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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

#371

Post by saruken »

wayne-li2 wrote: post #344
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 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 ren…

But isn't "cheating" the norm in real-world jobs too? It's rare that I or any of the developers I work with complete a task without looking something up or asking a question of someone more knowledgeable.

Seems to me the problem is how the assignments are posed – If the goal is to create a program that does X, and I can do that by copy/pasting or tweaking something from StackOverflow, have I not completed the goal? But if what you actually want is for me to understand all of the principles behind a program that does X, well that's a very different thing. And the assignment should be set up differently.

It feels like Proctorio and similar solutions are treating a symptom of the real problem, which is that the way a lot of higher learning is administered is inherently flawed. And until we fix that, won't cheating and cheating detection be the same Coast-Guard-vs-smugglers arms race it's always been?

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

#372

Post by probably_wrong »

hyperpape wrote: post #172
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.

I'm conflicted about this. I agree with you that I think working for this company and not having an ethical objection is a red flag. But the interview environment is fraught. Is it really obvious that no candidate would think "this question is a trap"? There's a lot of interview advice that says your answer to this question can only ever hurt you, so be as bland as possible. Some employers want compliant employees wh…

There is no upside to speaking ill of your previous company. In no particular order, your potential employer might think...

... that you'll badmouth them in the future too,

... that you are the type of person who will cause drama by speaking behind other people's backs,

... that you don't know how to accept and recognize your mistakes ("it's not me, it's them")

... that you are not as nice to work with as any of those other candidates who didn't badmouth their previous employee when given a chance

... and so on. The interview process is biased enough against you to be worth the risk, specially when there's so little to be gained from it.

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

#374

Post by pjmorris »

checkyoursudo wrote: post #303
smiths1999 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I teach at the university level and this is what I have done with my exams. Everything is open book and in my experience there is no difference in the average exam score between open book online and closed (or open) book in person. It is also way easier for me to not have to worry about who is cheating and where everyone is looking (I also don't like the idea of forcing students to turn on their webcams).

I finished up the coursework for my masters degree at the start of the pandemic. My university was quite flexible for how instructors would examine us, given how sudden everything had to change. One of my courses, which only had about 8 students and two instructors, decided to do an oral examination, which ended up being basically a very in-depth, one on one conversation about the course material and based on the exp…

> and it was just so great.

I'm delighted to hear that it went so well, and I am a believer in the idea. I have seen, from time to time, oral thesis defenses become rather tense and difficult, and think that things go better in proportion to the preparation of both student and examiner. Any general observations about what worked, for those contemplating giving exams in this fashion?

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

#376

Post by lutorm »

ska wrote: post #359
checkyoursudo wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I finished up the coursework for my masters degree at the start of the pandemic. My university was quite flexible for how instructors would examine us, given how sudden everything had to change. One of my courses, which only had about 8 students and two instructors, decided to do an oral examination, which ended up being basically a very in-depth, one on one conversation about the course material and based on the exp…

> decided to do an oral examination, This really is the best case, but as you note it was 8 students so quite manageable. It requires a little skill on the part of the examiner, but you can quickly find out how much material the student knows with much higher accuracy than other exam formats, in my opinion. One of the skills needed is to be able to make it conversational-feeling and reduce the anxiety of students. Yo…

Orals have a lot of advantages, but they also make it very easy for unconscious bias to come into play, in that all the criteria for grading are soft.

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

#377

Post by stale2002 »

crazygringo wrote: post #318
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.

Unless those ethical concerns directly impact your own team, then that's deeply unprofessional and unethical on your part, and you should reconsider your priorities. Who appointed you moral judge of others? You discriminating against candidates based on their moral views unrelated to their work is no different from discriminating based on religion or political party affiliation. It is legitimately within your purview…

> Who appointed you moral judge of others?

Well, they got appointed the judge of others when they were put in charge of figuring out if it would be a good idea to hire someone for the company.

Having moral red flags is a perfectly valid thing for a company to be concerned about. Immoral employees are at risk of doing bad things, and can hurt the company.

> based on their moral views unrelated to their work

It is pretty related to the work though. It is directly about the moral decisions that they made, while at work. Specifically it would be for working for that company that is doing immoral things.

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

#378

Post by vincent-manis »

anticristi wrote: post #292
soperj wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Our university physics teacher allowed us to bring one-page self-made cheat sheet. By the time you compressed the essence of a whole course into a one-pager, you were pretty much done learning. :))

I always permitted/encouraged this when I taught (I'm retired now). Every once in a while, we'd find some enterprising student selling pre-made cheat sheets, which were of course of little value to the purchaser.

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

#379

Post by lutorm »

barefeg wrote: post #366
samkater wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would add some nuance to this view. For nearly every undergraduate course I agree - the ability of knowing where to look for resources in a particular subject matter, synthesizing the available information to solve a reasonably novel problem, and presenting the information in a coherent way is a skill/art that should be one of the primary goals of the education. For advanced degrees, though, I'm not so sure. I expe…

1. PhDs don’t “do exams”. You can’t cheat your way to publishing original research (exceptions of course) and have external expert researchers review it and accepted on a reputable journal. Given that that’s a requisite for obtaining your degree, there’s no point on a final exam. Most defenses nowadays are partly ceremonial (exceptions of course). Both the material and your ability to do research has been checked mon…

You can’t cheat your way to publishing original research

Of course you can, making up results is a time-honored tradition!

It does take a certain amount of skill to do it believably, though.... ;-)

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

#380

Post by ModernMech »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #277
ModernMech wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

The way I explain this requirements to my student is that the proof-of-work is just as important to me as the end result. It's like in math class: you don't just write the answer, you need to show your work. Your commit history is not distinct from the assignment, it is part of the assignment.

Regardless though, my students usually are at a point where they don't have a commit style. They come to my class with no knowledge of git or version control -- I have to teach it to them.

Secondly, labeling you a possible cheater doesn't condemn you to anything, it just puts you on a shortlist of assignments to examine more closely.

Thirdly, this style of committing has helped more than a few students out when their computers die mid assignment and they need to move to another computer. It also allow me to help them with their assignments. When they come to me for questions, the first thing I ask is "have you pushed everything to your repo?" Instead of trying to debug over a virtual desktop connection, I can run their code locally and get to the cause much quicker in my own environment. It really works out well for everyone involved.

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