EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd • Hacker News Board

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

#491

Post by snotrockets » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 6:12 AM UTC

MereInterest wrote: post #404

gspr wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why PhD's typically have comprehensive exams. America is leaking again.

The US frequently merges the masters and PhD programs into a single 4-7 year program, rather than a 2-year masters followed by 2-5 year PhD program. The comprehensive exams for PhDs are typically at the end of the first two years, and cover material similar to that of a masters. The two are pretty much equivalent, but with different names.

To quote my advisor, who was a faculty member both sides of the Atlantic, while the path is different, by the end of the PhD, you mostly done the same amount of work, regardless of which system you participated in.

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

#492

Post by aaron695 » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 6:21 AM UTC

hackerrrnews wrote: post #195

aaron695 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or having eye and/or skin colors [1] Yet you could only link to one example for a totally different program ExamSoft. They had a thick dark beard above a dark shirt and dark glasses with reflections (on a much lighter skin tone). They also look like they have a second eyebrow due to the lighting on their eye lid and glasses. It could be their head shape tied to their race I guess, but you have a sample of one from…

My favourite Hacker News game to play is to count all the hoops people will go through to deny the fact that maybe, just maybe, race can be a factor in people's experiences.

I'm aiming for a shadow ban so I'll be frank.....

https://pimeyes.com/ can find the shitty twitter photo of their computer rejection screen from "ExamSoft" across the global fucking web.

I put in the photo from twitter and it popped out. And that's the fucking stupid 'photo' of the fucking stupid 'rejection screen' on a program that's not even Proctorio.

Sooooo Pimeyes is Polish, maybe it's the programmers from the USA and the fact you have all lost your minds and want to be racist because it makes up for you lack of ability to program. Because the Polish can facial recognise on a USA phone photo of a rejection screen.

Yes Dang... here it is, you did this on a different comment but we know this is the one it's about (Still keen for shadow ban, replies are the worst)

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

#493

Post by foerbert » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 7:06 AM UTC

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.)

I'm not sure about that.

It certainly could, but it also certainly couldn't. I imagine being confidently incorrect is likely to produce a worse result than being unconfidently(?) incorrect, for example.

Similarly, a less confident speaker may end up spending more effort justifying their answers, which could better expose their knowledge.

I think it would depend quite a bit on the examiner in this case. Some people may even be simply biased against particularly confident speakers, particularly considering the relative positions of the speaker and examiner.

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

#494

Post by checkyoursudo » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 7:33 AM UTC

pjmorris wrote: post #374

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…

> 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?

Probably the most important thing that made it a good process was that, although I was certainly under pressure to perform and show that I knew and could explain the material, the format was as a thoughtful, two-way, deeply-engaging conversation rather than a grilling, one-sided examination.

The examiner (one of my two instructors) had a list of questions/topics that we had to get through, but the specifics and flow were natural and spontaneous rather than artificial and forced.

What made the conversation good was that the examiner discussed points that I raised, raised points that I didn't, asked my opinion on e.g. real world implications of theories or conclusions that could be drawn if this or that were true, et cetera. This made it two-way and engaging. While he did not give me any answers, of course, when it was clear that I could bring up and sufficiently discuss a topic, then he would go into details, which would trigger even more detailed responses from me, and so forth. In this way I think he was able to probe the depths of my understanding while not needing to employ a one-sided question/answer format.

I think that it is difficult to bullshit a topic in depth with someone else who knows what they are talking about, so an oral exam probably does not need to be a hardcore opposition like a thesis defense might be.

The allotted time was maybe 30 or 45 minutes (I don't quite recall), after which the examiner would tell you what grade they would recommend. If it was a grade with distinction, then of course you would say thanks and be done. If it was less than distinction then you could request another 10 or 15 minutes of further examination to try to show your mastery. (I passed with distinction, so I didn't go through that part, but I assume it would have been a continuation? But maybe it would get a little more intense if you were trying to improve your performance at the last minute? I don't know.)

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

#495

Post by baobabKoodaa » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 7:51 AM UTC

saruken wrote: post #371

wayne-li2 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? B…

Please don't muddy the waters like that. I'm sure you understand perfectly well that when a job asks you to do X, they just want to get X done, whereas when a school asks you to do X, they want to test your skills or make you practice.

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

#496

Post by joatmon-snoo » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 8:19 AM UTC

mousepilot wrote: post #432

cmckn wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have a couple of the cheat sheets my study group compiled -- they're so fun to look back on. One for Computer Organization is almost unintelligible to me now; we were so proud of the density of that sucker.

did your instructor also allow a desktop microscope?

One of the more creative tricks I remember was writing a cheatsheet in red and blue text overlaid on each other and using 3D glasses to read it, which allowed you to squeeze more on. Never actually did it, so I don't know if it was useful...

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

#497

Post by wespiser_2018 » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 8:52 AM UTC

ladams wrote: post #268

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…

I'm a physics grad student, and this is completely wrong. The purpose of graduate classes (at least in physics) is to teach you how to navigate a the standard reference texts. For example, the main thing I learned in my grad E&M class was where to find information in Jackson (aka "Classical Electrodynamics"). Classical mechanics was a mix of Goldsmith and Landau and Lifshitz. Quantum mechanics used Sakauri. And stati…

Valuable comment right here for the autodidact, thank you!

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

#498

Post by eythian » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 9:21 AM UTC

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. :))

When I was involved in the teaching of a course that allowed this, one student basically reduced all the course notes onto a single two-sided page, except they also had flaps on it to fit more in. The exam invigilator took it from them deeming it (correctly imo) to not be in the spirit of the allowance. We decided we'd mark their exam, and then determine what we should do about this cheating-cheat-sheet. Given they got something like 5% in the exam anyway, we decided to let it slide.

My own experience of making up those cheat sheets is the same as yours, the effort put in to create them is an excellent teaching tool in itself, as you're studying and distilling all the stuff you don't know well, and by the time you're done, you hardly have to refer to it in the exam anyway.

For physics, they'd just give us a page with all the formulas but with no context aside from the letters in them, so if you knew roughly what it should look like, you could find it and you're not at so much risk of making a basic error under pressure.

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

#499

Post by wiredfool » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 10:24 AM UTC

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. :))

At one point in college, I printed "Don't Panic" in large letters on one of these one page cheat sheets.

This raised eyebrows of the TA's proctoring the exam, but like, if you don't know the stuff, a page isn't going to help you at that point.

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

#500

Post by amalcon » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 10:44 AM UTC

leetcrew wrote: post #246

908B64B197 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's software to detect copy-pasted code or plagiarized (it analyses the syntax tree so renaming the variables and changing indentation won't fool it!). The best however, is a 1:1 code review with a TA or Prof. Randomly jumping to files, reading the code and asking questions about it. Extremely hard to copy a codebase and learn it well enough you can explain it but really easy to do if you wrote it yourself.

I have to wonder how well that analysis code works in practice. for a lot of intro-level (and some mid-level) course assignments, there's only one or two straightforward ways to write the code. sometimes these assignments are just pasting together sample code from the powerpoint with a couple tweaks. I was a TA for a few of these courses, and the correct solutions tended to be very similar. I was only sure students w…

Yeah, this description immediately brought to mind FizzBuzz. In a C-like language, there's basically a whole 3 ways to write it without doing something esoteric (loop a switch, loop an if/elseif construct, try to be cute with independent ifs and a boolean).