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EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

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Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#221

Post by 908B64B197 »

fxtentacle wrote: post #5

In case you don't know who Proctorio is: (like me) Apparently it's a supervision software that students are forced to install on their private computer and (as expected) it'll do its worst to invade your privacy and flag "suspicious" things, based on which the university might punish you. "Suspicious" here means wearing glasses [3] or looking around in the room or blinking too much [4] or having eye and/or skin color…

That's one of the reasons I wish more people would run Windows 10S or whatever the store only version was called. Or iOS.

Can't install shady third party drivers, can't install stuff like that that mess with hypervisors (and anyways, every app kind of runs in a sandboxed process anyways) and your app can go in the background at anytime!

Don't like it? Roll your own devices.

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#222

Post by skeeter2020 »

silexia wrote: post #167
MattGaiser wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I think people here are underestimating the volume of cheating in school. It isn't a minority. It is an overwhelming majority if they think they can get away with it. https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2017/02/cheating_in_college_... https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-academic-cheating-1....

Maybe we should stop endlessly pushing and insisting on degrees... Maybe skills tests in an interview process is not such a bad thing. As an employer, I don't care what piece of paper you have from what school. I only care about how well you can do the job I need to be done.

>> As an employer, I don't care what piece of paper you have from what school. I only care about how well you can do the job I need to be done.

To be blunt, duh. I agree degrees are very imperfect & crude indicators of what you're try to measure, but what is your alternative? I'm getting DoS levels of applications blasted at me, how do I filter to an effective level that removes the same cheating mechanics mentioned here?

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#223

Post by inetknght »

tingol wrote: post #201
c7DJTLrn wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, screw those people for... needing to pay the bills.

Someone working at a high profile software company has problems paying bills? Yeah sure...

People come from all walks of life.

You should learn some empathy.

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#224

Post by jlund-molfese »

tingol wrote: post #201
c7DJTLrn wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, screw those people for... needing to pay the bills.

Someone working at a high profile software company has problems paying bills? Yeah sure...

It can be pretty hard to get, for example, visa sponsorship. A pariah company might be the only option which allows some people to meet their goals.

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#225

Post by iforgotpassword »

vincentmarle wrote: post #145
fxtentacle wrote: post #5

In case you don't know who Proctorio is: (like me) Apparently it's a supervision software that students are forced to install on their private computer and (as expected) it'll do its worst to invade your privacy and flag "suspicious" things, based on which the university might punish you. "Suspicious" here means wearing glasses [3] or looking around in the room or blinking too much [4] or having eye and/or skin color…

As a remote accredited degree candidate (pre-pandemic so I did it before it was cool) the only alternative to Proctorio was finding an actual proctor in my area who was subject to approval by my university and who I would have to pay to sit and watch over me. Every exam was a multi-week hassle that I had to coordinate with the added stress of last minute cancellations. I much prefer Proctorio. Yeah, it’s intrusive fo…

Except the fucked up cases op linked and then some. Sure as long as it always works for you it's great and you can just ignore these to avoid uncomfortable thoughts, but once you're affected I bet it turns into a whole different story and suddenly you turn into one of these hysterical tinfoil hats yourself.

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#226

Post by ModernMech »

LegitShady wrote: post #209
ModernMech wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since the pandemic began, I've been giving my CS students take home exams, and the results have been so great. They are open everything, including the internet, and the students have 4-5 days to work on the exam, which is a project. I just don't have the ability to police 150-200 students as to whether they are cheating. So I assume they will cheat, and give them a cheating-resistant exam. Instead of asking knowledge…

You sound like a good teacher. My experience at university was that the good teachers were a minority. Most would do their research and the minimum for teaching.

I'm teaching faculty, so I don't do research. Research faculty are right to prioritize their research -- they are incentivized to do so by administration. Their tenure is predicated almost 100% on their research output and the grant money they bring in. Teaching ability is an afterthought when it comes to tenure and promotion. It doesn't make them bad people or bad at their job, it's just that their job isn't really teaching according to basically every signal sent their way by the admin.

