Does anyone have copies/mirrors of the deleted Pastebin entries?
EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
521–530 of 538 posts
Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Isn't the purpose of school to train you to where you can do X for a company? If standard practice in the field is to look that up, I fail to see the value in forcing you to remember how to do X so that you can later forget it and end up Googling it anyways. I generally find it silly to teach things that you can adequately grasp from Google in 10 minutes. That's not to imply that anything can be learned from Google i…
> If standard practice in the field is to look that up, I fail to see the value in forcing you to remember how to do X so that you can later forget it and end up Googling it anyways.
I agree 100%. I also don't see the value in forcing people to memorize googleable facts. It's frustrating to see schools implement curricula like that. However, I disagree with your implication here. You're implying that because schools make you learn stupid things, everybody should just cheat. What's the point of that, exactly? You think the curricula is not optimized well, so you would rather reduce the entire institution to a diploma mill, instead of simply learning with the unoptimized programme?
> Isn't the purpose of school to train you to where you can do X for a company?
That may be true for a vocational school, but for a computer science programme at a university, it is not true at all. If you look up the stated purpose of computer science programmes, they are about educating people for the sake of knowledge itself, not to achieve an ulterior purpose like producing a useful workforce.
> Learning how to implement on optimized bubble sort? That's kind of dumb; in the real world you just use an existing one.
If you memorize a bubble sort algorithm without understanding, just to be able to repeat it back verbatim in the exam, I agree that's dumb (and it's also dumb on the school's part to create a programme that incentivizes such behavior). However, that's not the only way to learn bubble sort. You can also approach it from an "algorithm design" perspective, and strive to develop the skills needed to design and work with algorithms. That's not dumb at all. In fact, I would argue that's one of the core skills that a computer science education should provide.
> in the real world you just use an existing one.
No, you wouldn't. You would never use a bubble sort in the real world, because it has O(n^2) time complexity and it has no redeeming qualities when compared to other algorithms.
So let me get this straight: if someone at work asks you to "implement sorting for these results", you might just google "bubble sort java", copypaste code, test that it works, and ship it? And you don't think there's any value in learning what properties these algorithms have or how they work? Don't care, don't wanna learn, cheat through school, end up using bubble sort in production. Great. That's exactly the type of attitude that causes 5 minute startup load times in GTA.
Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I might not ask about C-specific context, but if you don't know how to write a value to a sequence of bytes, you have no business being a SWE at Google I know quite a few engineers who passed Google interviews and work there, and they wouldn't know how to do this off the top of their head. I also interviewed with Google a few times, and not once was I asked a question like this. Also seems weird you would say that t…
Having performed interviews at Google for about 5 years, I don't think the needing to "know how to write a value to a sequence of bytes" is representative indeed. Many of current junior candidates use Java/Python in which it seems too niche a question to be a valuable signal for a hiring committee, particularly if it's for general SWE. Either you've dealt with this problem before and you know it, or you'll struggle.
> too niche a question to be a valuable signal for a hiring committee
I feel like I must be taking crazy pills, but this thread is definitely derailed at this point, so...
I don't hesitate to take a hard stance on this. If you don't know off the top of your head how to write a value to a sequence of bytes, you are an incompetent programmer and are unfit for the profession. That is indeed a VERY strong signal to a hiring committee.
It's like interviewing to be an IP lawyer and now knowing what the types of intellectual property are, or interviewing for a copy editor and now knowing basic sentence structure. There's a baseline of knowledge that anyone ordinarily skilled in the art needs to have, and trivial operations on sequences of values is without question one of them.
Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
There already is unconscious bias. You can see the student's name, their penmanship, their writing style, you likely know who they are, etc. An oral exam just changes things by changing the bias to accent, inflection, annunciation, skin tone, dress, etc.
When I was in school, 95% of grading was blind and nothing outside of exams was handwritten. And while it was possible to de-anonymise, the academics were all in support of blind grading so why would they? The only exceptions were projects where everyone was assigned a different topic, and graded presentations. Of course, this is simpler in STEM subjects - it's not like you can guess someone's race or gender from the…
This also depends quite a bit on class size. If you are one of 9 profs and 36 TA's on a whole year of a 1st year intro course, you can get together and batch mark finals very effectively blind.
If you are teaching a 4th yr/masters mixed class of 11 by yourself, you pretty much get to know who is who whether you want to or not. I suppose avoiding handwriting can help if it's appropriate (e.g., won't work on a math course) but I suspect you'll know everyones style by then anyway.
Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends on the degree. If you're becoming a medical doctor you'll have to do a ton of memorization, but in other fields doctorates are the least memorization-intensive part of your education, because the focus is on generation and synthesis, on the assumption that you've already learned the rote knowledge. You don't need to memorize anything to write a dissertation but that doesn't make it easy (and you'll end up…
> medical doctor you'll have to do a ton of memorisation Which is a load of dingos kidneys. Gate keeping. All the good doctors I've ever been to have a wall of reference material and use it , even if only to show the patient, but it's there and accessible. And besides, it's not like practising medical doctors don't make heaps of mistakes . The number one cause of complications in a medical setting is medical interven…
Anecdotes in support of this comment:
I lived with a orthopedic surgeon doing a specialization in pediatric orthopedia.
He was very very very good based on my understanding of the places he had worked, the offers he had to undertake his specialization, the change in operation waiting times and his model of how he worked within the hospital, and that immediately after returning to his home country he was head of the newly created orthopedic pediatrics ward.
His description of how he would approach a surgery was straight-forward:
- he would review the surgical referral, his notes from his patient intake
- he would review appropriate notes and documentation from the hospital on the allowed surgeries allowed, including reference texts on that particular surgery
- he would create a full plan for entering, performing, and exiting the operation
- (surgery)
- he would review the plan, add notes on how it actually went
So it's not like he woke up, walked into a surgical room, and ad-libbed it.
As an anecdote, he said he liked B-students for his surgical teams because they had to work hard to get there.
I also was good friends with a very nerdy emergency room doctor. He offered the anecdote that he was "called out" for using Google. His justification was that "once you throw in the appropriate medical terms, all you're getting is the latest research on treatments--and I was attempting to offer the best and latest in proven care". He also made the several changes to the shifts at the ER, including using time-sheet and patient data to show that patient outcomes suffered during longer doctor shift rotations. His anecdote on his schooling; "I was a bad student, and I'm a poor doctor, but my job is to get you stable until we can intervene properly". He funded a startup and wrote (in Java) a medical EMR system.
Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
#526Earlier 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…
Orals have a lot of advantages, but they also make it very easy for unconscious bias to come into play, in that all the criteria for grading are soft.
The examiner doesn't even have to use the oral exam to give a grade. They could use that part simply to figure out whether the student passes or fails. It's very difficult to cheat in an oral exam. Combine the oral exam with the written exam and you could get an overview of what the student knows.
Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't if the examiner understands the material. You can't bullshit someone who knows much more about a topic than you do - bullshitting with confidence will only make you sound like a fool. If the examiner isn't much more knowledgeable about a topic than their students, then something else has gone wrong.
But you can appear to know less than you actually do through a lack of confidence.
Right, but that's why it takes a bit skill on the part of the examiner - you need to be able to support people through their nerves and lack of confidence.
Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, good point, the UK programs I know of are notably ligher in this regard (and PhD shorter) though they do generally require a 1st class honors (honours, i guess!) degree in subject, which includes "tripos" which is roughly equivalent. So in some ways a higher bar for undergrad matched with a lower bar for grad. At least that's the theory - I don't know if in practice it holds up; most of the grad students and late…
The difference I tend to see is that the outcome of the UK viva (oral) examination is far less of a foregone conclusion, and can still be quite traditional in that students are expected to be able to have a broad and well-informed discussion about their wider field and the context of their work. The thinking is that they will (if meritous of a PhD) have a certain level of expertise, and thus be able to have a discuss…
I don't know anyone who failed their viva entirely, but it's standard to be asked to make corrections to the thesis after it. Getting passed without corrections is a significant achievement. Those corrections can relate to weaknesses in your general knowledge uncovered in the viva: if there is something the examiners think you should know about, and you don't, you can be asked to add it to the thesis.
My impression was that someone failing their viva was seen as a serious failure on the part of their supervisor, who should not have let them submit without being more prepared.
Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
#529Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, is that software legal to force upon your students? If you tried this in Europe, even with the student explicitly clicking "I consent", you would still be facing pretty serious GDPR penalties because the student had no other option than to accept making their consent invalid.
I wouldn't be too sure about those GDPR penalties. Dutch universities are also using Proctorio, with the recorded footage being sent to the US: https://www.volkskrant.nl/columns-opinie/opinie-universiteit...
That would allow all those students to exercise their GDPR rights against Proctorio and their university. Probably just takes a couple hundred to completely overwhelm Proctorio and cost them so much money that it makes more sense to drop the small Dutch market. Or to get them in a lot of trouble if they refuse to give all students access to all data they have.
Will take the privacy regulators a few years, justice moves slow. But if I was a Proctorio shareholder I would be very very unhappy if my company got stuck in years of unresolved legal issues with unknown (and high) potential fines.
Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
#530Earlier 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.
People can easily share the solutions to real exams, as well. (Though I agree the bar is much higher.)