Banning e-proctoring is unfair to students who worked hard.
You don't think students who worked hard deserve privacy?
Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring
171–180 of 324 posts
Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring
#172Earlier 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…
instead let's teach them that if they cheat, nothing adverse happens.
Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring
#173I 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…
I think the only alternative to eproctoring is standard in-person exams in a room at the school/university. We can debate how far eprotoring solutions should reasonably go but really if someone is allowed to take an exam remotely alone there has to be a form a surveillance. This can include providing an approved, locked laptop with monitoring sofware instead of letting students use their own devices with eproctoring…
We allow students to take exams alone, unsupervised, all the time and we have been doing it just fine for hundreds of years. Have you ever written a paper as a final for a class? Or done a problem set? Or a project? Or even a take home test? No surveillance needed if you structure the format of the final to suit the “testing” environment.
If the answers to your final are easily Googled then you’ve written a shitty final.
Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real story here is that cheating is rampant, everyone knows it, and that the universities (as opposed to individual professors) are not prepared to do what is necessary to stop it. I'm speaking, of course, of measures like expulsion. Too much of a hit to the bottom line, too much messy litigation, and too much bad PR. All of this is another way of making your point, which is that the core mission of universities…
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.
> Good bye, apply again next year.
Apply again next year? In Germany, a university expulsion usually comes with a lifetime ban on studying the same subject again.
Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring
#175Just to throw it out there, I graduated during the pandemic, and it was so frustrating not only the amount of cheating that occurred, which meant that if you didn't cheat you fell behind; but also how professors responded. I had a few professors who made exams ridiculously hard with strict time limits, just because they expected people to cheat. So the exams were designed in a way they cheating was the only way to get through it, which just encouraged more people to cheat. Not to say every person cheated, or every professor designed tests to be harder, but both groups were larger than you'd expect.
The good news is I think that with classes being in person again things will go relatively back to normal. Honestly I don't think I can fault students who cheated during the pandemic, it was just so abnormal that most people did whatever they had to to cope.
Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring
#176I 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.
Then it's like a job interview. If the answer doesn't pop into your head the instant after you hear the question you go into panic mode and can't even answer questions you should know.
Though I suppose it would make people a lot better at job interviews if done for every class.
Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
But why should you not be allowed to look them up? Isn't that just testing for memory rather than comprehension?
Beats me. A well designed exam asks one to apply knowledge not to regurgitate it. You should be able to look up any of the supporting information but you also need to be able to organize that information.
All of my BSc Applied Physics exams including the final (Exeter Uni. 1977) were open note and this really helped sort the competent students from those who thought that they were at university to learn facts. The latter brought fifty litre rucksacks full of notes in to the finals and without exception either failed entirely or scraped through to third class honours.
They seemed to have not realized that the faculty would not set questions that could be directly answered by looking up the question in one's notes. The best example was the final quantum mechanics paper which did not contain a single question that had a direct answer in the notes we had taken or the textbooks we had used.
My most recent exam was a C# course and that exam was open book. It wasn't as extreme as my QM final but had basically the same idea: apply what you have learnt.
Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
instead let's teach them that if they cheat, nothing adverse happens.
Replace exams with vivas and see how far the cheats can get. At least make a viva voce a large proportion of the final score.
Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring
#179Just to throw it out there, I graduated during the pandemic, and it was so frustrating not only the amount of cheating that occurred, which meant that if you didn't cheat you fell behind; but also how professors responded. I had a few professors who made exams ridiculously hard with strict time limits, just because they expected people to cheat. So the exams were designed in a way they cheating was the only way to ge…
Does anyone in academia know if tests are designed on a curve? You can give a test that everyone gets 100% on (assuming they show up) and you can give a test that everyone fails. Is part of creating a test thinking about how many students in your class are capable of scoring A’s, etc or is it just a side effect
Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring
#180Earlier 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 can't begin to count the number of books I am partway through when left to my own motivation.
Signing up for a class with a hurdle at the end I need to jump over is exactly what I need. Free online classes are like gym memberships, but even cheaper. Most people won't stick to it.