Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software • Hacker News Board

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#121

Post by userbinator » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 3:52 AM UTC

maerF0x0 wrote: post #66

I had a teacher that solved this by saying all exams were open book, and then put so many questions that if you didnt know the material you'd just run out of time. Basically you could look up a very low number of things in the amount of time per question allotted

I remember one who actually said "I do not expect you to finish all the questions" and gave an exam with many questions, but to his surprise, a few students (very few - approximately 2 out of 300+) including me, managed to race through them all. The questions were extremely easy for those who knew the material, such that you'd spend more time writing the answer than thinking.

That sort of thing can't be done for all subject matter, however.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#122

Post by salawat » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 4:01 AM UTC

ivansavz wrote: post #41

salawat wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Say you know (for whatever reason) you're 90% going to fail - do you accept that? Or do break out the Hail Mary cheat - what have you got to lose? This is almost the critical pass/fail decision in my opinion, because in the real world, on actually difficult or unsolved problems the correct decision is to escalate, clearly communicate you have an issue, and either be directed to someone who can get you unstuck, or in…

> "I've killed more trees writing out the work for these problems than anyone should reasonably have to." Lol... so true. Some procedures take forever. Like finding the eigenvectors of a 3x3 matrix, for example. First the eigenvalues calculation, then for each eigenvalue there is a nullspace problem. Some trees will be hurt for sure!

I still look back on those notebooks sometimes, and contemplate doing a refresher problem or two.

Then I realize I have no trees in my yard, and that I should correct that.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#123

Post by cheeze » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 4:10 AM UTC

GhostVII wrote: post #99

cosmie wrote: post #9

Back in the good ol' days, you could just take the exam inside of a VM. The VM is locked down, but the host isn't. Looks like from ProctorU's docs[1] that they got around to probing for the (blatantly obvious[2]) signatures of a VM and stopped that trick. I wonder if those signatures exist in a Windows Sandbox[3] instance, or if you can detect/block the Enhanced RDP Session Windows leverages when running a Sandbox...…

You can also just duct tape a phone to your computer screen with your notes. Webcam can't see it, and it's right in your field of view when looking at the questions. Locked down browsers are dumb, no matter what you do there's a million ways to cheat easily.

I agree with you but this is trivially defeated with a mirror

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#124

Post by weehoo » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 4:12 AM UTC

centimeter wrote: post #116

whoisburbansky wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The intuitive understanding that you still retain was only built up by repetition and memorization in the first place, no?

Absolutely not. I honestly can’t identify with your comments in the slightest. The only part of math that I ever learned by memorization was addition and multiplication tables in elementary school. Every subsequent revelation was based on pure understanding - zero repetition required. Up to what level of math have you studied? I honestly can’t imagine anyone thinking they’re good at undergrad-level math if they do it…

The great grandparent to your post (the one who initially brought up the necessity of rote learning) is a quant at a market maker.

Anecdotally, my favorite professor from undergrad (born in China, PhD from the best department in his field [my personal opinion]) said he thought the reason for Russian/Chinese dominance in certain areas of math was due to how those areas benefitted very much from rote practice. He advised all of us (American undergrads) to drill and kill certain techniques in order to build up our pattern matching.

I don’t think they’re advocating doing hundreds of worksheets on the power rule or trig substitutions or memorizing line by line proofs. Our brains do follow formal rules when doing math, but the insight necessary to find a way to solve a problem that isn’t straightforward isn’t through application of rules, it’s through a tacit intuition that you build up by doing lots of math. There is no other way.

It’s like how everyone feels like they understand physics to a PhD level while watching the Feynman lectures, but if you were to hand them any of the problems afterwards, what seemed like such a natural stream of thought is just simply out of reach. It’s much easier to go over something and declare “this makes sense” than it is to come up with that something in the first place.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#125

Post by gravypod » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 4:16 AM UTC

sn41 wrote: post #119

cloud5ir wrote: post #55

To me, this underscores notion that schools continue to test for the wrong thing. With the exception of professions/trades that require impulse application of knowledge, I don't know why I would want/need someone to memorize a concept in order to apply it. Productive members of our society/workforce think critically, they ask good questions, and they research and leverage the information at their disposal to make dat…

I teach programming. What prevents students from colluding over their tablets/mobiles/laptops while taking the exam from another device? Can't the student mirror the screen elsewhere, leading to interesting possibilities for cheating? Proctoring is not a solution that I am comfortable with. I do not want to peer into the private lives of students and their home environments. Not every student is well-off, and has a p…

Could you make your class project based and give everyone different, but equally difficult, projects of their choosing. Each check in into master would then be merged after a code review with you where you ask questions about why implementations are done specific ways to solve the problem/refactor. Code is only merged when it hits a quality marker you set. Students are graded by percentage of deliverable hit from original project specs.

