As bad as all of the proctoring software seems to be, I wish we had it. I'm a 1L at an American law school that's doing entirely unproctored exams. I didn't come to the state with any connections, nor am I friends with any upperclassmen. I already know I'm going to get fucking annihilated by people who are cheating with their 2L/3L buddies, because there's literally zero risk of getting caught.
In light of how heavily your 1L grades affect your career prospects, it seems insane that they're going to basically sort people by their performance on unproctored take-home exams with no integrity whatsoever.
Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software
151–160 of 242 posts
Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm genuinely curious to learn your option on cheating - does it actually matter? What I mean is - certainly you don't want to harm the reputation of your school, and you want your students to have actually learned the material and be prepared for whatever they do in life that requires that knowledge... but what I'm wondering is... if there's presumably some tiny percentage of a class that is going to actually cheat…
Of course it matters. In a class where cheating is permitted, the students who choose to cheat will perform better than they otherwise would have. That will give them an advantage over the students who choose to not cheat. I personally experienced this in undergraduate with a professor who chose to ignore obvious cheating and I think it negatively impacted the motivation of students to learn the material.
I assume the people downvoting you are trying to say "there was nothing stopping you from cheating either".
Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software
#153To 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…
The problem is less that students can look up answers online, its that they could hand the laptop to someone experienced and have them complete the exam for the student.
An ideal situation would be allowing students to use online resources but not to communicate with other people during the exam.
Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I thought in the US people paid money for going to university, so that classes are well-funded enough... /sarcasm
Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Most code reviews I've done at work take between 5 minutes to 10 minutes. To assume the worst possible case of 200 students, 20 deliverable per student, and a 10 minutes meeting per MR you'd be at ~28 days (~84 8hr-days). Get 1 TA and you now have 42 days of the semester dedicated to 1:1 time (35%) and the remainder of the semester dedicated to producing learning content. Learning content (lecture videos, etc) can be…
The hard part is giving the student meaningful feedback. Especially to those who don't understand something important.
It takes time to understand what they do and don't understand, and explain it at their level.
Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software
#156I 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…
What kind of cheat does it prevent? I imagine it wouldn't be terribly hard to run the machines so that only one full-screen window is shown, or a user for whom the internet is disabled. Is that not enough?
> What kind of cheat does it prevent?
Not much. When lockdowns first started I remember seeing _tons_ of first and second hand accounts of all the ways anti-cheating software failed when exposed to the real world.
> I imagine it wouldn't be terribly hard to run the machines so that only one full-screen window is shown, or a user for whom the internet is disabled. Is that not enough?
It can be a little tricky. We put the test in a single full-screen window on top of any other windows, and...the students alter the transparency to view their notes behind it, or they notice that we only check windows in the current desktop or for the current active user. Maybe "full-screen" on the system in question only fills a single monitor and leaves another open for research.
All of that assumes that the student is only using a single device and doesn't have a hi-def pet silicon rock in their pockets at all times, hence the webcam monitoring and whatnot to check that a student is actively staring at the screen the whole time.
Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is absolutely backwards. No amount of reference sheets will help you with mathematics if you don't understand something.
I think you have backwards: you only understand something after grinding out problems and memorization.
Anecdote time. Never have I ever understood concepts through repetition alone. Grinding problems is for building patterns via using different input sets, not unlike ML. It is true that it "clicks" sometimes after a threshold and you actually understand it, but usually what grinding does is reinforce the algorithm without actually understanding it - e.g. surely you know that c squared equals a squared plus b squared, you've probably grinded that enough to memorize that equation. Can you prove it or at least explain why that equation is correct? Because i can't, not even after repeating it a million times. That's the difference between memorization and understanding.
Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software
#158A solution for both this, and the problems with exams in general, is oral exams. Student has to answer questions from the teacher, in real time, one-on-one. Takes longer, but is much more authentic.
"Hey bro, I'll pay you $50 to let me listen while the teacher asks you questions"
Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Most code reviews I've done at work take between 5 minutes to 10 minutes. To assume the worst possible case of 200 students, 20 deliverable per student, and a 10 minutes meeting per MR you'd be at ~28 days (~84 8hr-days). Get 1 TA and you now have 42 days of the semester dedicated to 1:1 time (35%) and the remainder of the semester dedicated to producing learning content. Learning content (lecture videos, etc) can be…
It's easy (even a bit fun) to grade and give feedback for good students. Meanwhile it's a huge pain to do for the weak students. You need to first figure out what they heck they're trying to do before you can tell them how to fix it, which may take a lot. I suspect code reviews for professionals is much more like the good student category.
If you're asking the students to define unique projects themselves, you run into new problems as students dig up the most obscure blogs they can find on the internet to download and give you. It's a never-ending adversarial struggle.
Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most code reviews I've done at work take between 5 minutes to 10 minutes. To assume the worst possible case of 200 students, 20 deliverable per student, and a 10 minutes meeting per MR you'd be at ~28 days (~84 8hr-days). Get 1 TA and you now have 42 days of the semester dedicated to 1:1 time (35%) and the remainder of the semester dedicated to producing learning content. Learning content (lecture videos, etc) can be…
It's easy (even a bit fun) to grade and give feedback for good students. Meanwhile it's a huge pain to do for the weak students. You need to first figure out what they heck they're trying to do before you can tell them how to fix it, which may take a lot. I suspect code reviews for professionals is much more like the good student category. If you're asking the students to define unique projects themselves, you run in…
You'll be surprised at what "weak" code you'll see in the real world and have to explain to someone it's not maintainable or clean or whatever.
This is especially true of junior data scientists (in my anecdotal experience so far)