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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

#341

Post by moron4hire »

fastball wrote: post #330
moron4hire wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe catching a few cheaters here and there isn't worth implementing The Panopticon for everyone else.

The problem is that cheating (if allowed) does not end up being a few people here and there.

Even if I were to believe you, so what? So a person gets a degree they don't deserve. Now they have all this student loan debt they can't pay off because they can't get and keep a job in their field because they didn't actually study.

Or they do get a job and are able to keep it down, in which case, so what if they cheated? They're clearly capable. Let them keep doing the job.

My solution: get rid of degrees completely. Can't cheat if there's no test to cheat on.

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

#342

Post by dariosalvi78 »

jasonjayr wrote: post #74
necovek wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which does not make tracking everyone a solution to the problem of cheating in exams. Higher level education is largely voluntary, and it's up to the person taking it up to decide what they gain from it. If they are only in it for a diploma, they'd get there one way or another. To me, focusing on finding "cheaters" makes education a competition. I never felt cheaters got anything over me in my studies, and I never fe…

While I despise software like this and how high-stakes and petty it can be, keep in mind that it's in the institution's interests to not only provide a quality education, but to defend the value of their brand. You might have worked very hard for a diploma from University X, but if it was found that University X was handing out diplomas like candy to other students that were not as academically rigorous, it weakens t…

The role of universities is to provide education not to police students. People put in place reasonable means to detect cheating (proctorio isn't) and then it's students responsibility to learn. They're adults and should value what they get. If they don't, they're missing an opportunity.

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

#343

Post by alasdair_ »

soperj wrote: post #220
liminalsunset wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is silly. Make the exams open book and then the only thing you really need to worry about is the correct student taking the exam. If you're testing based on memorization of things in this day in age, then the course is useless.

>Make the exams open book and then the only thing you really need to worry about is the correct student taking the exam

This doesn't solve the problem of a student having an expert sitting off camera, feeding the student the answers.

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

#344

Post by wayne-li2 »

moron4hire wrote: post #298
jimmySixDOF wrote: post #119

They should have just ignored this guy and gone on with life. Now the they got the EFF to deal with and it serves them right. There is another HN thread on this and a lot of people in it are more upset about the line of work Proctorio is in and how they do it than the fact they sued this minor irritating student. My opinion is there is simply no easy pain free way to do fraud auditing and that's that. I just recently…

Maybe catching a few cheaters here and there isn't worth implementing The Panopticon for everyone else.

The cynic in me believes without any disincentive to cheating, “few cheaters” become “almost all participants”.

I was a TA in a prominent CS university. We used software that would compare everyone’s submissions to see if things were copied. The penalty for getting caught was high, and we made it clear to everyone that this software was, while not perfect, capable of detecting simple tricks (like copying code and renaming variables).

Nonetheless, after every project, I would go and have to manually review all the cases. There would be 10-20 severe cases, about 30 moderate cases, and then about 50 cases where some things might look suspicious but there wasn’t enough proof to act.

Overall, we would penalize about 20-50 people per project (granted this is a class size of over 1000). But still, 2-5% would still cheat despite our repeated warnings that we could catch them.

I shudder to think what would happen if we had no way to detect.

While TAing there, I was also a student. Cheating was pretty much the norm. I was always a cynic after those experiences.

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

#345

Post by macintux »

hobs wrote: post #326
c7DJTLrn wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if nobody wanted to work for them, they'd just offer even better salaries until people did. Punish the politicians who allow this unethical software. Punish the CEOs and managers who make it happen. But don't punish the guys on the ground just making a living.

"Superior Orders" has been a tried and tested excuse - it doesn't work. If your shitty software harms people you don't just get to throw up your arms and shrug.

There’s a huge gap between concentration camps and software that can be misused by administrators to wrongly punish students.

If I had to feed my kids and had no other options, I wouldn’t shoot civilians, but I might well work for a software company where I had qualms about the output.

In fact, it’s hard (probably impossible) to find any large company that doesn’t have some negative impact on the world.

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

#346

Post by quercusa »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #212
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....

> I think people here are underestimating the volume of cheating in school. Not defending Protorio here, but I didn't really understand how rampant cheating was, either, until I became friends with someone who works at a University. Growing up, my friends and I would never dream of cheating and would fear the consequences of getting caught, so the entire concept feels foreign. We also grew up in the era of in-person…

It was eye-opening for me to see how much culture affects the perception and even the understanding of the concept of cheating. People from some non-Western cultures, honestly AFAICT, cannot understand why they should not 'help out' a cousin or older student or a military superior.

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

#347

Post by why_Mr_Anderson »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #306
Miraste wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the degree. If you're becoming a medical doctor you'll have to do a ton of memorization, but in other fields doctorates are the least memorization-intensive part of your education, because the focus is on generation and synthesis, on the assumption that you've already learned the rote knowledge. You don't need to memorize anything to write a dissertation but that doesn't make it easy (and you'll end up…

> medical doctor you'll have to do a ton of memorisation Which is a load of dingos kidneys. Gate keeping. All the good doctors I've ever been to have a wall of reference material and use it , even if only to show the patient, but it's there and accessible. And besides, it's not like practising medical doctors don't make heaps of mistakes . The number one cause of complications in a medical setting is medical interven…

But parent post is arguing that to become a doctor you need to memorize ungodly amount of things, which is absolutely true. And about that wall of reference material .. yeah, it's usually there to impress patients, most of those books were never touched :) (I'm from family with too many MDs)

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

#348

Post by GordonS »

em-bee wrote: post #15
anovikov wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But i think it's OK to install the software just on a laptop you'd use to take tests, some old laptop, and keep yourself free of surveillance otherwise right? If so, i can't see how is it a problem: someone absolutely has to be watched while taking a test. But if it's during whole education process, then yeah, it's ridiculous and worth fighting against.

it's pretty unrealistic to expect everyone to have a spare laptop around.

Assuming you have enough RAM, I guess you could run it in a VM.

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

#350

Post by dariosalvi78 »

davrosthedalek wrote: post #93
mkl wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your institution's reputation is at risk, you want to prevent it. Honest students don't get a lesser grade; that's not the problem. If the cheaters want to cheat their way through life, that's their problem. My problem is to make sure the rest of my students end up with a well-respected degree. I.e. the problem is being solved for the honest students, the ones I want to spend my time on.

In many courses, the grades are curved, so cheaters might really make the grades of honest students worse. While I am against these surveillance software, making sure that tests are fair is very hard, especially since everything is online now thanks to COVID.

I switched to online exams this year, no zoom, no special software, no checks at all. Grades were as usual. A couple of students cheated and were detected, all the others were very honest to the point that I wouldn't be myself if I were in their place. It can work, but you need to expect people to look up things.
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