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Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

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Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#41

Post by ivansavz »

salawat wrote: post #28
goldcd wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is pretty human. (or maybe I'm exposing my weaker moral character than the rest of you upstanding citizens). I think the vast majority of people who have entered some program of learning, want to 'learn' - and will try to. Where it gets tricky is when you find yourself backed into a corner. Say you know (for whatever reason) you're 90% going to fail - do you accept that? Or do break out the Hail M…

>Say you know (for whatever reason) you're 90% going to fail - do you accept that? Or do break out the Hail Mary cheat - what have you got to lose? This is almost the critical pass/fail decision in my opinion, because in the real world, on actually difficult or unsolved problems the correct decision is to escalate, clearly communicate you have an issue, and either be directed to someone who can get you unstuck, or in…

> "I've killed more trees writing out the work for these problems than anyone should reasonably have to."

Lol... so true. Some procedures take forever. Like finding the eigenvectors of a 3x3 matrix, for example. First the eigenvalues calculation, then for each eigenvalue there is a nullspace problem. Some trees will be hurt for sure!

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#42

Post by noodlesUK »

ColanR wrote: post #14
cosmie wrote: post #9

Back in the good ol' days, you could just take the exam inside of a VM. The VM is locked down, but the host isn't. Looks like from ProctorU's docs[1] that they got around to probing for the (blatantly obvious[2]) signatures of a VM and stopped that trick. I wonder if those signatures exist in a Windows Sandbox[3] instance, or if you can detect/block the Enhanced RDP Session Windows leverages when running a Sandbox...…

I wonder how feasible it is to remove such fingerprints - find a way to make the VM be functionally indistinguishable from the host.

There are certain tools often used for malware testing such as Cuckoo that can help conceal some of the more obvious tells.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#43

Post by RonanTheGrey »

impendia wrote: post #25
_8091149529 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a few years at Caltech in an academic role (not as a student). I never understood the rationale behind the unsupervised take-home exams. Could you elaborate what is it that makes it a 'success', in your opinion? The shortcomings that seem obvious to me are: - Penalizes honesty - Implied notion that Caltech students are "honourable" and honest. How is this achieved in practice?

I was an undergrad at Rice where we had a very strong honor code. Unsupervised exams were common, and to the best of my knowledge cheating was very rare. If you were accused of cheating then you went before the Honor Council, which was run entirely by students. I considered this an enormous success. It created an atmosphere where we were treated with respect, and where we were expected to treat others in the same way…

> How is this achieved in practice?

You were accountable to each other, not to an authority. Authority gets you enough to do the bare minimum to not get fired or not get caught.

Being accountable to each other feels very very different. It's tough to explain in an HN post but anyone who has felt the difference knows what I meant. You care what your peers think. You care about that authority only enough for them to leave you alone.

Never let it be said that shame isn't an effective tool.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#44

Post by wishinghand »

goldcd wrote: post #21
aaplok wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are doing that at my institution. The average GPA increased by several points . The thing is, if it's perceived that it's easier to cheat than to learn, people will do that, honor system or not. I admit that there is a difference between an institutionalised honor system, designed with respect toward and in collaboration with students, and a last-minute arrangement by an unprepared organisation. Students have…

I think the problem is pretty human. (or maybe I'm exposing my weaker moral character than the rest of you upstanding citizens). I think the vast majority of people who have entered some program of learning, want to 'learn' - and will try to. Where it gets tricky is when you find yourself backed into a corner. Say you know (for whatever reason) you're 90% going to fail - do you accept that? Or do break out the Hail M…

> Where it gets tricky is when you find yourself backed into a corner. Say you know (for whatever reason) you're 90% going to fail - do you accept that? Or do break out the Hail Mary cheat - what have you got to lose?

