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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

#481

Post by [deleted] »

tzs wrote: post #313
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood the concept of cheating . If you don't know the answer to a question and you look it up, that's not cheating, it's research , or at least referring to reference material, which is always permitted in real life. Except for some contrived or rare circumstances someone will now point out. Even the Apollo 11 crew had support. Any professional in any industry is allowed to say: "I don't know" and "I'll…

That only works if the answer can be looked up. Real life isn't always kind enough to only give problems that someone has already solved and published somewhere you can find.

[deleted]

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

#482

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

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.

> the only thing you really need to worry about is the correct student taking the exam

Which is the hard problem these solutions try to address, because even if the correct student is sitting in front of the computer, that doesn't mean he isn't just proxying the questions and answers to someone else (possibly paid).

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

#483

Post by emmelaich »

Here's an odd copyright thing I came across recently .. this video (link below) has been marked as having a song when there is absolutely no fragment of the song in the video.

The video was used for Forever Young by Youth Group. But this is the original footage, from Australian TV, from 1976. Waaay before even the original Forever Young, by Alphaville in 1984.

I went to record a complaint but you have to be the owner, so I threw it in the too hard basket.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nod5q7OHAF4

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

#484

Post by Invictus0 »

Impassionata wrote: post #472
ska wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This privileges confident speakers. (The same way written tests privilege confident readers, and standardized written tests privilege those who have the time and resources to study the standard.)

The real world also privileges confident speakers.

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

#485

Post by silexia »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #222
silexia wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we should stop endlessly pushing and insisting on degrees... Maybe skills tests in an interview process is not such a bad thing. As an employer, I don't care what piece of paper you have from what school. I only care about how well you can do the job I need to be done.

>> As an employer, I don't care what piece of paper you have from what school. I only care about how well you can do the job I need to be done. To be blunt, duh. I agree degrees are very imperfect & crude indicators of what you're try to measure, but what is your alternative? I'm getting DoS levels of applications blasted at me, how do I filter to an effective level that removes the same cheating mechanics mentioned…

I built tested recruits.com and skills test every applicant. You can use it free if you want.

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

#486

Post by nradov »

VRay wrote: post #462
nradov wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher education is already quite expensive. It would be great to have highly qualified professors spend more time directly interacting with students, but who will pay for those extra professors?

Why is higher education so expensive, anyway? It's already more expensive to go to college than it would be to just hire a set of PhD holders as private tutors for most fields What a scam

Higher education is so expensive primarily because of the widespread availability of government subsidized student loans. Those have removed most of the pressure on prices. If we eliminated those loans then tuition would fall drastically, but that would also reduce educational opportunities for low income students.

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

#487

Post by ska »

Impassionata wrote: post #472
ska wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This privileges confident speakers. (The same way written tests privilege confident readers, and standardized written tests privilege those who have the time and resources to study the standard.)

Not much if you do it well. Confident and wrong won’t get you far, either ...

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

#488

Post by girvo »

g_p wrote: post #458
twic wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No UK PhD programme has exams like this, that i have heard of.

Some UK programmes differ in that there isn't the same formal concept of "candidacy" like you see in other places. The end-of-first-year review is often a written report, sometimes with a "mini-viva". The common factor among all UK PhDs I know of is that there is a rigorous viva at the end, where the outcome for the sudent is not a foregone conclusion. Despite the shorter overall duration of the PhD (~3 to 4 years ty…

> Unlike European vivas though, there's no family or friends, no champagne corks being popped mid-defense, and no foregone conclusion of the outcome. I've been at European vivas with the family of the candidate preparing the celebratory buffet at the back of the auditorium while the questioning continues!

While the UK model is probably preferable in a lot of ways, this sounds much more enjoyable :)

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

#489

Post by modsmustgo »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #390
modsmustgo wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^Astrikes the portion of the law that says anything about responding to all claims "expeditiously", and replaces it with something that accurately represents the severity of the situation(s).^A edit: severity in relation to an actual copyright violation, not possible damages imagined in the accusers theoretical situation if the content was not removed. Some companies might gladly eat a fine if only 1/100 people chall…

The wording of the DMCA is irrelevant. All court officers take an oath to behave ethically. Submitting fraudulent documents because you're too lazy to exercise due diligence verifying the claim should result in meaningful punishment.

Without reviewing the pasted code it's hard to know if the claim is fraudulent, but I can assure you the DMCA is not the right tool for the job as-is. Using the word "expeditiously" implies there is some immediate threat that must be dealt with to prevent grave damages to copyright holder. In reality maybe some sections of code were pasted for critique, clearly not to steal property from (c)holder.

If only the most severe cases need to be handled "expeditiously" then MAYBE people wouldn't look at DMCA/DRM as a censorship tool. Right now though, its an automated nightmare which has no means for discriminating fair use of a small incomplete/unusable section of code vs someone posting full compiled binary.

Great for them if they can prove the claim was fraudulent, it can only aid in the fight to fix this busted law that has been abused repeatedly to harm competition and critique. We have to fix it now before the cops start using it to shut down streamers by playing copyrighted music at them (oh wait this IS happening, we need to fix this stupid law already...).

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

#490

Post by snotrockets »

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…

I felt as if exams in my masters (in Mathematics) were different: they mostly check you understand the definitions, maybe remember some basic tactics for approaching problems. You can't really check the students can solve "real" problems, as those are too complex for the limited scope of an exam.
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