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College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

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Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#151

Post by bsder »

908B64B197 wrote: post #104
nlh wrote: post #86

I found myself brewing with rage while reading this article. The approach of closely inspecting a student's words & physical actions while taking a test just feels...dated. Ancient. Anachronistic. Embarrassing. In the real world of 2020+, almost everyone has a portable Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in their pocket. Let people use calculators. Heck, let people use Wikipedia! If they copy an incorrect fact from Wiki…

Folks are doing take-home exam wrong. Caltech had tremendous success with a culture of honesty and take-home exams.

Most students go to college to get a piece of paper.

They couldn't care less whether they get it by cheating or by honest work.

The piece of paper is all that matters.

Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#152

Post by throwaway0a5e »

frenchy wrote: post #112
CamperBob2 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could just set the speed limit appropriately, at a level that most drivers will naturally conform to. This optimizes for both expediency and safety, but, sadly, not for revenue, or for readily-available probable cause to pull over essentially anyone the police want to pull over.

> Or you could just set the speed limit appropriately, at a level that most drivers will naturally conform to. The problem is that such a limit would not be a safe one, you would basically be replacing the limit with a sign that posts the rate that people like to drive at.

>The problem is that such a limit would not be a safe one,

According to who? The minority who wants the limit set elsewhere. Things like "what speed is safe and reasonable" are matters of social consensus. The "experts" can pontificate all they want and the vocal minority can gripe all they want but the median or average person and society at large is always going to be right on matters of social consensus. It's a tautology.

Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#153

Post by silly-silly »

brewdad wrote: post #143
ege_erdogan wrote: post #7

I see online synchronous 1-2 hour exams as a mistaken result of the "let's emulate in-person teaching in a remote setting" mindset. You don't succeed in remote teaching and learning by trying to make it as close as possible to the in-person setup. You have to treat it as an entirely different problem. Consider the synchronous exam. It is a perfect method of grading in-person. It is hard to cheat and all people take t…

We lost power (and internet) 45 seconds before my son's Physics final last spring during remote learning. He had to quickly scramble to take his testing materials outside and used his cell phone to access the exam. It worked out for him but easily could have been a disaster. We live at the edge of the school boundary and it was a localized outage due to a car hitting a pole, so he was the only student in his class th…

Are modern teachers really that robotic that they dont understand that 'things happen' outside of their limited domain of expectations ?

Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#154

Post by lolc »

parzivalm wrote: post #48
RegnisGnaw wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> People that want to cheat or game the system will find ways, it isn't hard to do. As someone who taught a college, that's a flawed statement. Let me propose this to you. You teach Calculus 1000 and there is an end of term exam. Your normal end of term exam is one where everyone sits in the same room, proctors are looking for cheats, things checked, etc. Instead this year you tell your students that this year it wi…

I perhaps wasn't clear enough but I meant solely when it comes to these type of anti-cheat systems being used. Obviously it would be different for in-person vs remote/take home.

I don't see why we should allow for the possibility that the ratio of cheaters would stay the same with or without the surveillance. That could only be true if the ratio of potential cheaters were so low that the threat of detection introduced by the spyware can't reduce the ratio further.

We may hate the software on ethical grounds, or because it degrades the exam-experience on many levels, or because its use can be considered abusive, but obviously it has an effect in the intended direction.

Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#155

Post by Tainnor »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #124
RegnisGnaw wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had my fair share of uncheatable open book exams, calculators allowed back in college. One I had on Calculus (or was it Linear Algebra?) was way harder than a comparable closed book exam. You really needed to know the subject to pass vs just memorizing a couple of formulas and plugging them in the right place. We're discussing this in relation in relation to COVID, so no large gathering. This means no open book i…

If someone can figure out how to cheat on an exam where each answer depends on the previous, and the original seed is unique to each student, wouldn't it show a pretty thorough mastery of the subject matter? I think the larger point is that it is fairly easy in any subject to design a test that is very hard to cheat on. It is much harder to find the resources in modern education to grade that test since each submissi…

How do you propose that this should work e.g. in proof-based maths courses? You can't just tweak a theorem to prove by the value of some "unique seed", the theorem might become wrong.

It's true that you usually can't cheat your way through such an exam provided you actually write the answer yourself, but in a take-home situation you can always ask someone else to solve it for you.

Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#156

Post by silly-silly »

chillwaves wrote: post #129
frenchy wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or you could just set the speed limit appropriately, at a level that most drivers will naturally conform to. The problem is that such a limit would not be a safe one, you would basically be replacing the limit with a sign that posts the rate that people like to drive at.

Do you have any evidence of this? My understanding is that speed limits have been largely unchanged for the past 50+ years. Car safety, on the other hand, has increased by a great deal. It seems likely to me that speed limits are conservative when it comes to safety.

I imagine because they are catering to the lowest common denominator, the human behind the wheel.

Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#157

Post by react_burger38 »

frenchy wrote: post #112
CamperBob2 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could just set the speed limit appropriately, at a level that most drivers will naturally conform to. This optimizes for both expediency and safety, but, sadly, not for revenue, or for readily-available probable cause to pull over essentially anyone the police want to pull over.

> Or you could just set the speed limit appropriately, at a level that most drivers will naturally conform to. The problem is that such a limit would not be a safe one, you would basically be replacing the limit with a sign that posts the rate that people like to drive at.

Speed limits on the I-15 in Utah have successfully been raised to 80mph without any negative impact to driver safety.

Turns out that people do drive at a reasonably safe speed, generally.

Source: https://jalopnik.com/utah-raises-some-speed-limits-to-80-mph...

Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#158

Post by withinboredom »

low_key wrote: post #108

I took an online class in 2015 that used Proctorio. Even at that time the proctoring/anti-cheat software was a nightmare. I was semi-accused of cheating because of "anomalies" during one of my tests. It was quickly cleared up by talking to the professor. The software is a privacy disaster and any computer that has had any of this spyware installed should be considered compromised. I kept a separate hard drive and wou…

Here’s the thing, if you want to cheat, you’ll find a way to cheat. This won’t stop anyone, it just stops casual cheating at a pretty hefty price.

Hell, just reading this article, I thought of various ways by having someone off screen listening to you read aloud and a projector mounted after the test starts, on the ceiling by another person who’s off screen.

You could have a kvm switch to a whole different computer, an AI overlaying data on the screen (reading from the video output, and injecting into the video output), or any number of ridiculously complicated setups.

It probably won’t catch any serious cheaters.

Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#159

Post by withinboredom »

silly-silly wrote: post #153
brewdad wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We lost power (and internet) 45 seconds before my son's Physics final last spring during remote learning. He had to quickly scramble to take his testing materials outside and used his cell phone to access the exam. It worked out for him but easily could have been a disaster. We live at the edge of the school boundary and it was a localized outage due to a car hitting a pole, so he was the only student in his class th…

Are modern teachers really that robotic that they dont understand that 'things happen' outside of their limited domain of expectations ?

If you’re a straight-A student, it’s probably not an issue. Like cutting up, or seen as an “average” student, your excuses are just that, and they aren’t excused.

Re: College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

#160

Post by godelski »

I think this illustrates the problems I have with these ML systems. Technology is supposed to make our lives easier. While surveillance may help catch more "bad guys" (clearly something we as a society argue over the definition of) it also causes many a lot of anxiety. One has to question if the added incrimination is worth the cost of anxiety to the public. Personally I do not think this is a good trade because even long before all this surveillance technology I felt safe in society. I believe most people did even in the 50's and 60's. So has the added surveillance really helped decrease crime? Or is it just correlated? (I'm not even convinced it is correlated).

As for tests, there is an easier solution to all this. Write your test as if it was a take home. Open notes. You can't stop people from communicating but often these types of exams/assignments it becomes clear who is doing it. In my undergrad all my upper division classes' exams were take home because "I can't test you on anything worthwhile in 2 hours." Honestly, most of us enjoyed these more. We often did the exams in the same room (we had the back of a building that was dedicated as a lounge to the physics students) and no one really cheated. The closest was "hey, I'm stuck on this problem and I know you are finished. Can I just use you as a rubber ducky?" (more like just explaining the problem to the person and the other person saying "uh huh" and no more) It also made me feel like an adult because our professors trusted us. As someone that frequently does poorly in a testing environment I was also surprised that I was able to get much higher scores on these tests despite the added complexity. The simple fact that I could "take a break and come back" was all the piece of mind I needed (or grabbing a beer when I felt frustrated). This also better reflected, in my opinion, what solving difficult problems were like in the real world. I could grab my book, go to the page that I know is helpful, sit and think, take of my shoes, pace, whatever. I was treated like an adult and it felt good.

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