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Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

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Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#61

Post by ceejayoz »

sebmellen wrote: post #29
advisedwang wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the onerous requirements mentioned in the article are about the test taker and the environment they are in, not hte computer envirionment. A VM doesn't help you when your professor is requiring you to rearrange your room, set up mirrors, bash earplugs etc.

I would record a video in advance or failing that flunk out. This calls for absolute rebellion against the system

The videos tend to be random, in both operations requested and their order.

If you can generate convincing real-time fake video based on verbal commands like “ok, now show me behind the desk… now your left ear” you probably don’t need to pass an exam any more.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#62

Post by nkrisc »

chrisseaton wrote: post #52
askvictor wrote: post #50

A solution for both this, and the problems with exams in general, is oral exams. Student has to answer questions from the teacher, in real time, one-on-one. Takes longer, but is much more authentic.

I think in the US some class sizes are in the hundreds , so this does not seem scalable for their case.

If they're having trouble proctoring their exams, perhaps they're admitting too many students.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#63

Post by usrusr »

lxe wrote: post #22

I took a remote amateur radio exam twice. The coordinator (proctor) asked to share the whole screen, scan the room with another device, and that's it! Just enough steps to have a degree of assurance that I'm not cheating, but not going overboard.

Examiners don't need to absolutely rule out a cheat, they just need to be sure that a cheating examinee would not be able to absolutely rule out cheat detection. Demonstrating absence of cheats isn't like some captcha that you just take again and again if you fail, as often as you like.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#64

Post by adrr »

cosmie wrote: post #9

Back in the good ol' days, you could just take the exam inside of a VM. The VM is locked down, but the host isn't. Looks like from ProctorU's docs[1] that they got around to probing for the (blatantly obvious[2]) signatures of a VM and stopped that trick. I wonder if those signatures exist in a Windows Sandbox[3] instance, or if you can detect/block the Enhanced RDP Session Windows leverages when running a Sandbox...…

Just get a monitor that supports Picture in Picture use two computers instead of one.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#65

Post by Kaze404 »

ColanR wrote: post #14
cosmie wrote: post #9

Back in the good ol' days, you could just take the exam inside of a VM. The VM is locked down, but the host isn't. Looks like from ProctorU's docs[1] that they got around to probing for the (blatantly obvious[2]) signatures of a VM and stopped that trick. I wonder if those signatures exist in a Windows Sandbox[3] instance, or if you can detect/block the Enhanced RDP Session Windows leverages when running a Sandbox...…

I wonder how feasible it is to remove such fingerprints - find a way to make the VM be functionally indistinguishable from the host.

For what it's worth, I play MMOs with malware anti cheats on a VM all the time with a Pci-pass-through setup. Event he ones that are known for detecting VMs don't seem to detect me under QEMU. Go figure.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#66

Post by maerF0x0 »

I had a teacher that solved this by saying all exams were open book, and then put so many questions that if you didnt know the material you'd just run out of time.

Basically you could look up a very low number of things in the amount of time per question allotted

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#67

Post by maerF0x0 »

beisner wrote: post #10
_8091149529 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a few years at Caltech in an academic role (not as a student). I never understood the rationale behind the unsupervised take-home exams. Could you elaborate what is it that makes it a 'success', in your opinion? The shortcomings that seem obvious to me are: - Penalizes honesty - Implied notion that Caltech students are "honourable" and honest. How is this achieved in practice?

The idea is that you create questions that are ungoogleable. Most of my upper-level CS courses had take-homes that were open-book, open-internet, and the professor basically said “good luck finding the answer to this problem online; you will not”. This is harder for professors to do, and maybe fails in intro courses, but generally is quite effective.

I had a professor that intentionally asked a question which wikipedia has the wrong answer... Called out and shamed everyone who used wikipedia as a source.

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#68

Post by _jal »

advisedwang wrote: post #24
cosmie wrote: post #9

Back in the good ol' days, you could just take the exam inside of a VM. The VM is locked down, but the host isn't. Looks like from ProctorU's docs[1] that they got around to probing for the (blatantly obvious[2]) signatures of a VM and stopped that trick. I wonder if those signatures exist in a Windows Sandbox[3] instance, or if you can detect/block the Enhanced RDP Session Windows leverages when running a Sandbox...…

Many of the onerous requirements mentioned in the article are about the test taker and the environment they are in, not hte computer envirionment. A VM doesn't help you when your professor is requiring you to rearrange your room, set up mirrors, bash earplugs etc.

I'm the kind of person who dropped out of college anyway, so it really doesn't matter. But I would have told any professor pulling this nonsense to get stuffed.

This is far less about cheating than petty power tripping. (They should, of course, feel free to abuse each other in what ever ways they find enjoyable. But this is really not my thing.)

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#69

Post by Enginerrrd »

cloud5ir wrote: post #55

To me, this underscores notion that schools continue to test for the wrong thing. With the exception of professions/trades that require impulse application of knowledge, I don't know why I would want/need someone to memorize a concept in order to apply it. Productive members of our society/workforce think critically, they ask good questions, and they research and leverage the information at their disposal to make dat…

Thinking critically on the subject: it also prevents the problem of having someone take the test for you by feeding you information through an earpiece or chatbox on a browser tab. In places where testing fraud is rampant, this is a common form of fraud actually.

So even a well designed

Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software

#70

Post by vkou »

dheera wrote: post #54
cosmie wrote: post #9

Back in the good ol' days, you could just take the exam inside of a VM. The VM is locked down, but the host isn't. Looks like from ProctorU's docs[1] that they got around to probing for the (blatantly obvious[2]) signatures of a VM and stopped that trick. I wonder if those signatures exist in a Windows Sandbox[3] instance, or if you can detect/block the Enhanced RDP Session Windows leverages when running a Sandbox...…

I would be in favor of a VM that is indistinguishable from a non-VM host. Is there any project that helps bring such functionality to, say, VirtualBox? Not because I encourage cheating, but because I should never have to install proprietary software on my personal machine to take an exam. I will however on occasion grudingly be okay with installing closed-source software inside of a VM.

Do you have any proprietary code running on your machine, or would you just not install any to take an exam?
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