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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

#531

Post by Siira »

checkyoursudo wrote: post #303
smiths1999 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I teach at the university level and this is what I have done with my exams. Everything is open book and in my experience there is no difference in the average exam score between open book online and closed (or open) book in person. It is also way easier for me to not have to worry about who is cheating and where everyone is looking (I also don't like the idea of forcing students to turn on their webcams).

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…

My experience with the oral exams have been the opposite. The profs ask useless questions on details that do not matter at all and are never covered in a real exam. They are also very biased in how they assess you based on their preconceptions. And it doesn't give you the time and privacy needed to solve real technical questions. (Most of my written exams were only 4-5 questions in 3 hours, which is obviously not happening in an oral exam.)

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

#532

Post by Natfan »

milkytron wrote: post #397
professoretc wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I give regular online exams without any protoring software, pure honor system. I have three students who live together who consistently turn in identical work. What I don't understand is why the keep doing it, when I keep giving them 0s for copying.

How did you find out they live together?

Back when I worked first line at a University, I had access to the student records system (so that I could verify students if they required a password reset).

I was able to see current and past residence data, which I suppose could have helped me verify the student's identity ("what post code[0] do you currently live at?"), but I tried not to look at that information when possible.

Lecturers also had access to this system (it dealt with some submission data), so I guess they may have had access to view residency data?

This is just an educated guess based on my experience, though.

[0]: For American readers, think ZIP code

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

#533

Post by cycomanic »

mkl wrote: post #451
cycomanic wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find your statements in different parts of the thread quite contradictory. On one hand you say that things don't scale because of number of students, but then a bit down thread you mention it's not worth making a new course for 10 students (out of 640), but for 10 students in person proctoring is clearly not a problem. You also mention the issue of cheating for professional qualifications, but again, that's a tiny…

Well I'm talking about decisions about different things by different people 1) running exams (institution level - run centrally), 2) creating bespoke purpose-designed online courses (mostly department level). The decision about exam invigilation was made at the institutional level, where 10 is a small number of online students for a course, and they have dozens of courses to worry about. For most of the institution's…

Hah! I did my PhD in NZ and became a part kiwi (I still miss it to be honest). I'm back in Europe now, in Sweden and as you might know we have had a very relaxed (and very weird from a non-Swede perspective) approach to the pandemic. So we did have in-person and online exams, but all with proctering via zoom.

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

#534

Post by cycomanic »

amcoastal wrote: post #95
mkl wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't make assumptions or resort to baseless insults. We have designed entirely new fully-online interactive courses in response to this. In other courses, where we have e.g. 640 local students and 10 online, they need to sit the same test for it to be fair.

Sounds like you need to design an online version of that course if you're going to allow online students to take it.

While I disagree with the OP on the use of proctoring software saying something like "just design an online version of the course" displays a massive ignorance of academic workloads. Designing a new course, especially one which works online, is a huge amount of work, who is going to do all that? Most academics even in normal semesters work >50h (more likely >60h) per week.

Just adjusting your lecturing to online can easily take an additional 2h preparation per lecture, and often takes significantly more, because you have to also adjust all communications and how to make material available. That's even without redesigning the course for online learning. I know a lot of colleagues who got very overworked, because of the increased demand on teachers during the pandemic.

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

#535

Post by anoncake »

fludlight wrote: post #475
Impassionata wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Schools should be teaching kids to be confident speakers and readers from an early age.

If teaching worked 100% we wouldn't need exams.

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

#536

Post by sepin4 »

smiths1999 wrote: post #287
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.

I teach at the university level and this is what I have done with my exams. Everything is open book and in my experience there is no difference in the average exam score between open book online and closed (or open) book in person. It is also way easier for me to not have to worry about who is cheating and where everyone is looking (I also don't like the idea of forcing students to turn on their webcams).

In my alma mater for most courses we had to actually discuss what we wrote(and maybe some other topics) with the lector as part of the exam. Some were open book, some were closed. Regardless of that however when you get to talk to the professor it's very hard to fake knowledge and especially logical thinking. It sure takes more time(we usually had one on one for about 20-30 minutes per student), but you can size a person way better than just reviewing what he wrote/selected. And there is no obstacle(other than time constraints, which can be worked around) to continue doing this even during the pandemic. I think we are overestimating technology such as AI and its applications. Some things are just plain better when done by a person. I had a very positive experience with one professor who chose to round up my grade instead of down, because my errors were technical(carelessness mostly) not logical, so he then asked me questions from subsequent chapters to see my reasoning. I really didn't care that much about the grade, but that discussion and the overall experience of failures that could lead to positive change through introspective analysis is something that you can't get from an AI or any pipeline processing.

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

#537

Post by matheusmoreira »

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.

I completely agree with you but good luck convincing anyone to do that. Memorization and regurgitation questions are easier to create, evaluate and grade. Asking meaningful questions, evaluating each student's answer and taking an individualized approach to each student requires a lot of time and effort which are the most scarce resources in today's mass education centers.

So they'll keep asking stupid questions as if the student was a database being queried. It's no wonder that people can solve them by querying actual knowledge bases! Schools won't accept that: they are selling degrees and they don't want to make it too easy for students to pass their courses. So they come up with the absolutely ridiculous notion of cheating.

The whole thing's so phony and artificial it's mindboggling. I don't think it's even possible to get a high quality education anymore. Maybe if a student is lucky enough to have a one-on-one mentorship.

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

#538

Post by matheusmoreira »

kbenson wrote: post #241
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think people here are underestimating the volume of cheating in school. Not defending Protorio here, but I didn't really understand how rampant cheating was, either, until I became friends with someone who works at a University. Growing up, my friends and I would never dream of cheating and would fear the consequences of getting caught, so the entire concept feels foreign. We also grew up in the era of in-person…

We can't stress the importance of school and how it will affect the rest of their life, and then not expect them to do whatever it takes to make sure they do well there. For some, it might be a matter of making sure they have an excellent record, for others, it might a case of keeping them in the system at all if they didn't get there though merit, or feel like they can't keep up enough to stick around. I imagine the…

> We can't stress the importance of school and how it will affect the rest of their life, and then not expect them to do whatever it takes to make sure they do well there.

Completely agree. For many students their lives and futures will literally be determined by the result of a single test. Under these circumstances, not using every resource available to win is simply stupid. Why would someone not cheat if possible?

The truth is academic integrity was doomed the second degrees became necessary for employment. People who care about academic integrity are those who are there by choice, not those who are pursuing a degree to improve their chances in the job market. The only possible solution to this problem is to end the "everyone must go to college" meme. Good work opportunities that don't require decades of education would go a long way.

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