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Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

baneproctoring.com

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Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#141

Post by kevincox »

alanfranz wrote: post #56

Recent gatech OMSCS graduate here. I fail to recognize any real issue with proctoring. I have used proctortrack and honorlock. * proctoring software can be installed before an exam and uninstalled afterwards. It doesn’t need to stay on your pc/browser, and its activation is very obvious. I have no info about permanent security issues caused by such software. * what proctoring does is mostly recording video and audio…

I think the main problem is that these are all malware by definition. They are grabbing all of the data they can get and the users are not the ones who what that. I could install this on a separate user account which should restrict its access to my stuff but it is still a lot to ask. And a lot of these software requires admin access, which is absolutely not ok even for a second on my personal PC. If the school wants to ship me their PC with it installed I have very little complaints other than the biases in the video analysis.

There are other concerns, such as they often only support a few proprietary operating systems, however many programs require these anyways, so that isn't a major step back in most cases.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#142

Post by 542458 »

tyingq wrote: post #138

An adjacent issue, not from a privacy standpoint, but from an "inappropriate use of tech" standpoint, is anti-plagiarism software. A relative of mine recently took an English course, and constantly had to lobby for re-evaluation of low grades caused by false positives with Turnitin[1]. The issues were varied, but the most frustrating one was that passages in her paper that were quoted and footnoted were marked as "so…

In turnitin’s defence, in my recollection their training material explicitly and repeatedly tells you not to do this - that a positive turnitin result is not the same as plagiarism, and that all positives should be manually reviewed. The student-facing side of it can be bad, as it errs on the side of extreme caution.

When I (as a TA) had to mark dozens and dozens of papers pre-screening for obviously copied paragraphs was a very nice time saver. Otherwise the only students I would catch are the ones with poor English skills (grammar switching from flawless to flawed and back again is a pretty good tell that the paragraph was written by somebody else).

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#143

Post by solveit »

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…

> I pretty much know if I learned the material or not.

Yes, but have you never met someone that was convinced they knew the material when they in fact didn't? They're everywhere! Accurately assessing oneself is a skill that needs to be taught for a lot of people, and an important part of it is by having people fail tests they're not capable of passing.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#144

Post by moron4hire »

fallingknife wrote: post #140
lotsofpulp wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming everyone is not constantly cheating and the coursework is somewhat relevant and rigorous, surely they signal a higher probability of at least awareness of the subject matter or ability to learn something.

You're 0-2 on those assumptions, though.

Seriously. Even assuming those things--I would say the program I went through was very relevant and I don't think cheating happened very often. It was a really small program and everybody got to know everyone else. So while I can't say for certain, I never saw cheating amongst my friends, nor was ever approached to assist in cheating (though I was frequently asked for help in studying).

The problem is, I knew some of the guys who graduated, with extremely low GPAs, who didn't cheat, have the same degree as me, exited with the same student loan debt as me, and can't code their way out of a wet paper bag. I've ran into some of them working retail jobs back in my home town.

It's a fucking travesty. They had to be saddled with a student loan debt load they would have no chance of paying back. I only paid mine back so early because of a lucky break on an insurance claim. I'd still be paying on them, 20 years later, if I hadn't lost everything I owned in a flood.

Universties talk about how they don't want to be seen as vocational training facilities. Well, they need to admit the reality. Primary education is not preparing people for the work force. We give people a free education for 13 years, and if they want to have economic opportunity, they want to do something more than just manual labor, we can't give them another 2 to 4 years? It's bullshit.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#145

Post by fallingknife »

captainmuon wrote: post #68
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…

