With a lot more people taking courses remotely, I expect some universities will take the approach Amazon does and have "test centers" with proctors to make sure there are no shenanigans. That, and a lot more coursework / open book exams instead of traditional tests.
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
#92Online classes really emphasize how irrelevant closed book/notes/neighbor tests have always been. In cute terms, this environment is the strongest possible counterexample to "you won't always have a calculator with you!". All students are literally doing the test on a computer with internet access in the present tense. Their connectivity is considered so robust that a student may lose points or time if their internet drops during the test, and yet open internet access (or even just textbook and notes!) is somehow not an obvious resource to allow students during tests.
Professors frequently copy tests from other sources or previous semesters, and this obviously saves an enormous amount of effort, but ironically their copied work is what makes cheating on their tests so much more accessible. Professors make loud noises about cheating, and some are so hyperfixated on preventing cheating that they demand ridiculous requirements like proctoring software. They clearly aren't really prioritizing cheating prevention in their efforts, otherwise they'd write new tests more frequently (or at all!). Cheating prevention measures that don't require greater instructor effort are far more commonplace. When a professor literally copies a test, they shouldn't be surprised to see their students doing the same.
Tests that are suddenly ineffective with open internet access are already complete garbage for 3 reasons:
1. Some students will always cheat, and as long as teaching is remote, some students will always have internet access. Open access means that honesty is no longer discouraged.
2. Verifying granular details/vocab on the internet is completely normal in real work, even among experts.
3. Any test without resources like notes or internet relies far too heavily on memorization. This might be justifiable if there were evidence that standard test studying strategies (cramming) were effective at guaranteeing long term memorization. Anecdotally, I would fail the majority of my finals from previous semesters without time to (re)prepare. Students should be encouraged to understand the inner workings of the topic, in terms of analysis and potential states of that system, not to memorize dozens of details and vocabulary terms.
Within my Computer Science curriculum, the most effective and important content (between tests, projects, and lectures) has been programming projects by far. I'm dubious that tests are effective for any curriculum with relevant real world projects, though CS may be better than other subjects at making projects the primary measurement of understanding, and replacing the rigor that testing creates.
Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was an undergrad at Rice where we had a very strong honor code. Unsupervised exams were common, and to the best of my knowledge cheating was very rare. If you were accused of cheating then you went before the Honor Council, which was run entirely by students. I considered this an enormous success. It created an atmosphere where we were treated with respect, and where we were expected to treat others in the same way…
> How is this achieved in practice? You were accountable to each other , not to an authority. Authority gets you enough to do the bare minimum to not get fired or not get caught. Being accountable to each other feels very very different. It's tough to explain in an HN post but anyone who has felt the difference knows what I meant. You care what your peers think. You care about that authority only enough for them to l…
> Never let it be said that shame isn't an effective tool.
This is true, but at the same time I think shame as a motivator is often really unhealthy. People can do all kinds of terrible things to avoid shame: at the extremes, witness things like family annihilators or so-called “honor killings”.
I’ve been reading a book about Midway lately so this is on the brain, but a culture of shame is part of the complex that prevented the Japanese from reeling in insubordinate but “patriotic” junior officers, and from realistically assessing their own and their opponents’ capabilities. Meanwhile the modern process for evaluating air accidents (constantly applauded on HN) explicitly removes the question of blame and shame.
So, I’m not really saying anything about Rice university. I’m sure they don’t have to worry about honor killings on campus. This has just been on my mind lately. Just saying that without social release valves for shame you can get some really wild consequences.
PS for anyone interested in Midway, read Shattered Sword for everything you ever wanted to know about early-war Japanese flight deck operations.
Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's easy to make the core device indistinguishable. It's the additional hardware that becomes a problem: QEMU/libvirt hardcodes its hard drive model to include the word "QEMU" (although there is an unmerged patch to make that configurable), and although I don't know how graphics work in a VM, it's far easier to create a higher-level graphics device than e.g. emulating Intel graphics.
I imagine a script could be used with qemu - given that patch you mentioned, which I would love a source for if you have it - to match the names of the virtual devices with names of devices on the physical host. Then there's no way for software to check the device names against a list of VM tools, since it always matches real, physical hardware. At that point, it seems to me that there isn't much left to distinguish…
Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software
#95To 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…
while this sounds good on the surface, i think memorization is much more important than you give it credit. imo you absolutely should have key concepts memorized if you have any real understanding of a subject. and as you become more of a specialist, your bar for what constitutes a "key concept" should raise. Being able to search things up is well and good, but dont you run into situations where you don't even know w…
You can’t get intelligently conversant about a thing without having the key bits in your mind, you’re right. But you don’t need to have as much memorized as we’re were tested on when I was in school (90s-early 2000s). And you need a lot more than just memorization to reach real understanding.
Every few years I need the quadratic formula for something, and I just derive the thing instead of remembering or looking it up. I’ve essentially traded some memorization for some understanding. We’re surely going to do it wrong, so I’d err on the side of too much understanding and too little memorizing. If you have a real feel for how a thing works, it’ll stick with you longer than the date of such and such battle.
Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software
#96To 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…
Memorization is absolutely crucial to getting good at math. In fact, I don't think there's any other way to get good at math besides memorization and doing problems, over and over and over again. It's rote, sure, but it has tremendous value.
If you think you understand something, but can't actually solve problems without referencing anything, you don't actually understand it.
Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software
#97I 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
Some people just work more slowly than others. Doesn't seem like a great solution.
And the real world penalizes people for that, for good reason. As such, I don't think there's anything wrong with time pressure on tests.
Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
This would almost certainly not work and you'd just get a 0 on the exam Can I ask, in a totally non-confrontational way, are you successful in your field and used to getting what you want? Based off of nothing other than this post I would guess that is the case
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Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software
#99Back 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...…
You can also just duct tape a phone to your computer screen with your notes. Webcam can't see it, and it's right in your field of view when looking at the questions. Locked down browsers are dumb, no matter what you do there's a million ways to cheat easily.
Re: Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software
#100A 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.
Tbh, I thought I'd like oral exams - but for whatever reason, I always bombed them. Even exams where I thought I did good, I'd completely bomb.
Because oral exams are quite time limited, you really only have one shot at each sub-question. And how good you are, is 100% subjective to the people judging you - and since this is in person, lots of things can influence their judgement. Hell, they may even have some latent bias.
And as others have mentioned, it brings a bunch of stress on the candidate.
I guess it's a very personal preference. I always did better on home exams, the stress-level was pretty much non-existent, compared to the others.