Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring • Hacker News Board

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#291

Post by 908B64B197 » Sat, Jul 10, 2021, 2:49 AM UTC

denton-scratch wrote: post #79

consp wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely anecdotal and not in the US: My experience as a TA are quite different, though this in in Europe. Especially with the algorithmic courses there was quite a lot of copying since there were multiple TA's and they thought we didn't compare notes. Several of them got reported (you get a mark, two marks is suspension, three is out) and I know of at least one case who got caught again at a different course and w…

Another anecdote (Britain): I was a part-time visiting lecturer in computing, paid by the lesson. Cheating was rife; I often got duplicate submission of coding exercises. Scoring was mainly by coursework, not exams. I asked my colleagues what to do about it. They said: 1. You can ignore it. 2. You can report it; you will be accused of racism (the majority of the class were people with brown skin). You will be require…

> 2. You can report it; you will be accused of racism (the majority of the class were people with brown skin). You will be required to sit on an exam board for several days during the holiday season, unpaid.

That's just sad.

> 3. You can explain to them that collaboration is encouraged, but submitting work you didn't do as if it were your own is cheating, and not permitted.

That gives you a great excuse to fail duplicate copies, since they clearly didn't follow the rules. Just split the grade across all duplicates (so something you received three times gets 1/3 of the points). Add a note saying that they can get more points if the other duplicate authors agree to transfer them points.

Watch the chaos.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#292

Post by 908B64B197 » Sat, Jul 10, 2021, 2:56 AM UTC

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.

If it installs drivers, I have news for you...

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#293

Post by jrm4 » Sat, Jul 10, 2021, 3:00 AM UTC

krull10 wrote: post #279

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…

I can't speak for those other disciplines, but I'd flip the question -- how valuable, really, is the act of "determining the source of the work, via proctored exams" when the goal is "ensuring that students learn." This is just an ongoing arms race, and other ways have to be experimented with.

Again, the biggest stupidity is "discouraging collaboration."

I teach web design and some programming, and FAR AND AWAY the best thing I've done is "get all my students on discord and encourage them to help each other on their assignments."

I set up a "make sure your website has this and this; content is up to you." And I end up with 40-50 different very cool websites, and I've gotten a pretty good sense that learning takes place because I'm in the chat too.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#294

Post by tbrownaw » Sat, Jul 10, 2021, 3:41 AM UTC

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.

And yet there truly are people who are far more (or far less) honest than other people in the same situations.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#295

Post by unishark » Sat, Jul 10, 2021, 5:11 AM UTC

zo1 wrote: post #190

unishark wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why do you need a grade at all? Fail, pass, distinction. You either know the answers because you know and understand all the material, or you have no business functioning in that field period.

More granularity is still valuable though, since in topics where deep understanding is needed, the shallower levels of understanding are required to master the deeper. E.g., you need to be able recognize an integral before you can solve them. Which in turn you need to be able to do in canned rote mechanical cases before you can handle general word problems that involve assembling and solving integrals. And not all subsequent classes or careers will necessarily require the full mastery of the topics in a class. Plus it's good to have such detailed feedback for both the student and the professor to focus on shortcomings.

Another issue with the purportedly "optimal" testing situation of creating unique challenging and deep questions for each test (and even for each student). It's difficult to make good questions. Sometimes they are too hard, are not as clear as they seem since students might misunderstand and go off in the wrong direction giving you some trivial answer to a similar-looking question. The safest questions are the most shallow. And deeper problem-solving questions may take a few iterations of "testing" (as in trying them out on exams and seeing how students do). So what seems like the best kind of question will actually be the riskiest and least-tested.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#296

Post by majjgepolja » Sat, Jul 10, 2021, 5:21 AM UTC

cowpig wrote: post #183

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 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…

open book exams with serious thinking questions is the answer.

I had such a numerical methods exam, I had a python script ready for it. No regrets on automating something that should be automated. I understood how the method works and wrote code for it.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#297

Post by majjgepolja » Sat, Jul 10, 2021, 5:24 AM UTC

SiempreViernes wrote: post #268

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…

Fundamentally, what you are complaining about is teaching being under resourced: making lots of variations of questions obviously takes more effort both to create and to score so that's why it's not done. Making questions that require critical thinking is very hard because you need a very good understanding of the students mind to test the correct thing, so it's usually not done.

It's also that many teachers are underproficient.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#298

Post by josephcsible » Sat, Jul 10, 2021, 5:26 AM UTC

aero-glide2 wrote: post #288

josephcsible wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think students who worked hard deserve privacy?

Do you have privacy when you sit in the exam hall?

Proctors and cameras in exam halls can't see inside your house, so yes.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#299

Post by majjgepolja » Sat, Jul 10, 2021, 5:28 AM 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.

It's a grey area.

In india, the engineering curriculum includes lot of subjects that are not useful for the students but only there because some fat belly officer thought it would be "Interdisciplinary".

Can you imagine teaching biology as a subject for engineers? waste of money and not what we have come to learn, or interested in. But colleges in India do that.

Cheating in such subjects is fair.

Re: Protect student privacy: ban eproctoring

#300

Post by bigcorp-slave » Sat, Jul 10, 2021, 6:16 AM UTC

majjgepolja wrote: post #299

zelphirkalt wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's a grey area. In india, the engineering curriculum includes lot of subjects that are not useful for the students but only there because some fat belly officer thought it would be "Interdisciplinary". Can you imagine teaching biology as a subject for engineers? waste of money and not what we have come to learn, or interested in. But colleges in India do that. Cheating in such subjects is fair.

It’s not a grey area, it devalues the degree for everyone and betrays you as a fundamentally dishonest and low value person.