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Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

baneproctoring.com

151–160 of 324 posts

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ex…

> Or in a law exam, case names.

I want my lawyer to double check the sources. Even if he has the case name memorized, joe vs sally is easy to get confused with joe vs sue (or sally vs joe...), and those details are important to get right, lest I lose the case on a technicality.

There is a time to memorize details, but for the most part I want people who verify before making a statement.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#152

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.

I had class where the final exam was indeed a socratic style oral. It was for an ancient philosophy class (300 or 400 level - this was well beyond the 101 level) where we had studied Socrates (the dialog was on platonic forms). The exam was a 2:1 and lasted an hour if I recall correctly.

For a class of 30, this took the professor 15 hours (three hours a day over the course of a week) to have all of the students go through the exam process during exam week.

Trying to scale this up for something that can handle ~100 students becomes difficult.

Another part with this is the objective vs subjective evaluation of the student.

With the "I got a poor grade because the professor didn't like me" type issues that come up, being able to objectively point to "this is the score on the homework" and "this is the score on the final" allows that subjective grading to be removed and protects the professors from students who feel that the grade they received was influenced by external factors.

While systematizing the verification of material learned may be the wrong approach, it is where we are for a number of factors that the university doesn't have too many options (allegations of professor bias, even if unfounded, still take up a lot of time; class sizes for some classes go beyond what can be reasonably verified on a 1:1 basis)

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#153

I may not be neurotypical, but surely I'm not the only one having a hard time not parsing the domain name as "Bane Proctoring", which admittedly sounds rather ominous.

Given that "bane" is a nearly infinitely more common word than "eproctoring" I bet you (and I) are in the majority.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#154

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…

Testing is a very good reality check on what you think you know. Unfortunately, testing are seen and maligned as only an assessment tool, not a learning tool.

Testing is itself a form of learning, because you are asked to recall facts, concepts, and practice skills.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#155
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wha…

> I know some student hate it because there is always a slacker in every group My experience is that there is sometimes somebody who is not a slacker, and it's usually the only one doing the work for the entire group.

Everyone thinks they are that one person. It is hard to be objective when different people are doing different things.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#156

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…

How do you have your phone with you? Stash it in the bathroom? At my university the invigilators make you show what's in your pockets before and after going to the bathroom (which has itself been checked, and which has a log of people and times), and you can't take anything out (e.g. formula sheet to secretly copy somehow-bathroom-stashed notes onto) or bring anything in. Phones are in bags up the front of the room, inaccessible. The kinds of things you're talking about very rarely happens, and consequences include fines and academic penalties.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#158

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?

You need to give a range of questions from challenging like that to easy regurgitation to discern their level of understanding and be able to assign them an appropriate grade.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#159
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…

The notion that higher education is all about self-enlightenment would be more plausible if these institutions did not issue degrees or other certificates and their students would be satisfied with this.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#160
post #156

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…

How do you have your phone with you? Stash it in the bathroom? At my university the invigilators make you show what's in your pockets before and after going to the bathroom (which has itself been checked, and which has a log of people and times), and you can't take anything out (e.g. formula sheet to secretly copy somehow-bathroom-stashed notes onto) or bring anything in. Phones are in bags up the front of the room,…

> The kinds of things you're talking about very rarely happens, and consequences include fines and academic penalties.

You are making assumptions based on your own experiences, and they are incorrect.

You have a lot of faith in for-profit entities.

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