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…

That was Germany in the 2000's. This is the USA in the 2020's. College is a game. They are getting rid of even having tests as a requirement for your application. And the admissions process is openly racist, even though this is directly banned by our constitution (for public universities). But don't mention this, or you will be called racist. You will be required to take "distribution requirements" (courses that have nothing to do with what you are there to study) for up to 2 years of credit hours depending on the school. The reason they do this is because department funding is set by the "asses in seats" formula where each student enrolled in the class is assigned a dollar value to the department. And, if you are an unpopular department, these 300 seat 1 level distribution requirement classes will be the vast majority of your funding. Departments typically squabble with each other about how many classes they get to have on the list. And everybody gets an A. Wouldn't want to have a reputation for being hard, or nobody will enroll in your cash cow class. These are all 1 and 2 level courses, which means they are basically high school level, or sometimes not even that. But they are not free like high school! Most people will be deep in debt when they graduate. And there is no way to distinguish yourself. The grades are so inflated that the median GPA is around 3.7 / 4.0! So I can't blame anybody for cheating the system that is cheating them.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#146

Post by reayn »

alanfranz wrote: post #106
reayn wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The software should’ve never existed, it’s a testimony to the failure of our education system. 2. You are far luckier than most when it comes to your circumstances, i have seen myself people failing exams for similar mishaps to yours.

1. Explain why. 2. Shitty instructors are not the software’s fault.

1. Re-stating what half the comments on this thread are already saying would be a waste of my time.

2. This has nothing to do with instructors (in my experience instructors have little to no say or participation in the usage of these systems), badly written algorithms will frequently kick students out of tests for non-adverse behavior or failure in facial recognition (once again oft-mentioned in this thread).

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#147

Post by lotsofpulp »

fallingknife wrote: post #140
lotsofpulp wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming everyone is not constantly cheating and the coursework is somewhat relevant and rigorous, surely they signal a higher probability of at least awareness of the subject matter or ability to learn something.

You're 0-2 on those assumptions, though.

I have not been in the education system for 15 years, but I would hope it is true for at least the high end schools in the hard sciences.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#148

Post by shagie »

10000truths wrote: post #115
mkl wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I recall calc 2 exam that I had... It was a rather hard exam and I left with a bit of a "meh" feeling to how well I did on it.

The professor handed back the exam the next lecture with the percent on it. I was looking at a 50% on my exam. This was a Tuesday Thursday class (rather than MWF) and so was an hour and a half long. I'm staring at my exam thinking "F, maybe a D, hope I got a C, I'd settle for a D, probably an F... hope I got a C" all through the lecture. Just before the bell rang, the professor wrote the curve on the chalkboard.

* 100 - 75 : A

* 50 - 75 : B

I don't remember any of the rest... I was stuck on "I got a B!" As I left, my TA congratulated me for getting a B.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#149

Post by user_7832 »

Etheryte wrote: post #102
miki123211 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems not to be a thing in the EU at all. At least in Poland where I live, it's pretty much unheard of. Sure, cameras are required once in a while, sometimes you need to show your student ID, but the scary e-proctoring software doesn't exist at all.

Anecdotal evidence, but I heard TU Delft (in the Netherlands) used e-proctoring software like this in some high level exams. So it might not be that black and white. If anything, I'd wager you mostly just don't hear about it because most students have nearly no leverage in situations like this.

I’m a TU Delft master’s student so I can comment on this. E-proctoring here is highly dependent on your department (also called faculty). I am in the TPM faculty where we don’t have any proctoring whatsoever (most of our exams are open book). But I do know from my friend that Aerospace has quite heavy proctoring with closed book exams. Similarly CS too (if I recall correctly) has proctoring.

Additionally, proctoring is unsurprisingly quite unpopular amongst students - for privacy reasons, and also perhaps because of the “assumed guilt”. There’s a lot of push to completely stop e-proctoring university wide.

Here are some interesting articles from our newsletter, TU Delta, with a lot of relevant information:

1. https://www.delta.tudelft.nl/article/online-proctoring-i-was... 2. https://www.delta.tudelft.nl/article/why-ae-students-have-so... 3. https://www.delta.tudelft.nl/article/dont-want-online-procto...

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#150

Post by alistairSH »

heisenbit wrote: post #117

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 any…

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

For a new graduate with little other experience, I'd look at it. But, on the list of things that really mattered, it was near the bottom - at most, a "low" GPA would trigger me to ask more basic tech questions than I might normally.

For anybody with career experience, I don't care.

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