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#227

Post by rincebrain »

MattGaiser wrote: post #160
leetcrew wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cheating was absolutely rampant when I was in college getting my CS degree. and that was with tests taken in person with the professor in the room! I'm sure students are even more brazen when all assignments are done at home. I think at the very least, all exams ought to be designed as "open book" with a time limit. that at least eliminates the issue of students using unauthorized resources. I'm not sure what can be…

Indeed. I think people here are underestimating the volume of cheating in school. It isn't a minority. It is an overwhelming majority if they think they can get away with it. https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2017/02/cheating_in_college_... https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-academic-cheating-1....

While I was at university for computer science, I often found many "senior" students (both graduate and undergraduate) who were truly astonishingly unversed in the most basic things (I think my "favorite" was the time I did a group project involving a student who had had an internship working in the kernel at Sun the prior summer and he turned in his portion of the project (in C) with code like "[...] char* foo = ""; foo += "bar"; [...]")...

...and yet I never thought to wonder how they managed to keep passing exams.

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#228

Post by munificent »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #164
lostcolony wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a CS degree a better solution is make it project based. Even if someone uses code found somewhere, just changing it up to not be obvious, that's not that different than actual industry, AND means they had to understand it at some level. And that's for stuff they -can- search for (such as 'implement a data structure/algorithm').

This is the answer. No one wants to hear this answer because it means actual work for the teaching staff (compared to, say, automated scoring of multiple-choice tests), but it is, in fact, the answer.

> actual work for the teaching staff

Actual work for the already incredibly underpaid, over-worked teaching staff. As the money dries up in university funding, teachers are stretched thinner and thinner. That forces them to rely more on automated testing instead of having the time to actually know more about their students' performance. That in turn makes it easier for students to cheat.

The economics (as usual) are perverting the system. The individual participants are merely suffering from the perserve incentives of the system.

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#229

Post by skeeter2020 »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #164
lostcolony wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a CS degree a better solution is make it project based. Even if someone uses code found somewhere, just changing it up to not be obvious, that's not that different than actual industry, AND means they had to understand it at some level. And that's for stuff they -can- search for (such as 'implement a data structure/algorithm').

This is the answer. No one wants to hear this answer because it means actual work for the teaching staff (compared to, say, automated scoring of multiple-choice tests), but it is, in fact, the answer.

Your answer indicates you don't really understand the intent nor desires of university profs. It's not to be the best version of the teachers you had in grade school. We can argue if this is THE best approach, but it is how the system is set up.

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#230

Post by maweki »

liminalsunset wrote: post #208
fxtentacle wrote: post #5

In case you don't know who Proctorio is: (like me) Apparently it's a supervision software that students are forced to install on their private computer and (as expected) it'll do its worst to invade your privacy and flag "suspicious" things, based on which the university might punish you. "Suspicious" here means wearing glasses [3] or looking around in the room or blinking too much [4] or having eye and/or skin color…

For what it's worth, at the school this happened at, UBC, Proctorio is now effectively banned, along with other similar "algorithmic" proctoring tools, and exams are no longer allowed to use it with some exceptions. They've moved to Lockdown Browser without the recording, and to Zoom proctoring. In my opinion, neither are particularly effective measures against cheating, and I'm sure they are trivially bypassable. Th…

I think zoom proctoring in combination with some increases in communication overhead are quite practical. We recently did this.

Giving students different exams (selections of slightly and subtly different tasks from a task pool), not showing task names, and mixing up the order of tasks for each student seems to work quite nicely.

The increased overhead to communicate which exact answer they need, finding out which other student has the exact same task, etc., has worked really well for us. Of course, you have to have it in a way where they do not have much time left over to shoulder this overhead.

Edit: So students are going from "What's the answer for 5" to sharing the topic of the task, the task description (there may be a negation hidden in there), and the constants and other students needing to compare. Maybe they aren't even at this task-type in their exam yet, as the order is mixed.

Edit2: We weren't really watching the video stream. It was just to discourage students actually sitting side-by-side, which would decrease the communication overhead drastically.

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