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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

#111

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

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…

Tests are supposed to test your knowledge of a concept. If you have to look it up then you don't know it.

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

#112

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

tarakat wrote: post #107
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.

That's one of the main points of The Shallows by Nicholas Carr and I think that I agree.

Long term subconscious memory is where a lot of the connections happen. If your long term memory only knows where to find things without knowing them then that ability is stunted.

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

#113

Post by jonfw »

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.

“Design better tests” is not useful feedback. It’s just kicking the can down the road and blaming professors

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

#114

Post by fn-mote »

kaba0 wrote: post #91
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…

Well, it depends. A big part of the valuable experience comes from having memories of similar situations, and thus a shortcut to the solution. In IT it can be similar to “indexing”, like I may remember reading a relevant stackoverflow question and I know how to find it again, but I don’t remember the exact solution. But the catch is, to index something you first have to crawl through it. In medicine for example, ther…

> [...] memories of similar situations [...]

I'm going to claim that memory is only one part, maybe 1/3, of what I would like to examine for. Certainly in a job interview, but I also like university exams that include the parts below.

There's another huge part, *problem solving skills*. Working long enough to figure out which pieces of knowledge that you have apply to the situation.

There's another part, *making it work*. Software engineers deal with failures in practice (debugging) as well as theory (don't know how to do it). Sadly but interestingly, sometimes this is the point of failure for a student/examinee when they possess plenty of knowledge but don't know how to use it.

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

#115

Post by pclmulqdq »

nano9 wrote: post #108
wolframhempel wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ho…

I think people who are really into "do the job for an hour" interviews don't understand this. Some skills (particularly programming languages) are just really easy to learn. I learned go in a week for a consulting job. If I had to do an interview in go, I would not have gotten the job.

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

#116

Post by dosman33 »

Tape your notes to the lid of the laptop and it's out of sight from even the most complete "scan" of a room. If people can cheat during an in person exam it's not possible to enforce cheating restrictions off-site, it's a completely useless loss of privacy to enforce an unenforceable idea.

I'm not pro-cheating, but this is just another example of tech trying to show that it can solve any social problem through even more technology and we already know this doesn't work. You must face the social issues head on, you can't just throw money at them in the form of more technology.

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

#117

Post by matheusmoreira »

tpetry wrote: post #41
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.

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 understoo…

> 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.

Reminds me of my school days. Tests with hundreds of questions and less than a minute to solve each question. They were essentially testing the student's time management skills as well as their physical and mental fortitude in addition to their knowledge. Extremely exhausting and anxiety inducing.

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

#118

Post by rntksi »

tarakat wrote: post #107
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.

The way I used to write/set-up tests when I was teaching is that you could use a limited set of online resources to answer, but if you have to search every question you won't have enough time to do it. So it also tested your ability to quickly locate the information you need should you not know it right away.

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

#119

Post by forgotusername6 »

tarakat wrote: post #107
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.

Back at university one of the first things we were told about being an a good engineer was: "You don't need to know everything, but you do need to know where to look it up".

It's a statement that I agree with. There is just too much knowledge to know it all. These days there is a very real skill in knowing how to search i.e. a second order version of the above statement "you need to know where to find out how to look this up".

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

#120

Post by Mordisquitos »

tremon wrote: post #76
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…

in the past where you could consult colleagues Perhaps tests are to make sure that you are a going to be colleague worth consulting then? Yes, pure memorization and recall of facts is less valuable now than before, but knowing how to apply the facts available to you is still a skill worth having, and similarly worth testing. Those skills can also be assessed using written tests, and the potential for cheating is just…

> Let's take language learning as an example: do you consider a foreigner with a dictionary to be just as expressive as a native speaker? Perhaps there is value in testing the immediate knowledge of the student rather than their lookup skills?

You may be well aware of this, but you've essentially converged on the classical Chinese Room thought experiment [0]. It's usually applied to the philosophical question as to what does and does not constitute intelligence in the context of AI, but it's interesting how it is also applicable to what does and does not constitute knowledge in the context of learning.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

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