How in the hell will they prevent cheating?
U.S. students will take the SAT online
331–340 of 407 posts
Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment comes off as "people who score well on tests are more often cheaters", supported by anecdotal evidence. Above all, it's hardly relevant to the overall discussion and feels more like a grievance.
A score of 14/100 on a test is unlikely to have cheated.
A score of 14/100 on a test is likely to have cheated incompetently, e.g. by using the answer key from some other test.
Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe that most states require road tests to get your first license or to get a license if you have been unlicensed for a while but stopped requiring them for a renewal, at least if you've got a clean driving record. In at least some states this was based on data that showed that for people that had clean records the rate of road test failures was very low, and those were almost always due to test anxiety and the…
Many states no longer require a road test. Instead you take a state approved driving course and the instructor certifies you as meeting the state driving skill requirements. Most states with this system do have an option to still take a state administered driving test instead but most new drivers just take the course. My daughter got her license last August and we paid for the course. They didn’t teach her anything.…
>> They had her drive around the local neighborhood for the state mandated numbers of hours
My instructor drove me for 3 hours instead of the mandated 6, saved himself some gas.
Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is also no testing or vision rechecking requirement, so there are just a lot of people on the roads who should probably have their license taken away.
Young people get into more crashes (and more deadly crashes) than old people, we should probably just flat out not allow people under 25 to drive long before we get around to worrying about things like vision checks.
Young people have more accidents because they have less experience driving. Raising the driving age doesn't help with that. If anything it should be lowered so that more of the learning period occurs when people are still under parental supervision.
Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
In an ideal world, you'd probably take one of the higher end courses like BMW offers. Of course, that's not a reasonable option for most people.
you mean a test track? how does that apply to the real world that would indicate that you actually know the rules of the road and can follow them?
You don't want your first experience at the traction limits of the vehicle to be a time when the road is wet and a wrong move causes a head-on collision with a school bus.
Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online
#336My friend took an important law school exam (GRE or BAR, not sure which) in the past 2 years that was self administered, and she described her experience as "harrowing." The kernel level malware they installed to monitor the exam crashed her device 4 times during the exam. This was after she got it running on a secondary device because it wouldn't even start on her M1 MacBook Air. The software recorded her screen and…
That's crazy because I imagine cheating is trivial for those that want to do it. All you would need is a clean install, an HDMI splitter, and a tiny earbud stuffed in your ear. Then someone in an adjacent room can feed you answers. Even if they start making people put their ears up to the camera, that won't help much. Bone conducting headphones built into the arms of glasses will be virtually undetectable. Do you ban…
It's practically impossible to defeat cheating on a technical front with their current design. Anti-cheating methods strike me as depending on emotions: I can probably find a way to cheat successfully but, if my future depends on it, my fear will make my body language stick out like a sore thumb. I also wouldn't do it to begin with since it's unlikely to have a better EV than putting the same effort into studying, especially if I actually need the knowledge in the future, or if there are social repercussions. Some won't have this hurdle but the combination of 'needing to cheat' and 'being skilled enough to get away with it' is rare.
The big problem is when cheating is so easy and widespread that everyone knows it. Then it becomes the low friction path. This would explain what I've heard about some Indian school exams.
There are probably a lot of people doing minor cheating and a few people doing major cheating. In most cases, it's not enough to undermine the reputation of the qualification.
Oh, it's the same shape as the fraud problem that's popular here:
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are based in the US, try to make a claim with your credit card or, if more adventurous, small claims court to sue. It seems pretty easy to win. Also, send a letter to your attorneys general office to explain what happened. > got 99th percentile scores on everything This part was unnecessary to include. Nothing but humblebragging there.
I disagree. It shows that the original test taker was less likely to be cheating than a lower scoring person and the system was at more likely to be at fault.
Not really, since if you don’t trust their account of the story in the first place (that they didn’t cheat), why would you trust that part? It adds nothing.
You should immunize yourself to devices like this having any impact for the same reason you should immunize yourself to cheap devices like “I normally hate X but” and “as an X, I think that” in other online comments.
Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online
#338I have consulted in this sector. An exec I met who has three decades of experience explained to me that software fit for purpose has to operate within these parameters:
1. The highest value exams (like lawyer licensing) can only be in-person proctored, not remote which can’t reasonably stop even moderately clever cheaters, and where any suspicion of cheating undermines the legitimacy of the entire exam.
2. No exam-giver wants to be responsible for the complaints they will receive if they provide the computers, since some number of people who do poorly will seek to blame the hardware, so exam-takers must be responsible for making sure the software works on their own machine.
3. Essay exams (like the bar exam) have to be the same day for all takers, because it is trivial to share meaningful information about the questions sufficient to give late takers a huge advantage. It is possible to use different questions on different days, but this creates major challenges for calibrating the answers fairly.
4. Large exam halls where thousands of people can take the exam simultaneously don’t have good enough wifi to hold all those connections, and even if they did, any blip would be a nightmare, so the software has to be able to work offline.
Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
Analyzing curriculum contents and local instruction transcription. Ranking and benchmarking between educational environments would require an additional psychometric evaluation layer. This would not a Day One function, so the tool would focus on maximizing utility as an assessment assistant tool for instructors. There is a bridge to be built between formative and summative assessment. If this thing doesn't make them…
At that point you're just describing another form of standardized testing. The whole point of a test like the SAT is to administer the same test so that results are comparable.
The function without the apparatus.
Everyday, all across the country - we pay teachers to teach and assess their students. Those assessment results aren’t trustable for benchmarking and ranking students, so we have standardized testing.
Obviously, yes - one intention of this concept is that it serves the same function as standardized testing, but it does so while eliding the externalities of cost and single, high stakes exams by allowing classroom assessment - made and proctored by the instructors during their standard lessons - to become trustable.
Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. It shows that the original test taker was less likely to be cheating than a lower scoring person and the system was at more likely to be at fault.
Not really, since if you don’t trust their account of the story in the first place (that they didn’t cheat), why would you trust that part? It adds nothing. You should immunize yourself to devices like this having any impact for the same reason you should immunize yourself to cheap devices like “I normally hate X but” and “as an X, I think that” in other online comments.
I don't understand the '99th percentile' aside as a way to convince HN readers that the commenter wasn't cheating.
Rather, I take it as an expression of personal pride (in the positive sense) that there was such incontrovertible evidence that the commenter had no need to cheat in the first place, told with the satisfying (but probably unrealised) hope that the people who unjustifiably accused the commenter of cheating were later aware of the top marks he or she achieved after taking the exam in person.