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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

#41

Post by tpetry »

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.

One of the bests I had written in university allowed you to bring every non-digital material you want to have. All slides? The books? The former exercises? No problem! The test was designed to be built on 2 primitives:

1. If you need to lookup stuff in your waste of material you won‘t be able to finish everything. The time constraint was very hard. 2. It was not just repeating former things, you had to have understood them. Everything was a transfer knowledge exercise.

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

#42

Post by deepdriver »

josh_fyi wrote: post #15

This will mean more tests in proctored test centers like Pearson VUE. Many students and professionals taking tests cheat casually and without embarrassment: It is seen as simply an efficient way to maximize grades.

I see this as a good thing. If you can self-learn remotely at your own pace and then show up once for a brief proctored (and by extension trusted) exam, it’s still far cheaper and much more accessible than the traditional college or high school alternative.

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

#43

Post by PeterStuer »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #20
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.

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.

Did any student show up with a 5G tablet and an earpiece?

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

#44

Post by tpetry »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #34
p1necone wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Add 1-2 questions which can be googled. I have seen enough engineers not earning the „can efficiently google“ badge.

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

#45

Post by janekm »

PeterStuer wrote: post #37
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.

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.

and... where's the problem? That's exactly the kind of group problem-solving that is actually required in the real world.

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

#46

Post by pksebben »

josh_fyi wrote: post #15

This will mean more tests in proctored test centers like Pearson VUE. Many students and professionals taking tests cheat casually and without embarrassment: It is seen as simply an efficient way to maximize grades.

one sort of wonders what the value in standardized testing is, in a world with such easy access to information.

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

#47

Post by blitzar »

titoCA321 wrote: post #21
josh_fyi wrote: post #15

This will mean more tests in proctored test centers like Pearson VUE. Many students and professionals taking tests cheat casually and without embarrassment: It is seen as simply an efficient way to maximize grades.

Yes, lots of testing at Pearson VUE. Many State Licensing certificates and IT certification testing is conducted at Pearson Vue. Military and government agencies also do applicant testing at Pearson VUE. Candidates seeking to apply to Secret Service show up for Pearson VUE testing center, along with military recruits and folks needing to update Cisco certificates and college students that need to take a test here or…

> Pearson VUE

I was so happy when the pandemic hit and the second part of a qualification I was doing could be remotely proctered - everyone from professionals to crack addicts were taking tests of some sort at the same time at the test centre.

My concentration broke when the crack addict picked up the monitor and smashed it on the ground and stormed out, im not sure it they were doing a Cisco qualification or a driving test, but I dont think it was going well.

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

#48

Post by gommm »

p1necone wrote: post #36
gommm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, another decent alternative I've seen was a test with a few multiple choice questions where each question needed quite a bit of reasoning and where you had to give the reasoning to get the points. The multiple choice question was a way for the teacher to quickly know if you had the correct answer and for the student to verify their answer against possible answers and see if they might have made a mistake but the teacher would still need to review the half a page of reasoning for each question.

It can be done decently but it's much easier to write and much more common to see bad multiple choice questions.

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

#49

Post by ghusto »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #35
technion wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

First thing I thought of was taping the "cheats" the the back of laptop screen ;P

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

#50

Post by blitzar »

janekm wrote: post #45
PeterStuer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

and... where's the problem? That's exactly the kind of group problem-solving that is actually required in the real world.

apparently 'im really good at google search' wasnt the answer someone was looking for in an interview
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