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Remote scan of student’s room before test violated his privacy, judge rules

nytimes.com

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Re: Remote scan of student’s room before test violated his privacy, judge rules

#31

Post by PeterStuer »

titoCA321 wrote: post #13
thrdbndndn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>which [why?] is this suddenly a problem? Because most of teachers didn't teach online class before. They are not used to design exams that would not be way too easy it suddenly becomes open book. I won't even say they're "lazy", coming up good take-home exams is super hard, especially when you spend your entire career not need to do that. > if people want to cheat they can find some way to cheat regardless of any co…

Come on now, some of the college instructors weren't even teaching the offline classes. 200 students in a lecture hall and some random TA grading and assigning the tests. Do you honesty believe the TA knows each and ever student and that someone else didn't show up on exam day?!

At every university that l took exams photo id was required to sit the exam.

Re: Remote scan of student’s room before test violated his privacy, judge rules

#32

Post by squarefoot »

mschuster91 wrote: post #3

The problem at the core is not spyware and "room checks", they are just a symptom - the question rather is how exams are designed and why schools and universities go to such drastic lengths to prevent cheating. Most tests are essentially nothing more than tests for the ability of rote memorization - they don't (really) check if the students actually understood the material and are able to apply it to new situations (…

> Most tests are essentially nothing more than tests for the ability of rote memorization

This a hundred times. If I had to hire someone for a job, I would rather hire someone who knows how to search online the answer to a problem than the one who repeats the book word for word without knowing what he/she is talking about.

Exams are crap like that because better exams would require the use of one professor asking non trivial questions for each student, which costs money.

Re: Remote scan of student’s room before test violated his privacy, judge rules

#33

Post by jamesrr39 »

sh4rks wrote: post #14
Claude_Shannon wrote: post #4

It is terrible, but what is the alternative to prevent cheating? I had quite a few on-line exams by now and I've seen very creative attempts at cheating so far.

The best way to prevent cheating in an online test is to set a strict time limit. That way its harder for them to look up the answers on Google etc. The problem then is that a student may experience technical difficulties out of their control. For cases like that, students should be able to appeal for extra time.

This might work for things you have to remember off the top of your head, where you have e.g. 10 seconds to write answer, but it doesn't really work when you have longer questions requiring some kind of working which take more than a minute to work out.

I also think that the "extra time for technical difficulties" is going to be very hard to prove or disprove and would lead to very arbitrary decisions.

Re: Remote scan of student’s room before test violated his privacy, judge rules

#34

Post by KingOfCoders »

p1necone wrote: post #23
KingOfCoders wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A math professor (granted easier with math) at university always said, you can bring anything you want to the exam, if you can answer it with help he made a mistake designing the test. I see the same when I interview people online and I hear them frantically click their keyboard - but no help, I know before what Google returns.

Trying to evaluate a software engineer without letting them use google strikes me as being similar to trying to evaluate a construction worker by making them dig holes with their bare hands.

I'm not asking things that can be solved by Google [1], because they can be solved by Google, and I only gain the knowledge "Candidate can Google", I see this as given. It doesn't mean that not a lot of work at the job involves googling Stackoverflow - I do it myself all the time.

[1] I don't ask API knowledge, if someone doesn't know some API I tell them just to invent the call they need.

Re: Remote scan of student’s room before test violated his privacy, judge rules

#35

Post by helsinkiandrew »

technion wrote: post #30
khazhoux wrote: post #25

Can someone please describe this "scan" technology? The article didn't. I'm picturing a swarm of small hovering drones sweeping their blue laser beams over your bedroom office, before one of them finishes with an accusative scan of your retina.

Before the test starts, you are directed to move the camera around the room, behind your chair and things like that. The Pearson proctor made me remove paintings from the wall to prove there was nothing behind them

It's hard to believe that a suitably motivated college student couldn't figure out a way of getting around that kind of scanning - what about papers in books, info on phone screen, even someone holding up posters at the window.

