Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring • Hacker News Board

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#241

Post by ridiculous_leke » Fri, Jul 09, 2021, 5:40 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

I beg to differ. Saying that dishonesty is acceptable in certain scenarios will only motivate them to further partake in bad acts. In extreme cases, the child will end up as a criminal.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#242

Post by MaxBarraclough » Fri, Jul 09, 2021, 5:41 PM UTC

christophilus wrote: post #48

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…

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.

Others have already pointed out that thesis defences and hiring interviews already use this format. I'm not an educator, but I can see some downsides:

• Unless it's recorded, you can't easily get another opinion on how to grade it, except from those at the event

• Some students will naturally be better at interview-style exams, independent of their skill in the relevant material. This is also the case with written exams, of course, but I imagine the 'skilled bullshitter' types might do better in an interview-style exam, and a nervous student might do much worse.

• I imagine it would be tougher on students who don't speak the language natively

• The 'imprecision' of a wandering organic conversation might make it harder for the student to know what to study

• Different students don't get the same exam, which might raise questions of fairness in itself, but it's worsened by that the examiner's mood is likely to change. (With written exams, an examiner can mark all students on the first question before moving on to marking the second question, to protect against this.)

• Physical appearance and deportment might skew the examiner's judgement. (This is widely believed to be an issue with juries, after all.)

• You can't hide the student's identity from the examiner, as a measure against favouritism. With written exams this can, and should, be done

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#243

Post by ekidd » Fri, Jul 09, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

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.…

> 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.

My school's CS department defaulted to allowing students to use almost any available resource (unless specifically indicated otherwise). But you were required to write down what resources you used.

So a professor might assign a whole pile of nasty algorithm proofs, and say, "You're allowed to work in groups to find the general solution. But you need to write down your group members, and you need to do your own writeups." Tests were in person but not especially proctored. The penalty for cheating was a heavy suspension and a transcript annotation, with permanent expulsion for a second offense.

This actually worked pretty well, back in the day.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#244

Post by cesarb » Fri, Jul 09, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

mindslight wrote: post #225

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…

> 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. The permanent security issue is that violating a security assertion (eg running an untrusted program) on your machine means you can never trust that machine until it gets completely wipe…

> The permanent security issue is that violating a security assertion (eg running an untrusted program) on your machine means you can never trust that machine until it gets completely wiped.

That hasn't been the case ever since firmware became updatable. Nowadays, even wiping the machine completely is not enough, because the firmware might have been maliciously modified by whatever violated the security boundary. And it might not even be the firmware you'd expect (the SPI chip containing the UEFI); see the recent post here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27740295) about someone who modified his laptop's EC firmware and his laptop's wireless card firmware, making the first intercept all key presses (the EC is also the keyboard controller) and send them to the second to be broadcast over the radio, completely invisible to both the operating system and the UEFI firmware.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#245

Post by imwillofficial » Fri, Jul 09, 2021, 5:47 PM UTC

On the linked site it calls the eproctoring algorithms that have difficulty with dark skin tones “racist” I think it’s foolish to ascribe human belief systems to computer vision frameworks. Instead you could describe them as “buggy” or “missing critical features that make it unusable”

But no, the article linked on baneproctoring.com is instead saying something more along the lines of “eproctoring hates black people” This isn’t helpful.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#246

Post by Spooky23 » Fri, Jul 09, 2021, 5:57 PM UTC

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…

I graduated in 2000, and cheating was rampant if you knew where to look.

One variety was legal - you’d have a doctors note to get a reasonable accommodation for ADD. In the 90s, it was pretty trivial to do that. Once you had that, you were taking tests in a facility that made cheating very easy (open book) if you were motivated.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#247

Post by mindslight » Fri, Jul 09, 2021, 5:59 PM UTC

cesarb wrote: post #244

mindslight wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The permanent security issue is that violating a security assertion (eg running an untrusted program) on your machine means you can never trust that machine until it gets completely wipe…

> The permanent security issue is that violating a security assertion (eg running an untrusted program) on your machine means you can never trust that machine until it gets completely wiped. That hasn't been the case ever since firmware became updatable. Nowadays, even wiping the machine completely is not enough, because the firmware might have been maliciously modified by whatever violated the security boundary. And…

I hadn't wanted to go into that level of detail, but you're right to. My own definition of wipe includes reflashing libreboot.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#248

Post by jjeaff » Fri, Jul 09, 2021, 6:07 PM UTC

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 an interesting point. Testing and professors and their curriculum were always so intertwined in my college days that I never even considered a "separation of powers" but it makes sense.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#249

Post by johnnyanmac » Fri, Jul 09, 2021, 6:12 PM UTC

zelphirkalt wrote: post #204

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…

> 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. Cheating is never OK. Look what that lead to. A few bad apples ruined it for the other students. People have to learn, that their behavior in such a setting does not only affect themselves. In this case it very negatively impacted everyone studying with them.

>People have to learn, that their behavior in such a setting does not only affect themselves

at some point it's like defensive driving. Sure, they are at fault and an idiot, but for the sake of your own safety you shouldn't "stick to your morals" or just "hope they get theirs". Look out for yourself, because for some people that's the only person that will do it.

With that lens, yes. I don't blame people who need to do what they do for one day in some artificial environment so they aren't impacted in their transition to real world work where they are otherwise moral.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#250

Post by mytailorisrich » Fri, Jul 09, 2021, 6:12 PM UTC

elliekelly wrote: post #173

mytailorisrich wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fi…

A final paper is different and the concept itself obviously does not lend itself to surveillance, which used to be less important because it is/was less easy to cheat. There are growing problems with this as well because of all the online "help" students may get access to these days.

Allowing students to take exams alone, at home, unsupervised is just a recipe for disaster without surveillance. It's not just Google but any sort of help in the room or remote, which can go all the way to someone else taking the exam. That really simply is the reality. I don't think this is contentious and I am surprised by the debate.

On the other hand, it is of course possible to discuss how far surveillance should go and how perhaps to avoid too much intrusion (as mentioned in my previous comment). That said, with the expensive connectivity people have these days, in addition to all they can think of if the exam takes place at home this is really an arm race situation.

So, again, the alternative is good old in-person, on-site exams, where students are also under surveillance, by the way, but that feels less intrusive because students aren't in their own private space at home.