Half serious here. If they’re so smart why didn’t they know about screenshots? I mean part of their proof was a photograph of a screen, which seems odd to me.
Avoiding homework with code and getting caught
41–50 of 169 posts
Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught
#42wild
Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught
#43Half serious here. If they’re so smart why didn’t they know about screenshots? I mean part of their proof was a photograph of a screen, which seems odd to me.
We never really thought about documenting progress, so the photo of the email was taken from a phone camera of a teacher's computer (they had sent the email). We managed to find it while I was writing the article earlier on in the year, in a "deleted pictures" folder. I thought it would be cool to add it on. It's purely because the project spanned such a long time and nothing was really written down or saved.
Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught
#44Everyone has to start somewhere. These young lads “worked around” couple of educational platforms. 35 years ago I was hex dumping ZX Spectrum game saves and disassembling the program files to get more lives, infinite lives or just more ammo or whatever. That seemed easier and more interesting than getting good at games themselves. I sometimes wonder if that kind of “not approved” intellectual curiosity can be used to…
I did the same thing with Bolo on an Apple ][e - I never got very good at the game but I dumped the assembler code for the whole thing onto greenbar paper and marked it up with highlighters. Then gave myself infinite lives, made the maze walls penetrable, made myself invisible to the robots - all kinds of stuff.
The penetrable walls were the best, because if you drove your tank off the map, the graphics renderer would just look at whatever memory happened to be specified by your impossible coordinates, display eerie shifting structures that were the working memory of your code, and pretty quickly crash the whole machine writing the tank sprite into god knows what.
That was a fun summer. I wonder if my mom still has that greenbar printout in her basement.
Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught
#45This reminds me of when I was in college, they used this platform that randomly gave out questions, and the same platform was used for quizzes. It was one of my first practical programming experiences to scrape all the questions and save them as a text file. Later on, these files were passed around the entire class etc. It is just astonishing to see how these things spread.
Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught
#46Reminds me of a passion project I started in high school that went completely viral and took on a life of its own. Wrote a small script for my friends to check their AP scores a few days early. Required high schoolers giving clear text access to their entire CollegeBoard account so I could log on and scrape their scores. Somehow it got posted to Reddit and from that year on, grew wildly. Got to almost 2 million stude…
You ran EarlyScores? Thanks for a tool that really helped my friends and I!
You’re welcome - Glad it helped!
Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught
#47Everyone has to start somewhere. These young lads “worked around” couple of educational platforms. 35 years ago I was hex dumping ZX Spectrum game saves and disassembling the program files to get more lives, infinite lives or just more ammo or whatever. That seemed easier and more interesting than getting good at games themselves. I sometimes wonder if that kind of “not approved” intellectual curiosity can be used to…
When I was way way younger, I mucked about in our school's computer library and the network security (or rather, how the permissions were set up) until I figured out a way to run and share Halo and Soldier of Fortune 2 off of a networked USB stick (or maybe I just copied it to my computer and then shared it off of the HDD, the memory is pretty vague). This is back in the XP days.
It worked pretty well and we had many a play session with 10-16 kids, alt-tabs were pressed, until somehow they discovered we were playing games, and then a bit later they found some residual files that had my account as the initial creator set on them.
I got a 30 minute dressing down talk from the IT head, then again from my mentor, and then again from the 'dean' (our school system is a little different). Then I had detention after school for months.
No one ever asked me how I actually bypassed their network permissions. When I found another exploit weeks later, I never used it, but I also never told them.
Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught
#48These online learning platforms should also consider drawing on canvas e.g. flutter to make it harder to scrape screen contents I think they could also just check the isTrusted field in the Event since that can't be overwritten without a custom compiled browser
That's a total no-go unfortunately since WCAG-AA accessibility is a non-optional requirement in edtech.
The solution in general is in improving the quality of the content, using a more sophisticated format of questions that requires work rather than mere knowledge (which is also far better for formative assessment, but most platforms are focused on summative, particularly in the US)... independent multi-choice is always easily gameable in some way - if there is no better format of question available, the best that can be done for multi-choice is to have a massive pool from which you randomly draw a different subset of questions for each student, and limit the number of attempts to make it impossible to fully scrape... even then, a smart group of students may pool and share their feedback as they progress.
The tricky thing is that you want to encourage such behaviour, helping each other learn, and although in some people's eyes this is purely cheating, it's not dissimilar in spirit.
Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught
#49Half serious here. If they’re so smart why didn’t they know about screenshots? I mean part of their proof was a photograph of a screen, which seems odd to me.
We never really thought about documenting progress, so the photo of the email was taken from a phone camera of a teacher's computer (they had sent the email). We managed to find it while I was writing the article earlier on in the year, in a "deleted pictures" folder. I thought it would be cool to add it on. It's purely because the project spanned such a long time and nothing was really written down or saved.
Ah, relief! Thanks
Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught
#50Ha. I had a homeroom teacher in grade 8 who would clip out the numerical crossword puzzle (basically like super-Sudoku) from the newspaper and give us a bonus mark if we could complete it by the next morning.
I was the kid who wrote myself a recursive descent solver for it in QuickBasic, of all things.