Re: Remote scan of student’s room before test violated his privacy, judge rules

#36

Post by p1necone »

gommm wrote: post #27
p1necone wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Design better tests. If you can "cheat" on a test by just googling things/looking at notes then the test isn't testing anything but rote memorization anyway.

Exactly, I strongly believe that any test at a secondary education level should be open book. We should be testing for reasoning and capacity to apply knowledge not rote-learning. It's also why I believe that in most cases multiple choice questions have no place in any well designed tests because it's extremely hard to create multiple choice questions that actually test the application of knowledge versus the regurgi…

I've seen some very hairy multi choice questions in Math/Computer science (think testing order of operations, which function gets called due to complicated polymorphism etc). I think it depends on the subject.

Although I also encountered a few where multiple answers were technically correct. Then you have to guess at which answer the professor thinks is "more correct" which kinda sucks.

Re: Remote scan of student’s room before test violated his privacy, judge rules

#37

Post by PeterStuer »

p1necone wrote: post #19
Claude_Shannon wrote: post #4

It is terrible, but what is the alternative to prevent cheating? I had quite a few on-line exams by now and I've seen very creative attempts at cheating so far.

Design better tests. If you can "cheat" on a test by just googling things/looking at notes then the test isn't testing anything but rote memorization anyway.

It's not just googling . It's communicating with others. In a no checks environment you can have an a la carte team of paid consultants and helpfull friends solving the test with you.

Re: Remote scan of student’s room before test violated his privacy, judge rules

#38

Post by zimpenfish »

p1necone wrote: post #23
KingOfCoders wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A math professor (granted easier with math) at university always said, you can bring anything you want to the exam, if you can answer it with help he made a mistake designing the test. I see the same when I interview people online and I hear them frantically click their keyboard - but no help, I know before what Google returns.

Trying to evaluate a software engineer without letting them use google strikes me as being similar to trying to evaluate a construction worker by making them dig holes with their bare hands.

Best technical interview I ever had, they sat me down in front of an internet-connected laptop, gave me some problems on a piece of paper, and said "we'll be back in an hour, do your best". Just left me alone with Google et al.

(Then I spent an hour-ish talking to swardley about 3D printing and its future impact on IP law, etc. -- this was back in early 2007, before it was generally available. That was the weirdest non-technical interview I've had.)

Re: Remote scan of student’s room before test violated his privacy, judge rules

#39

Post by janekm »

madsbuch wrote: post #16

We are definitely in the period where we are seeing the limits of scalability of current technology. Google et al. eliminated customer service, schools are educating on a massive scale, etc. We always have the option of oral onsite exams as has been custom for many years, and accept that education does not scale excessively. We can also keep developing surveillance tech and other AI solutions to the problem and handl…

Or we could accept that in this day and age, expecting kids to recite factoids broadcast to them by a "teacher" doesn't make any kind of sense any more, with google in everyone's pocket.

And testing in the typical style that fails when a student can use a textbook or google makes just as little sense.

Re: Remote scan of student’s room before test violated his privacy, judge rules

#40

Post by pksebben »

madsbuch wrote: post #16

We are definitely in the period where we are seeing the limits of scalability of current technology. Google et al. eliminated customer service, schools are educating on a massive scale, etc. We always have the option of oral onsite exams as has been custom for many years, and accept that education does not scale excessively. We can also keep developing surveillance tech and other AI solutions to the problem and handl…

it's situations like these that make me think perhaps we shouldn't be scaling quite so large. That is to say, quite so high.

Scaling past a certain size puts you kind of further and further outside of what your environment can optimally sustain. Think if a fish in a bowl never stopped growing.

Add to this the particular challenges that orgs with centralized decision making face when scaling (inertia, homogeneity, single-point-of-failure) and it becomes really hard to see the current big-fish trend as even remotely sustainable.

Perhaps only semi-related, but I like the gore-tex model, myself. Scale out and shard.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303803687_Working_W...

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