Ex: student is to implement a K&R C compiler + code generator in 1 semester. Help them break up the project into manageable chunks (tokenize, AST, register allocation, etc). Each feature includes tests, comments, docs, and is presented to you by X date. Code review and cycle as many times as needed as long as it gets in by X date. By the end of the class the student hit 100% of their deadlines but only pass 70% of some test C files you create so they get a 70% (or higher if their code was consistently good and did not need cleanup) in the class or something.

It would never work because "you need to have a final exam" but it's the ideal I think we should strive for if you are "teaching programming" since this is how most work I've done in the real world has gone.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#126

Post by nerdbaggy » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 4:25 AM UTC

Here if a fun thing. In chrome whenever you grant we website to use your camera and mic you now have that web site access to view all cameras and listen to all mics on your computer at the same time

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#127

Post by acbart » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 4:28 AM UTC

gravypod wrote: post #125

sn41 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I teach programming. What prevents students from colluding over their tablets/mobiles/laptops while taking the exam from another device? Can't the student mirror the screen elsewhere, leading to interesting possibilities for cheating? Proctoring is not a solution that I am comfortable with. I do not want to peer into the private lives of students and their home environments. Not every student is well-off, and has a p…

Could you make your class project based and give everyone different, but equally difficult, projects of their choosing. Each check in into master would then be merged after a code review with you where you ask questions about why implementations are done specific ways to solve the problem/refactor. Code is only merged when it hits a quality marker you set. Students are graded by percentage of deliverable hit from ori…

This will never work because it absolutely fails to scale, at a time when we have a complete lack of computing educators. Customized projects for each student? I have 159 students in my CS1 this semester, and I can barely keep track of them with the massive amounts of data I collect. The idea of making individualized assignments is beautiful but unrealistic.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#128

Post by olyjohn » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 4:45 AM UTC

I feel so bad for the students that have to deal with this. I worked at a Community College in IT for a while. Students would come into a lab that was specifically set up for testing. The anti-cheating software was such total trash, it would crash, crash the browser, crash the whole system. Students would have to start testing over...

At least twice a month, their systems would be down, and nobody could take tests at all. We'd have to send home 30-60 students at a time, and reschedule their tests for another day. These were students who were also working jobs, and took time off of work, likely unpaid, to come in and take the test. So we wasted their time, and lost them money. Not to mention the constant waste of IT's time dealing with this trash software.

It's totally fucking criminal that these companies sell such garbage to our schools and get away with it. It doesn't matter how bad it is, it checks a box on some requirements sheet so we will never switch to something else... Not that the other options are any better.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#129

Post by peeters » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 4:49 AM UTC

> one WLU professor wrote that anyone who wished to use foam noise-cancelling ear plugs must “in plain view of your webcam … place the ear plugs on your desk and use a hard object to hit each ear plug before putting it in your ear—if they are indeed just foam ear plugs they will not be harmed.”

Nitpick but noise-cancelling is by definition an active electronic process, and so will never be a purely foam ear plug. This is Vice misreporting what the professor said (professor's words were "ear plugs for noise reduction").

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#130

Post by FuckButtons » Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 4:50 AM UTC

acbart wrote: post #127

gravypod wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you make your class project based and give everyone different, but equally difficult, projects of their choosing. Each check in into master would then be merged after a code review with you where you ask questions about why implementations are done specific ways to solve the problem/refactor. Code is only merged when it hits a quality marker you set. Students are graded by percentage of deliverable hit from ori…

This will never work because it absolutely fails to scale, at a time when we have a complete lack of computing educators. Customized projects for each student? I have 159 students in my CS1 this semester, and I can barely keep track of them with the massive amounts of data I collect. The idea of making individualized assignments is beautiful but unrealistic.

So much this: cs61a at Berkeley for example has almost 2000 students in a single class, the idea of personalized anything with that many students is total unfeasible.