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Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

dailyprincetonian.com

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Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#381

Post by marsten »

throwup238 wrote: post #175
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s just the propaganda they sell during college visits I'm speaking generally, not just about colleges. If you've never been in a high-trust commuity, I strongly recommend travelling to find one. It's about as mind blowing as transiting from one such community to a low-trust, high-cynicism one.

Can you give examples of what you consider to be high trust communities? Without specifics it’s hard to calibrate and figure out whether we‘re talking past each other. I spent two seasons working with the SPCC Icefall Doctors who put up the infrastructure to cross the Khumbu Icefall each year for Everest climbers so I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what a high trust community looks like (the Nepalese guiding…

Japan is a classic example. You can drop your wallet there and someone will send it to you with all the cash intact. It makes you realize how much overhead it causes when you need to guard against cheaters and thieves.

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#382

Post by morkalork »

recroad wrote: post #309

You mean currently exams aren't proctored?! I went to the University of Toronto and can't recall a single exam which wasn't.

It's weird, right? The US is just hands down strange in some regards to little procedural things that are important but also easy to implement, and yet for whatever reason don't do and make a big deal over it when it's a complete non-affaire in other countries.

Like voter ID. It's not some partisan issue. None of the political parties are fighting Elections Canada over it and its been around my whole life. Its just not a thing(tm). You go to vote, show your ID and and voilà, done. And yet somehow, this is a "big deal" down south?

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#383

Post by Forgeties79 »

marsten wrote: post #373
busyant wrote: post #346

I was a grad student @ Princeton a handful of decades ago. I was a TA for a few classes and, given the honor code, we did not proctor the exams for undergrads. We just handed them out (left the room) and returned to collect them at the end. - One of the exams in a course that I TAed had 5 free-response questions. - There were also 5 TAs in that class, so we un-stapled the exams and each TA graded one question (for co…

Academic integrity committees at prestigious schools are horribly lax. They want these types of issues to go away quietly. I have a friend who in college had another student take his test from the "complete" pile, erase my friend's name, and put on his own instead. It was only through blind luck that my friend figured it out. He, the TA, and the professor reported it – with smoking gun proof – but nothing happened. T…

I went to a school that actually tried to enforce it, and unfortunately it ended up being enforced wildly disproportionately along racial lines. My school had a very simple rule: if you were caught cheating, you were expelled. No strikes, no exceptions.

That is a massive burden to put on an educator.

Getting expelled from your university is a very serious, mandated fork in the road for anyone it happens to. So what do they do? If they relate to/empathize with the person, they try to handle it without reporting it. If they don’t, they reported and “let the system handle it.”

As any reasonable person would expect, white people were not reported and marginalized groups were. Privileged groups also got exceptions (the football team had a massive cheating scandal that should have expelled about 15 players, and the professor reported it! But mumble mumble uhh they learned their lesson).

After over a century they finally ended the system recently and honestly? Good. I appreciated what they were attempting to do, but it didn’t work.

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#384

Post by eclipticplane »

mynameisash wrote: post #311
wps wrote: post #27

I've sat in classes where people at my table genuinely took pictures of the exam while the professor's back was turned (being kind to us and giving us useful information on the board) and uploaded the entire exam to the Gemini app. Cheating is all around disheartening and is now incredibly easy with all the free multi-modal models around. Real active proctoring is needed and devices need to be confiscated during exam…

My son is taking an AP chem class - he's doing really well, super interested in the subject. It's a difficult class, to be sure. Many of his peers are just goofing off and don't understand things. My son regularly tells me about people in his lab group that are cheating off his papers (and, I think, even his test). He tries to cover up answers, but it's not always possible to do. What is even more frustrating is that…

Read r/teachers for 20 minutes and you'll understand why some teachers in the US don't do anything.

(And then mute r/teachers because it's depressing as all hell.)

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#385

Post by badlibrarian »

elgertam wrote: post #336
CSMastermind wrote: post #275

People blame AI but in reality it's more about America transitioning from a high-trust society to a low-trust one.

> it's more about America transitioning from a high-trust society to a low-trust one. We're talking about Princeton , here. Trust among elites remains persistently high. In fact, it's likely higher than ever due to assortative mating & geographic sorting. Elites, even students in the Ivies, still have trust of government and elite institutions, which the elite stratum itself runs. Trust between elites and lower strat…

The morgue manager at Harvard Medical School spent five years selling donated body parts online. The Cornell president just backed his Cadillac into a student asking him a question in a parking lot. This isn't high-trust culture. It's people who stopped believing anyone was watching.

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#386

Post by paler-adsorb »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #377
heggerd wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Chicken or the egg: multiculturalism doesn’t work or multiculturalism doesn’t work because assholes treat people with different cultures like shit. Also what’s the definition of multiculturalism? Can orthodox Christians be chill with Catholics? How about Japanese with Korean? Stupid shit. Also what’s your definition of white? Does it include Mediterranean climates? Fair-skinned Arabs? How about the Irish? What about…

[dead]

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#387

Post by eclipticplane »

traderj0e wrote: post #268
Krasnol wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine why you would be so stupid to allow phones to exams. Is this normal in the US?

Usually the rule is you can't have a phone out of your pocket or backpack during a test. Students still have phones on them. If they disallowed that too, how would that work, an airport security style check going in?

If NYC schools can do it at scale (1,600 schools this year banned cell phones), Princeton could certainly do it.

Students either leave phones at home, or the school provides pouches/mini lockers for each student.

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#388

Post by hammock »

csiegert wrote: post #376
busyant wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no recollection of the student's name. ~150 students in the class, so they were all a blur. This was also a few years before the web took hold, so I could not have "Google-stalked" her even if I had been so inclined. I do remember my fellow TA's name! But that's probably not surprising.

[flagged]

No one likes a gossip

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#389

Post by rayiner »

busyant wrote: post #346

I was a grad student @ Princeton a handful of decades ago. I was a TA for a few classes and, given the honor code, we did not proctor the exams for undergrads. We just handed them out (left the room) and returned to collect them at the end. - One of the exams in a course that I TAed had 5 free-response questions. - There were also 5 TAs in that class, so we un-stapled the exams and each TA graded one question (for co…

If you want rage bait, read the proceedings of honor code committees at your school. At least at Northwestern they were public record (sometimes with redaction of identities). The number of people who got off with obviously bullshit excuses was maddening even to read about.

Re: Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

#390

Post by f33d5173 »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #383
marsten wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Academic integrity committees at prestigious schools are horribly lax. They want these types of issues to go away quietly. I have a friend who in college had another student take his test from the "complete" pile, erase my friend's name, and put on his own instead. It was only through blind luck that my friend figured it out. He, the TA, and the professor reported it – with smoking gun proof – but nothing happened. T…

I went to a school that actually tried to enforce it, and unfortunately it ended up being enforced wildly disproportionately along racial lines. My school had a very simple rule: if you were caught cheating, you were expelled. No strikes, no exceptions. That is a massive burden to put on an educator. Getting expelled from your university is a very serious, mandated fork in the road for anyone it happens to. So what d…

You could just... make punishments more proportionate? If people are regularly circumventing your punishment system because they feel it's too harsh, maybe take that as a sign.
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