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Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

baneproctoring.com

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Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#271

Post by nybble41 »

Frost1x wrote: post #129
pfortuny wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I (undegrad. prof. of mathematics, Spain) did "nothing" (see below) except prepare (not so) different exams. Same results as always. Exactly the same. Someone will have cheated. Well, as always: I am sure people cheat at my exams as they do at any other. I do not repent and I do not think I would do otherwise. *However*: I DID spend a lot of time preparing materials, attending tutorials, replying to emails, correctin…

I had an very relaxed Indian professor who served as as department chair when I went to university and he always had open book/note quizzes, tests/exams with no restrictions. These exams weren't designed to be more difficult, some answers you could very quickly reference from the associated text, handouts, or your notes. People asked if he was concerned that people cheated or wouldn't learn anything and he once gave…

> He was right because while almost everyone passed his classes, not everyone ended up with successful careers.

That can hurt the school's reputation if it becomes known for passing students who aren't actually prepared to do the work. Employers would prefer to recruit from schools where having a diploma actually means one is capable of doing what the job requires.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#272

Post by bulatb »

zepto wrote: post #262
an_opabinia wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it was so frustrating not only the amount of cheating that occurred Yeah, it's crazy that cheaters are the protagonist of the ban e-proctoring story. What if the university only admitted students who don't cheat? How do we know that policy works for real at a place like Caltech? Academic culture is accommodating, and you feel that way too. But universities must know that cheating harms everyone, it's a losing propo…

> What if the university only admitted students who don't cheat? It’s a common fallacy to attribute behavior to innate qualities of people, rather than situations.

For anyone interested, it's called the fundamental attribution error.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#273

Post by TravisHusky »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #178
unishark wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have never had an oral exam, but I have always thought it would be great for smaller classes. Basically I would love to have an exam where I sit down with a professor for 30 minutes to an hour and talk about the content and answer questions they ask. I feel like it would be a bit more in-depth while also eliminating the possibility of misunderstanding a mistakenly ambiguous question. I am not sure how realistic that is for a class above about 15 students, and also how things like disabilities would be handled, but I'd love to try it.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#274

Post by pjbeam »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #267
sandworm101 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must not have seen a modern home cheating rig. The student read/scrolls through the entire test to read each question, as is recommended. A small camera that sees the screen transmits the questions to a team in another room. Each team member works on one question at a time. A single person then communicates the prepared answers back to the test taker via an earpiece, one small enough that it isn't detectable on t…

How much does the team cost?

This is one of those situations in which it pays to have likeminded friends.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#275

Post by swiley »

TravisHusky wrote: post #273
kwhitefoot wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have never had an oral exam, but I have always thought it would be great for smaller classes. Basically I would love to have an exam where I sit down with a professor for 30 minutes to an hour and talk about the content and answer questions they ask. I feel like it would be a bit more in-depth while also eliminating the possibility of misunderstanding a mistakenly ambiguous question. I am not sure how realistic tha…

> Basically I would love to have an exam where I sit down with a professor for 30 minutes to an hour and talk about the content and answer questions they ask.

That would have been fun! The only time I did something like this was when I tested out of one of the intro to programming classes. I was one of the last students to talk to the professor that ran it before he left.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#276

Post by sandworm101 »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #267
sandworm101 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must not have seen a modern home cheating rig. The student read/scrolls through the entire test to read each question, as is recommended. A small camera that sees the screen transmits the questions to a team in another room. Each team member works on one question at a time. A single person then communicates the prepared answers back to the test taker via an earpiece, one small enough that it isn't detectable on t…

How much does the team cost?

That would depend on the level of expertise you need. To pass a highschool calc exam, probably less than 100$. To have someone sit the LSAT for you in person, probably in the low five figures. I've never been involved with people actually being paid for such things but they do happen. Huffman allegedly paid $15,000 to get her daughter unlimited time on the SAT. Paying to have someone actually stand in would have certainly cost more.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#278

Post by krull10 »

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…

Then you’re lucky to have students with a lot of integrity at your college/university. Even with a great unique exam where nothing can be looked up online, this doesn’t prevent students from copying each other, posting problems on sites like Chegg and paying for help, or working together…

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#279

Post by krull10 »

jrm4 wrote: post #232

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 te…

How are you supposed to assess whether a student has learned quantum mechanics, or chemistry, or calculus if any questions you ask them they can simply contact another student for help, or get someone to do it for them on sites like Chegg? Short of giving an individualized oral exam, which is not feasible for anything but tiny classes, proctored exams are necessary for assessment in such classes. This has nothing to do with memorization or time pressures, and everything to do with making sure the student is the one who actually did the work. In an ideal world one could trust students to do take-home exams on their own, but I’ve yet to be at a university where undergraduates did not take advantage of such trust…

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#280

Post by jimbokun »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #198
jdmichal wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My AP calculus teacher allowed us to use calculators on our tests. Why? Because he knew exactly how to design questions such that the calculator would switch from exact to approximation mode. So you could enter any problem on the test into the calculator, and all it would spit out is a useless answer with as many decimal places as it could handle. Of course the calculator worked fine on every homework question. But y…

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).

> Calculators are generally useless in Calculus. Or at least they should be.

Mathematica, on the other hand...

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