EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by ModernMech » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 5:12 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #233

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…

> The distribution of grades the last exam was normal with a mean of 80%, pretty much in line with what I get during a typical semester. The distribution is one thing, but grade correlation with other statistics might be more revealing. In particular, how do you know that wealthier students aren't hiring people to take the exam for them?

I think one thing I can't protect against is students completely faking their identities. Meaning if I expect Matt Smith, and Matt Smith has hired John Doe to interact with me all semester, I can't detect that, because I don't really know who Matt Smith is. But Matt Smith would have to know that John Doe will be available to impersonate him for the next 3 years because they will be taking several courses with me. If Matt Smith is rich enough to hire a double to essentially go through college for him, then good on Matt Smith for being independently wealthy I guess.

The other thing I do is I don't make exams so weighty. If you ace the exam but you don't do well on the assignments, you're not getting an A in the course. So the hypothetical wealthy cheater will have to keep their body double on retainer for the semester.

But I will say that the students who earn an "A" are ones I interact with fairly regularly. "A" students typically come to class, ask questions, engage with the assignments, start their assignments early, etc. And before anyone accuses me of playing favorites, I don't do any grading, and grading is anonymized. But I can easily predict the "A" students just by their work ethic. The idea of the brilliant student who doesn't come to class and effortlessly breezes through the exam is as far as I can tell after teaching thousands of students a myth. At least at my university. Maybe all of those kids go to MIT.

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

#272

Post by kulig » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 5:12 PM UTC

c7DJTLrn wrote: post #179

driverdan wrote: post #161

Proctorio is on my red flag list. If any current or former employees of a flagged company apply for a job on my team I expect their reason for leaving to be for ethical reasons, or for them to tell me about how they had ethical problems with what the company was doing. If they don't I immediately remove them from the candidate pool.

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

Just doing my job, said the nazi guards.

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

#273

Post by steelframe » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 5:13 PM UTC

I conducted interviews at Google for about 8 years. I would often run across a fresh-from-college candidate who fell flat on their face, and all I could think was, "You've somehow managed to waste 4 years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars doing whatever it was you were doing for all that time."

Some performed so poorly that I could only conclude that they cheated their way all the way through their program, because the discrepancy between their GPA and the fact that they can't even begin to explain memset (one of many trivial examples I ran across) was so stark. Well, all that cheating certainly caught up with them when they were face-to-face with me trying to get a job. It must of been stressful and humiliating for them as they sat there hemming and hawing while I asked them elementary question after question that they couldn't even begin to answer. Or maybe not, depending on whatever lack of pride and sense of self-worth led them to cheat like they did in the first place.

I'm sure many of them managed to get a job somewhere in industry, and whoever hired them got to deal with a hire who turned out to be an imposter.

Of course I recognize that some people may have been severely impacted by the technical interview process to the point that they were intellectually paralyzed. But at least some of them I'm sure just didn't learn anything.

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

#274

Post by whimsicalism » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

steelframe wrote: post #273

I conducted interviews at Google for about 8 years. I would often run across a fresh-from-college candidate who fell flat on their face, and all I could think was, "You've somehow managed to waste 4 years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars doing whatever it was you were doing for all that time." Some performed so poorly that I could only conclude that they cheated their way all the way through their progra…

Perhaps people get stressed in interviews?

For instance, I don't code in C that often, and if asked, I'm not sure I could remember off the top of my head if the function signature is `memset(dst, value, n)` or `memset(dst, n, value)`. My guess from intuition is the first, but I would be hemming and hawing a bit if asked in an interview something like that.

Also, many CS programs are easy enough that you'll never even encounter a memset.

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

#275

Post by annoyingnoob » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 5:15 PM UTC

6510 wrote: post #259

There was a time when calculators were not allowed. The solution was that since people can always have access to calculators they should be allowed to use them. I think that should work, if a student can use a computer to answer a question he can always use a computer to answer that question. It should be encouraged to do so, the school should make an effort providing- and keeping the answers online and available for…

I remember a prof telling the class "if you can figure out how to program your calculator to do this then go for it". I learned how to program my calculator in that class and not much else.

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

#276

Post by reaperducer » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 5:17 PM UTC

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #269

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…

>looking around in the room or blinking too much >And I tend to close my eyes a lot because it helps me visualize the problem Nvidia has added eye-correction feature to it's Maxine platform(SDK with set of ML features for video conferencing) it can correct our eyes in real-time to show that we're looking at the camera even when we didn't. When I first saw it's demo the first thing which came to my mind was these proc…

It's a matter of time before all major video conferencing tools add these features or 3rd party plugins/hacks which enable it.

Apple demonstrated this in Facetime about a year ago, but I don't know what happened to it. I don't use Facetime, so I can't confirm it was ever implemented. But clearly it's on big tech's radar.

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

#277

Post by mynameisvlad » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 5:18 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #219

nradov wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure projects are generally better than exams. But cheating on projects and papers is also rampant. Students just pay someone else to do the work.

Here's my solution to this: 1) Version control all assignments. I force them to make periodic commits throughout the week. If they want to copy a project wholesale, they have to do so in a way that takes a lot of time and effort. 2) Comparing bytecode. If they change the names of variables, comments, spacing, etc. these superficial differences will be lost in compilation. 3) Oral explanations. Now that everyone has g…

#1 just encourages people to make BS commits throughout the week to pad the numbers.

Not everyone does projects over time, not everyone commits all the time. I don't like committing in progress work and I usually do work in big chunks with large breaks in between, especially for solo projects where I don't have to share code regularly with others.

Based on your criteria, I'd likely be considered a "possible cheater" just for having a different style.

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

#278

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

smolder wrote: post #197

silexia wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think you want a doctor without a degree, and there are many similarly difficult professions with a lot of impact.

[deleted]

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

#279

Post by 2ion » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

driverdan wrote: post #161

Proctorio is on my red flag list. If any current or former employees of a flagged company apply for a job on my team I expect their reason for leaving to be for ethical reasons, or for them to tell me about how they had ethical problems with what the company was doing. If they don't I immediately remove them from the candidate pool.

Yeah sure. I also discriminate against people because I don't like the color of their skin while feeling high and mighty. What you're saying is, that if company A bids more salary than company B, you reserve the prerogative to judge that anybody should join company B because you deem the totally legal company A bad, even though the principles of the labour market dictate that if company A furthers the welfare of the worker more he should join company A. This means you're denying the validity of a mechanism that you as the hiring manager -- proudly calling yourself leadership in your bio -- are exploiting yourself every day to influence the commitment of your own employees. Pretty hypocritic. Chase the money but only if I want you to! -- you wish.

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

#280

Post by ch4s3 » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

worik wrote: post #68

zibzab wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note also that the original lawsuit was for Ian tweeting about their public YouTube videos. How can this garbage lawauit be allowed to go on and cost a man $100.000 in lawyer fees??

Because the rules are made by lawyers

Maybe... But in the US we have anti-SLAPP laws written by lawyers in a lot of states. Any California court would toss this shit out in a second.