Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring • Hacker News Board

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#121

Post by mvanaltvorst » Fri, Jul 09, 2021, 12:03 PM UTC

MereInterest wrote: post #104

mvanaltvorst wrote: post #52

Me and my roommate are first year undergraduate students. We do different bachelors; I have taken all my tests this year with online proctoring, my roommate has had all his tests without online proctoring. The proctoring process is actually pretty simple: I have a Google Chrome extension installed that I enable when I have to take an exam. It takes 5 extra minutes before the exam: I have to show my identification, th…

> Similarly with my room, you can hide everything that would breach your privacy before the exam starts. The need to hide things is itself an effect of privacy having been breached. Privacy isn't just to keep information secret, but also to provide a space in which you can be comfortable because it is your own space. Needing to hide things away is a reaction to privacy being breached, not a way to preserve privacy.

I do not understand how hiding private items from the camera breaches your privacy. That is like saying you have already died of thirst because you have to drink water; the preventive measure does not cause the thing it tries to prevent.

Furthermore, you do not have to take the exam in your own room. Any quiet room where there are no other people is theoretically fine. Having access to such a room is your own responsibility, just like having access to a laptop to do your study is your own responsibility. In practice, hiding private items in your study room is usually the most practical way to get access to a comfortable room, but I do not believe requiring students to have access to a private room for 2 hours breaches their privacy.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#122

Post by lol768 » Fri, Jul 09, 2021, 12:15 PM UTC

undfg wrote: post #116

notenoughhorses wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Expensive fees are a thing in countries that observe timezones aligned with "EU time" too.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#123

Post by analog31 » Fri, Jul 09, 2021, 12:23 PM UTC

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…

Idea taken from real life: Flood the discord channel with misinformation, so people don't know what's real and what isn't.

No, I don't really advocate doing that, but it's what first came to mind.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#124

Post by stjohnswarts » Fri, Jul 09, 2021, 12:23 PM UTC

swiley wrote: post #75

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…

My calculus 3 professor would pass out tests 10-15 minutes early on test days. He'd dump them right on top of your study materials and expect you to push them out of the way if wanted extra time to study. Applying a panopticon to children to prevent cheating is questionable since it normalizes authorities using electronics to bully people. Applying it to adults at a university is arguably a human rights violation and…

This is the scary part. Teaching students and younger generations that's it's normal and okay to be surveilled 24/7.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#125

Post by raverpundit » Fri, Jul 09, 2021, 12:25 PM UTC

How I am hacking my university exams. - installed a virtual machine - renamed reg keys values to hide drivers name - use vm hardner etc. - on host machine installed charles to get response(html) of the proctor website - wrote a python script that takes in response html and outputs google search result for all the questions at once

I got lucky and University hosted a mock test through which i was able to grab the whole proctor website The proctor software dev. Didn’t obscure the JS Found so many vulnerabilities that led me to go full god mode. I can get questions paper 60min before the exam starts.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#126

Post by MeinBlutIstBlau » Fri, Jul 09, 2021, 12:30 PM UTC

mvanaltvorst wrote: post #52

Me and my roommate are first year undergraduate students. We do different bachelors; I have taken all my tests this year with online proctoring, my roommate has had all his tests without online proctoring. The proctoring process is actually pretty simple: I have a Google Chrome extension installed that I enable when I have to take an exam. It takes 5 extra minutes before the exam: I have to show my identification, th…

College is a game. If you arent cheating, you really dont care about your gpa and waste too much time in school. Those students that cheat and get away with it are actually much wiser than your friend seeing as they save way more time.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#127

Post by eldaisfish » Fri, Jul 09, 2021, 12:30 PM UTC

machinehermiter wrote: post #94

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.

The older and more educated I become from free classes online the more ridiculous our education system seems. I pretty much know if I learned the material or not. A test is nice to confirm this for myself but the way we have put test scores above everything is just ridiculous. It is all the symptoms of credentialism. Imagine taking the same class for free that you don't get "credit" for. It is not "cheating" then if…

This is a very bad take.

A major component of the university experience is collaboration and networking. Dividing tasks and plugging holes in each other's understanding. Bouncing ideas off other people to test your own understanding and verify against theirs.

Any good university isn't simply about grades and there's a limit to what you can learn online. Credentials exist as a minimum filter, not as a mark of competence. One cannot be tested for an expressed numerically.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#128

Post by joppy » Fri, Jul 09, 2021, 12:34 PM UTC

mvanaltvorst wrote: post #121

MereInterest wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Similarly with my room, you can hide everything that would breach your privacy before the exam starts. The need to hide things is itself an effect of privacy having been breached. Privacy isn't just to keep information secret, but also to provide a space in which you can be comfortable because it is your own space. Needing to hide things away is a reaction to privacy being breached, not a way to preserve privacy.

I do not understand how hiding private items from the camera breaches your privacy. That is like saying you have already died of thirst because you have to drink water; the preventive measure does not cause the thing it tries to prevent. Furthermore, you do not have to take the exam in your own room. Any quiet room where there are no other people is theoretically fine. Having access to such a room is your own respons…

“Having access to such a room is your own responsibility”…

It might be a little much to ask for during a pandemic where people are stuck in places they didn’t expect to be for a long while though, with a whole bunch of other people also stuck inside.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#129

Post by Frost1x » Fri, Jul 09, 2021, 12:35 PM UTC

pfortuny wrote: post #30

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 (undegrad. prof. of mathematics, Spain) did "nothing" (see below) except prepare (not so) different exams. Same results as always. Exactly the same. Someone will have cheated. Well, as always: I am sure people cheat at my exams as they do at any other. I do not repent and I do not think I would do otherwise. *However*: I DID spend a lot of time preparing materials, attending tutorials, replying to emails, correctin…

I had an very relaxed Indian professor who served as as department chair when I went to university and he always had open book/note quizzes, tests/exams with no restrictions. These exams weren't designed to be more difficult, some answers you could very quickly reference from the associated text, handouts, or your notes.

People asked if he was concerned that people cheated or wouldn't learn anything and he once gave an insightful comment m that stuck with me: if people cheat, and they will, they're only cheating themselves.

He was right because while almost everyone passed his classes, not everyone ended up with successful careers. If they did, they probably had to pickup the sort of knowledge he crafted together like a masterful chef and hand fed us. The education is the product, not the degree. The degree is often a necessary rubber stamp to get past the first interview filters but it's not going to help you in most positions for the subsequent interview or actual job demands. You're really only cheating yourself of the education because the education is the real product here.

Things have changed a bit and you can find pretty much anything online readily, but you have to chop up the information, prep it, and craft it into a meal. Over time these skills improve and you too can become a knowledge chef but your (good) university programs give you the tools to become a knowledge chef in your field. They start you out as a cook who knows how to do certain things but they also give techniques you need to make your own new dishes. That's what you're paying for.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#130

Post by basisword » Fri, Jul 09, 2021, 12:35 PM UTC

ttonelli wrote: post #119

basisword wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Depends on the subject. In a long form essay where you need to cite sources or technical details you could make a big difference to your score by quickly looking these up. Nobody can go into the exam blind but they can improve their answers significantly by looking up the details that others have to spend a long time trying to remember. For example in an English exam, direct quotations from literature. Or in a law exam, case names.