Avoiding homework with code and getting caught • Hacker News Board

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#151

Post by dubya » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 4:13 PM UTC

photochemsyn wrote: post #138

"Cruically, our teachers could see how many times we've watched the video..." This sounds like it's normalizing invasive surveillance. Getting kids used to the notion that their teachers should be able to monitor their online educational activities... and then, if governments and corporations are tracking all your internet activity, email communications, phone location data - it's just the way things are done! Now ha…

Canvas, which I think is pretty standard, has views, last access, and total access time for all pages. I don't think there's a way to choose not to track, and I've not seen a policy for what happens to the data.

Our school also has mandatory online trainings every year or two, with videos in a pop-up with most controls disabled. "document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = 1000;" used to save a lot of time, but with cross-site protections it's easier to use a plugin, which is much slower to adjust.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#152

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 4:19 PM UTC

Heh...reminds me in my Algebra II class, we were being taught polynomial expansion. I had a TI-89 which would do it automatically with a single function, but that wouldn't show the work, so I wouldn't get credit for it.

So I wrote a program that would show the work.

I asked my teacher if I could use that program on the test, and she said that if I knew the material so well that I could write a program that shows the work, then I'd probably ace the test without it anyways, so I could go ahead and use it on the condition that I did not share the program with any of my friends.

That condition was fine with me. I didn't have any friends. :-(

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#153

Post by spicysugar » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 4:24 PM UTC

Still in Uni, I remember the first day, when I got the class wifi credentials, i found out one app i use was blocked. A basic messenger app. Why am I trying to be spooky, it's WhatsApp. Other sites like instagram, Twitter, Snapchat etc were also blocked. I used none of the other blocked sites. I still remember that as soon as I realised it, i installed orbot to tunnel my WhatsApp traffic through tor. It worked as expected. I don't have many people texting me, but when someone does it's usually urgent and not anything spam. So people noticed it and held me as some tech genius who defeated the system, little did they know I just dug the ground and made a tunnel. They still are distracted, sometimes, but it's fine. Atleast for me.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#154

Post by lupire » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 4:43 PM UTC

rjmunro wrote: post #113

rcfox wrote: post #55

When I was in university, I scraped an internal job postings site for students to find internships. The site was terrible- each job description would load in a pop-up window controlled by Javascript, and loading a second description would override the first. It was also really slow and had limited filtering. My version could load job descriptions in new tabs, presented the table on a single page, and you could mark j…

So you made a tool to make life easier for you and your fellow students, and rather than congratulating you they threatened to sue?

Yes, that's how institutions operate. Seeing Like a State is the classic text on the subject.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#155

Post by BizarroLand » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 5:56 PM UTC

imdsm wrote: post #104

aabbccsmith wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't really get that vibe, especially when we called Colin. He was super friendly. But then again, we didn't want to test it and we complied immediately =)

Diplomacy often comes across as friendliness. I've been in situations where I've not acquiesced and seen how quickly things can change. As they say, don't take friendliness for weakness. Wonderfully managed by all parties though.

Yeah, chances are Hegarty was actually impressed and alarmed, and the best way to reconcile both of those was to befriend this kid, share the info so that HegartyMath doesn't get damaged from the leak, and send some praise their way for identifying a glaring security and utility issue in the app.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#156

Post by coldacid » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 7:11 PM UTC

NorwegianDude wrote: post #87

Well done, and nice of you guys to take it down too. I remember having some fun in high school when windows XP was the thing and handing out software at school was done using USB memory sticks. I wrote a small program just to mess with classmates that copyed itself to the machine when the memory stick was inserted and set itself to run at startup. It also copyed itself to any USB storage that was connected to the mac…

So you made the Morris worm but for USB. Nice!

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#157

Post by coldacid » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 7:20 PM UTC

harel wrote: post #100

Not exactly the same, but in the late 80s I've written some Amiga Basic (or was it AMOS?) programs to do all the variations of my algebra homework. Maybe that's why I suck at maths today...

Probably AMOS, unless you were using an A1000 running OS 1.x. I don't think Amiga Basic worked on anything else.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#158

Post by coldacid » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 7:21 PM UTC

JacobSeated wrote: post #89

Very interesting, and love the way Colin Hegarty took it, it's probably never worth to drag kids to court etc.

In fact, listening to them, communicating with them, and praising them for their efforts probably leads to _better_ outcomes than anything else, as it reinforces white hat behaviour.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#159

Post by faeriechangling » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 7:32 PM UTC

josefresco wrote: post #131

youssefabdelm wrote: post #118

Rooting for you guys. If anything this should cause some people to question the very educational structure they've set up. If people are attempting to evade homework it's because it isn't interesting to the student, which hints at a deeper problem that the school/teacher/entire school set-up and structure needs to address. They essentially need to throw out everything they've set up because they're operating it more…

>If anything this should cause some people to question the very educational structure they've set up. I played basketball growing up. Much of our practice was boring things like passing drills, dribbling drills, running, countless free throws. We all grumbled & complained - "Why can't we just scrimmage?" we'd ask. "I already know how to play the game, why do I need to work on these boring skills?" I don't think I nee…

In chess I drilled tactics puzzles, I drilled endgames, I memorized openings, I studied the game, all things typically considered less interesting than actually playing. Yet I never felt this was very difficult because I paced myself out, I skipped it when I was bored, I did extra when I felt more encouraged, I alloted a fixed amount of time to this sort of practice. I used spaced repetition software and generally optimised for actual learning of the skill.

The big difference with sports and games vs school is that in sports and games you are optimising to win the game, and in school you're optimising to pass an arbitrary test which only exists in the context of school. It's depressing for the same reason people grinding leetcode puzzles just to get through interviews is depressing. I've had to drill many pointless things over the years to prove to some authority that I'm willing to waste tons of time if they want me to.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#160

Post by mcv » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 9:15 PM UTC

pards wrote: post #147

mcv wrote: post #97

Epic stuff, and I think this experience may well be more valuable than the homework you avoided. Basically you did harder homework in order to avoid easier homework. The problem is letting other people use it; of course it's nice to help people, and it's altruistic to do so for free, but some of those people might actually need this homework to learn, and you may have deprived them of that. (Although I also think wat…

KPMG got fined $US450k for this kind of behaviour [0]. If I recall correctly, employees kept the answers to the mandatory compliance training tests in a document on a shared drive. [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/15/us-wa...

Well, then I guess it's good that I didn't share it with anyone else.