Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

baneproctoring.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 324 posts

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#231

Post by JasonFruit »

One problem here is analogous to the separation of powers in government: education and testing are separate powers, and shouldn't be exercised by the same body. Educators ought to be doing everything they can to help students gain understanding, and such evaluation as is necessary for them to guide that process ought to be consequence-free, except to alert the educator to what next step is needed. Doing otherwise creates a needlessly antagonistic relationship between teacher and student, and causes all sorts of unhelpful incentives in both parties.

Evaluation of the success of that education, on individual and institutional levels, ought to be done by people not involved in the process of education. Such testing should be infrequent enough that live, in-person proctoring would be no burden. There is no reason for high-stakes evaluation to be a constant feature of education.

I don't think that'll happen anytime soon, but it seems like the right approach, to me.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#232

Post by jrm4 »

Important to suss out the two issues, because they are in conflict:

1) EProctoring is bad when it does not work as intended (racism, getting people wrong, etc)

2) EProctoring is bad when it works exactly as intended.

The second is the bigger issue, IMHO. I refuse to use it categorically. We teachers need to learn to adapt to the current world. This means understanding that there is very little use for this kind of testing in general. Very few situations in life require rote memorization in a time sensitive environment where you can't talk to people or use the internet. Teachers, teach better.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#233

Post by voxic11 »

cbsks wrote: post #209
Workaccount2 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calculators are generally useless in Calculus. Or at least they should be. Calculus is a process, and normally you are graded on that process, not on the answer. We were allowed calculators too, but the problems were designed that anyone even mildly good at mental math didn't need them. In theory you could teach all of calculus without ever even using numbers (perhaps except 0).

It's been a while since I took calculus, but I seem to remember that a TI-89 calculator could show its steps when solving a problem.

Yeah I also had a TI-89 and you could directly type in most calc problem and get a great step by step answer. The symbolic solver on that thing was great.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#234

Post by camgunz »

hinkley wrote: post #210
TravisHusky wrote: post #175

Just 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…

We had a particularly articulate young man in our graduating class that argued that checking the book is ultimately not cheating in the world of professional CS and software development. Rather, it’s considered being responsible. So why should we be taking tests that treat it as anomalous or cheating? He convinced one professor, possibly two, but if he had any more luck than that, I wasn’t in those classes with him.…

Totally agree. Generally my response to that situation is usually, "wait you did that from memory without looking it up? That's super irresponsible, check your work or use an existing ___".

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#235

Post by allgreed »

tppiotrowski wrote: post #179
TravisHusky wrote: post #175

Just 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

Not strictly curve grading, but when I was studying electronics one of the professors had a 9-step algorithm for processing raw scores into grades. That involved normalizing the lab scores between different reviewers (so that harshness of a particular reviewer would be compensated for). He also assigned `cos(percentage_from_other_test as radians)` instead of resits if you missed one of the tests for valid reason but had shown up on the other.

On one hand I really like the former approach and could understand the latter (organizing resits is likely a huge PITA). On the other that's the only professor I heard of that was attacked with an axe by one of his students.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#236

Post by voxic11 »

VLM wrote: post #208
sonograph wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow. Do you mean to say that the calculator would produce .333333333 repeating but the student was expected to write 1/3 ?

Those reciprocals are too small. Lets see if the kids know how to multiply fractions: factorial(256) times ( 1 divided by factorial(256) ) equals ? And yes, there will unfortunately be kids trying to brute force it by typing it in instead of cancelling the factorial(256).

The TI-89 comes with a excellent symbolic solver that can do solve this or any calc problem and give the proper symbolic result. It can even do things like equation simplification and give the results in terms of the variables. Looks like this https://imgur.com/a/FmdCyYU

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#237

Post by majormajor »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #226
mprovost wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why this is good training for the real world.

As most things in school, it's an artificial situation that bears no resemblance to the real world. IRL: - people has much higher stakes, while in school tanking a class project is no big deal for most slackers. IRL, they can get excluded, isolated, shamed, fired and so on. - such group would exist rarely in the first place, because institutions filter people; - if you are in the rare situation it happens, you can ge…

I've seen the same school-type dynamic play out in companies amongst people getting paid the sort of numbers that make folks on HN say "most people don't get that, not everybody works at a FAANG."

We (as a species, really) are bad at interviewing lots of people that we don't already know well - just like we're bad at testing academically, surprise! - and we're also bad at coaching/firing/managing them.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#238

Post by skeeter2020 »

xg15 wrote: post #212
cowpig wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an experience like this in Numerical Methods in university years ago. The exams were incredibly difficult for bad reasons: you had to calculate many iterations of an algorithm by hand. You also had to memorize a bunch of algorithms (rather than understanding how they worked or how to modify them to solve different problems). The professor also had a "can't do anything about it" attitude, and so the entire class…

I think professors should ask themselves if their exam would make a good CAPTCHA. If a machine could solve the exam easier than a human, it's a bad exam.

"circle all pictures that represent sqrt(pi)"

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#239

Post by edtechdev »

JasonFruit wrote: post #231

One problem here is analogous to the separation of powers in government: education and testing are separate powers, and shouldn't be exercised by the same body. Educators ought to be doing everything they can to help students gain understanding, and such evaluation as is necessary for them to guide that process ought to be consequence-free, except to alert the educator to what next step is needed. Doing otherwise cre…

This is how Western Governors University works - they have separate instructors and evaluators. Not sure how well it works in practice, however. I have read a few complaints.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#240

Post by [deleted] »

voxic11 wrote: post #236
VLM wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those reciprocals are too small. Lets see if the kids know how to multiply fractions: factorial(256) times ( 1 divided by factorial(256) ) equals ? And yes, there will unfortunately be kids trying to brute force it by typing it in instead of cancelling the factorial(256).

The TI-89 comes with a excellent symbolic solver that can do solve this or any calc problem and give the proper symbolic result. It can even do things like equation simplification and give the results in terms of the variables. Looks like this https://imgur.com/a/FmdCyYU

[deleted]
Post reply on HN