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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

#101

Post by madsbuch »

janekm wrote: post #39
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.

This is definitely a discussion I will leave to those researching teaching.

That said, for many years I shared the view. Some time ago a convincing argument for "memorization" was presented, and I am slowly changing to the view that it is a reasonable way to learn and to become more creative.

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

#102

Post by tsimionescu »

janekm wrote: post #39
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.

I challenge you to do wny intellectual task without knowing the basics by heart. For example, try writing a large program in APL today - you can easily Google the symbol for any function you want.

Memorization, while not sufficient, is an absolutely necessary part of learning. No amount of googling can help you become skillful at something.

Note that searching for new information or old information that you may have forgotten the specifics of is also perfectly normal, and an important skill in itself. But even there, Google will usually be more of a tool for recall (what was the order of those two parameters? What was the name of that substance that they use for liver issues?) then completely new fact finding.

For example, if I ask you what is the complexity of finding an element in a red-black tree, it would be OK to quickly Google the speicifc answer. But if you have to Google what complexity means, or what a red black tree even is, or if you're not sure whether the complexity is better or worse than searching a linked list, then it's clear you don't have working knowledge of red black trees.

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

#103

Post by klabb3 »

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.

Bingo! [Surprised I had to scroll so far to find this.] You can discuss the merits of rote learning and test design all day, but cheating exists within any pedagogic paradigm. Back in my day, most cheating was between students doing each other favors or taking a small commission.

The way some teachers solved this was a 1:1 oral complementary exam, where students were asked to explain a random set of their solutions. This is drastically more difficult to cheat in real time, and you will almost certainly look like an idiot if you come unprepared. It's a stupidly simple solution, disincentivizing cheating through shame. Doesn't need any proctoring rootkits and rectal cameras, a simple identity check is enough.

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

#104

Post by davisoneee »

squarefoot wrote: post #32
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…

How do the candidates know _what_ to search? That's memorisation.

How do you get creativity, how are candidates better able to combine idea together? By forming each idea into a memory 'chunk' that can be handled as a single concept, and then working to combine these chunks.

If you hire people who can search google, then you get people who can search what is easily searchable, and who can create what has been previously posted online. If they somehow have 'internal' knowledge and capability, that's memory.

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

#105

Post by davisoneee »

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 (…

Rote memorisation is essential. Not _all_ there is to achievement, but as you say the other parts are difficult to test.

Without memorisation ("Just google", as many comments seem to suggest), you are severely limited in what you can come up with, and how you can contribute.

If you don't have foundational knowledge (memory): 1) you don't know what to google; 2) within a discussion concepts will go over your head so you can't contribute; 3) you don't have the components to play around with and mix and match in your head to generate new ideas.

If your work is dreadfully formulaic, sure, you can probably get by with limited foundational knowledge and just searching. If your work in any way is knowledge work, then you need _knowledge_, not just access to a vast reference.

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

#106

Post by lifeisstillgood »

I think the value here is testing fluency.

If a student has easy to hand lookups and cheat sheets, then unsupervised they can appear more fluent. But someone sitting watching would obviously noticed and judge them more harshly than someone reading a completed paper.

The obverse is something often complained about on HN - being forced to perform at interviews that do not measure fluency but are tests or other shortcuts to actually sitting with and judging someone

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

#107

Post by tarakat »

wolframhempel wrote: post #72

This has been eluded to by a few other comments already, but I think it's worth stressing: Maybe the problem is that our definition of "cheating" doesn't make sense anymore. Our methods of teaching come from a worldview in which the information stored in your head is your only resource. That wasn't true in the past where you could consult colleagues, look things up in books or call experts - and it's certainly not tr…

Being able to look things up, even in seconds, is not equivalent to knowing them. When someone suggests "let's do X", you cannot reply with "but that would cause Y", if Y is buried in some pdf file on your computer, or one Bing search away - how do you know you should search for Y, when there are infinite other things you could search for.

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

#108

Post by nano9 »

wolframhempel wrote: post #81
wolframhempel wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to test their ability to perform a task - rather than how well they memorized things. Which is not to say that memorization is not important, but it's just one piece of the Puzzle. So when it comes to language tests, rather than having the candidate fill in prepositions into blanks, let's have an actual conversation with them in which they apply their combined skills.

I actually adhere to this philosophy when hiring candidates as well. Rather than having them explain how to reverse binary trees on a whiteboard, I have them sit down and do a mini version of the actual task they will have to do in their job later. And, unsurprisingly, knowing how well they do the actual task is a much better indicator of how well they perform at doing the actual task later.

I understand what the halting problem implies, what complexity is, what Turing machine means and why they are an abstraction for algorithms, and the basic common memes of programming such as using a stack and a heap, IEEE 754 floating point numbers, 2s complement binary numbering, and so on and so forth.

Yet I don't know a lick of Go. If I were to open up a Hello World tutorial for Go during the interview, would I honestly still have a shot?

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

#109

Post by saalweachter »

tpetry wrote: post #44
KingOfCoders wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I got dinged on that test once. "Why didn't you just Google this question?" they asked, "Because I was taking a test," I said.

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

#110

Post by nulbyte »

tsimionescu wrote: post #102
janekm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I challenge you to do wny intellectual task without knowing the basics by heart. For example, try writing a large program in APL today - you can easily Google the symbol for any function you want. Memorization, while not sufficient, is an absolutely necessary part of learning. No amount of googling can help you become skillful at something. Note that searching for new information or old information that you may have…

> I challenge you to do wny intellectual task without knowing the basics by heart.

So, in other words, you propose a test. Presumably it's open-book, since you are testing an ability to apply knowledge and not an ability to merely remember it.

This sounds less like a rebuttal and more like a validation.

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