote: post #2

We employed the method of mixing the order of questions, not giving question titles, and having a pool of subtly different questions (a negation or a different constant slipped in) in order to vastly increase the amount of necessary communication to collaborate. We had the students turn on their webcams just to discourage them sitting in the same room, which basically would negate our former efforts. Neither did we f…

I teached a C class during coronavirus lockdown in France and I also did something of the sort (having different question per student, mixing their order, etc).

But I think, most importantly, I put a lot of emphasis on group work & home work. This has also its own issues. I like to do group homework because I believe that in the real world, you rarely work alone, and group work allow to have more fun project than what you can do in a 1-2h exam. On the other hand, I know some student hate it because there is always a slacker in every group. And home work is also an issue because not every student has time to work outside of school sadly. I try to give time during the classes for them to work on their homework but it is not all the time possible (limited number of hour for the whole course).

Overall, I hate grading and exams, I consider that my job is teaching, not grading, but this doesn't really work in the real world sadly.

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