131–140 of 324 posts
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I agree with you, but at the same time, it diminishes the value of a degree, because it no longer certifies that meet certain requirements.
They already don't certify competence.
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> Similarly with my room, you can hide everything that would breach your privacy before the exam starts. The need to hide things is itself an effect of privacy having been breached. Privacy isn't just to keep information secret, but also to provide a space in which you can be comfortable because it is your own space. Needing to hide things away is a reaction to privacy being breached, not a way to preserve privacy.
I do not understand how hiding private items from the camera breaches your privacy. That is like saying you have already died of thirst because you have to drink water; the preventive measure does not cause the thing it tries to prevent. Furthermore, you do not have to take the exam in your own room. Any quiet room where there are no other people is theoretically fine. Having access to such a room is your own respons…
I think I see the difference here. You're seeing "privacy" in terms of information being leaked. So long as no information is revealed, then no privacy has been lost. The information security is key. Is that an accurate way of describing your views?
For me, "privacy" is a state in which effort does not need to be expended to maintain information security. The cost is not the personal information being leaked, but rather the effort needed in order to prevent information from being leaked. Of knowing that your sanctuary has been violated, that your comfortable place has been exposed to others. And sure, you may try to minimize other effects of that breach of privacy by hiding away aspects of yourself, but that is a response to an invasion that has already occurred.
To use your analogy, suppose I'm going on a trip through the desert. I know that water may not be readily available, so I take several gallons of water with me. On the other hand, if I'm going to a restaurant, I can assume that water will be available and do not pack my own. In neither case have I died of thirst, but in one case I have needed to spend additional effort to ensure that was the case. If I hide things away from the camera, I haven't had information leaks (died of thirst), but I have needed to take extra precautions (carrying several gallons of water) due to the breach of privacy (travel through the desert) that has already occurred.
> Furthermore, you do not have to take the exam in your own room. Any quiet room where there are no other people is theoretically fine. Having access to such a room is your own responsibility, just like having access to a laptop to do your study is your own responsibility.
During normal times, when there may be publicly available study rooms at a university, those options exist. When those same study rooms are closed to stop the spread of a pandemic, or when those study rooms cannot be booked due to lack of availability, a person's private room may be the only room available. In that case, the requirement of exposing one's exam space implicitly requires exposing one's personal space.
> I do not believe requiring students to have access to a private room for 2 hours breaches their privacy.
Requiring students to have access to a private room isn't the issue. Requiring proctors to have access to the student's private room is.
We employed the method of mixing the order of questions, not giving question titles, and having a pool of subtly different questions (a negation or a different constant slipped in) in order to vastly increase the amount of necessary communication to collaborate. We had the students turn on their webcams just to discourage them sitting in the same room, which basically would negate our former efforts. Neither did we f…
I teached a C class during coronavirus lockdown in France and I also did something of the sort (having different question per student, mixing their order, etc). But I think, most importantly, I put a lot of emphasis on group work & home work. This has also its own issues. I like to do group homework because I believe that in the real world, you rarely work alone, and group work allow to have more fun project than wha…
My experience is that there is sometimes somebody who is not a slacker, and it's usually the only one doing the work for the entire group.
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I would add as an aside that the invigilated exam halls you likely remember from your British education don’t really exist in most US universities. Final exams are generally administered by the lecturers themselves rather than independent invigilators, and there’s (generally) less emphasis on having a standardised process from one course to another.
Funny, at my UK university for Computer Science we did not have independently invigilated exams. I would assume other courses were similar. We did have them for secondary education though.
I can see why universities want to use a system like this. A friend of mine is a University lecturer for physics and one of his students gave him an invite to the discord channel where half his students are in there sharing all the answers during the final exam. He basically told me there is nothing he can do about it. He talked to the head of department and they basically said if you have proof of specific people ch…
Discord accounts are tied to real identities and the company is pretty aggressive about removing duplicate accounts. It should be possible to ID most of the people in that chat and report them to the administration.
Since when? My discord account doesn't have my name or phone linked at all, just email.
A relative of mine recently took an English course, and constantly had to lobby for re-evaluation of low grades caused by false positives with Turnitin[1].
The issues were varied, but the most frustrating one was that passages in her paper that were quoted and footnoted were marked as "sourced from the internet". Turns out that would happen with any passage quoted from a book that someone put on the internet, somewhere.
Of course, instructors are supposed to manually review for this sort of thing, but it's such a basic miss. One that's going to get worse over time. People put existing source material on the internet, and it gets indexed.
Also, see this example from Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/h731k/thank_god_for_tu... Argh.
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Maybe making questions that you have to think about instead of just looking up the answer would help?
Depends on the subject. In a long form essay where you need to cite sources or technical details you could make a big difference to your score by quickly looking these up. Nobody can go into the exam blind but they can improve their answers significantly by looking up the details that others have to spend a long time trying to remember. For example in an English exam, direct quotations from literature. Or in a law ex…
Isn't that just testing for memory rather than comprehension?
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They already don't certify competence.
Assuming everyone is not constantly cheating and the coursework is somewhat relevant and rigorous, surely they signal a higher probability of at least awareness of the subject matter or ability to learn something.