EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

Isn't effectively the entire problem with university/college in the current age that instead of its original purpose it's treated as a hiring filter for companies. Shouldn't we do anything we can to disincentivize use of college degrees as a signal for hiring?

Like, doing the job of software development a degree is completely irrelevant. Computer science degrees shouldn't be 4(?) year long coding bootcamps, they should be about computer science for people who are interested in computer science. (disclaimer I never did a computer science degree, I did chemistry but I felt the quality of the degree was similarly afflicted). Anything we can do to make college as a hiring signal worse for companies is better for the quality of education, better for people's financial health and better for equality.

The entire system is rotten and we need to bring the edifice crashing down, not make life easier for companies who are about the only entities with money. You know what costs a lot more than hiring relative to the entity's financial means? A student loan [citation needed I guess].

I maintain that cheating is almost always a pedagogical problem first, and a trust problem second.

Cheating becomes a convenient solution to a problem when you're dealing with a course with inadequate teaching, a difficult learning curve, or a lack of motivation for students to do their work to the best of their ability themselves, or a nonsensical curriculum. Fixing cheating doesn't involve surveillance - it instead involves removing the incentive structure that exists for cheating in the first place. This may involve rethinking grading, or course material, or assignments; but is certainly not impossible.

We act surprised when students "cheat" in CS exams that's expected to be done with only pen and paper - nearly any real workplace will give you an option of a text editor or IDE of your choice. So give them an IDE! Give them the API documentation! Don't create an incentive to test the waters to fix the broken rules of assignments.

Another relevant area of work is ungrading, or self-graded courses in general - when you remove the friction that grades cause in the feedback loop of learning; learning becomes an organic process for everyone involved. There's a lot of interesting pedagogical research, and just "cheating is rampant" doesn't scratch the surface of "but why is it?"

In addition, cheating is a game. Every second you spend drumming up cheating in front of your students is another second they think about trying to get away with cheating you. If you tell students they're not to be trusted, they will not give you any reasons to trust them; in many cases it's as simple as that.

A combination of good pedagogical design, and building a relationship of mutual trust with your students, is certainly more fruitful than creating an academic police state (of which Proctorio is only one part of). There will always be people slipping through the cracks, but there are other safeguards in the world to catch them too.

Another important thing is that conversations about cheating always assume a very specific framing of higher education - that they exist primarily as a gatekeeper or arbiter of who-knows-what; the university also has the purpose of providing an environment for learning. And in many cases, cheating is just a result of a failure to provide that environment.

In addition, if the primary beneficiary of university degrees are the employers (or the people who care about the who-knows-what stamp), then why do students foot the bill for tuition? If you choose to accept this framing of universities primarily as arbiters, isn't access to a degree just a head tax to enter the skilled labor market?

The sky's the limit when you think about it really.

There is research that the certainty of getting caught is the strongest deterrent (as opposed to the severity of the consequences if someone gets caught) and yet, assuming the software was as good as you suggest and assuming the students were adequately and repeatedly warned, 2-5% of the class still chose to cheat. Which begs the question: why would so many (presumably logical and rational) students take such a risk despite knowing they were substantially likely to be caught?

I have to imagine those students, for whatever reason, felt cheating was their best (or perhaps only) option.

The cynic in me believes we’ve created a system that strongly incentivizes getting an expensive piece of paper with a value completely divorced from what it was intended to represent: having studied.