I wonder if the extreme cost of university in the USA worsens this? If education was cheaper they might lament the lost time as opposed to lost time and a lot more money.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#45

Post by OnlyOneCannolo »

cosmie wrote: post #9

Back in the good ol' days, you could just take the exam inside of a VM. The VM is locked down, but the host isn't. Looks like from ProctorU's docs[1] that they got around to probing for the (blatantly obvious[2]) signatures of a VM and stopped that trick. I wonder if those signatures exist in a Windows Sandbox[3] instance, or if you can detect/block the Enhanced RDP Session Windows leverages when running a Sandbox...…

Windows Sandbox doesn't fool exam monitoring software.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#46

Post by ColanR »

cosmie wrote: post #39
ColanR wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine a script could be used with qemu - given that patch you mentioned, which I would love a source for if you have it - to match the names of the virtual devices with names of devices on the physical host. Then there's no way for software to check the device names against a list of VM tools, since it always matches real, physical hardware. At that point, it seems to me that there isn't much left to distinguish…

One of the other telltale signs of a VM are "things VMs can do that physical devices can't" - such as weird screen resolutions (when running in windowed mode rather than full screen), weird CPU core counts, physical ram values that aren't cleanly divisible into DIMM slots, etc.

Good point. I guess that would be relatively easy to check for programmatically.

What else is there that could possibly indicate virtualization? Available instruction sets? Strange limitations of the given CPU? (e.g., the cpu presents itself as some Intel chip that's known to have 4 cores, but there's only 2 available)

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#47

Post by an_opabinia »

_8091149529 wrote: post #6
908B64B197 wrote: post #2

Folks are doing take-home exam wrong. Caltech had tremendous success with a culture of honesty and take-home exams.

I spent a few years at Caltech in an academic role (not as a student). I never understood the rationale behind the unsupervised take-home exams. Could you elaborate what is it that makes it a 'success', in your opinion? The shortcomings that seem obvious to me are: - Penalizes honesty - Implied notion that Caltech students are "honourable" and honest. How is this achieved in practice?

Insofar as universities produce pedigrees, it doesn’t really matter if Caltech students cheat. I suppose there’s greater justice in a student cheating on an exam and getting good grades while nobody knows - the student already won the lottery, they are getting the degree and a floor of a good lifestyle.

Yet they will be less likely to commit suicide, you know? Or some other act of desperation.

It’s a success because it lets students quietly cheat - if they need to - without reducing the graduation rate.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#48

Post by tenebrisalietum »

ColanR wrote: post #14
cosmie wrote: post #9

Back in the good ol' days, you could just take the exam inside of a VM. The VM is locked down, but the host isn't. Looks like from ProctorU's docs[1] that they got around to probing for the (blatantly obvious[2]) signatures of a VM and stopped that trick. I wonder if those signatures exist in a Windows Sandbox[3] instance, or if you can detect/block the Enhanced RDP Session Windows leverages when running a Sandbox...…

I wonder how feasible it is to remove such fingerprints - find a way to make the VM be functionally indistinguishable from the host.

- You run into copyright issues, because unless you duplicate a commercial UEFI (SMBIOS and all that good stuff) within the VM you'll be detected.

- You run into performance issues - virtualization's speed depends on paravirtualized drivers, which are readily identifiable (e.g. "virtio" disk controller). These can be emulated instead of paravirtualized but will cost performance. Windows drivers are signed so you can't just change names of things.

- Chipsets - some are often emulated by VMs. For example, if you are running a system in 2020 and are using an Intel 440BX chipset, it's probably a VM.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#49

Post by _8091149529 »

impendia wrote: post #25
_8091149529 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a few years at Caltech in an academic role (not as a student). I never understood the rationale behind the unsupervised take-home exams. Could you elaborate what is it that makes it a 'success', in your opinion? The shortcomings that seem obvious to me are: - Penalizes honesty - Implied notion that Caltech students are "honourable" and honest. How is this achieved in practice?

I was an undergrad at Rice where we had a very strong honor code. Unsupervised exams were common, and to the best of my knowledge cheating was very rare. If you were accused of cheating then you went before the Honor Council, which was run entirely by students. I considered this an enormous success. It created an atmosphere where we were treated with respect, and where we were expected to treat others in the same way…

> How is this achieved in practice? Wish I knew.

I think my take-home from this discussion is that the honor code can be made to work in the right circumstances that exist, at least, at Caltech, Rice, etc.

At the same time, I believe it is impossible to induce the requisite "cohesion" in other contexts such as 100% remote learning or high-stakes mass testing (entrance exams etc.), even if the student body stayed the same.

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