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Remote scan of student’s room before test violated his privacy, judge rules

nytimes.com

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Re: Remote scan of student’s room before test violated his privacy, judge rules

#91

Post by kaba0 »

wolframhempel wrote: post #72

This has been eluded to by a few other comments already, but I think it's worth stressing: Maybe the problem is that our definition of "cheating" doesn't make sense anymore. Our methods of teaching come from a worldview in which the information stored in your head is your only resource. That wasn't true in the past where you could consult colleagues, look things up in books or call experts - and it's certainly not tr…

Well, it depends.

A big part of the valuable experience comes from having memories of similar situations, and thus a shortcut to the solution. In IT it can be similar to “indexing”, like I may remember reading a relevant stackoverflow question and I know how to find it again, but I don’t remember the exact solution.

But the catch is, to index something you first have to crawl through it. In medicine for example, there may not be much point in holding every single extreme-rare disease in memory, but having memorized them once and mostly forgotten them will lead a good doctor to know about it enough so that he/she can look it up on the odd chance it gets relevant. It will be only possible when he/she memorized it once back then.

My point is, there is a point in memorization (especially that it improves memory all-around - one will remember facts much easily after extensive learning), what should be better distinguished is facts that are to be learnt for life vs those that are only needed for a given test. It’s like unknowns vs unknown unknowns - the latter can be much worse and you don’t want someone like that as a colleague.

Re: Remote scan of student’s room before test violated his privacy, judge rules

#92

Post by geek_at »

smabie wrote: post #7
Claude_Shannon wrote: post #4

It is terrible, but what is the alternative to prevent cheating? I had quite a few on-line exams by now and I've seen very creative attempts at cheating so far.

You've been able to take online classes for decades, why is this suddenly a problem? Moreover, if people want to cheat they can find some way to cheat regardless of any countermeasures you deploy.

> if people want to cheat they can find some way to cheat regardless of any countermeasures you deploy

I was a Academic highschool teacher for 8 years and I agree with your statement but also don't think that we should make it too easy for them. At minimum a screen recorder so the students know even if they were not caught during the exam, they could later be caught

Bonus anecdote When the first bluetooth phones hit the market we had students use their (pseudo) smart phones (that looked like expensive calculators with greyscale displays back then) to send each other the solutions during the physics exam. No teacher at the time had this as a threat model

Re: Remote scan of student’s room before test violated his privacy, judge rules

#93

Post by wil421 »

wolframhempel wrote: post #72

This has been eluded to by a few other comments already, but I think it's worth stressing: Maybe the problem is that our definition of "cheating" doesn't make sense anymore. Our methods of teaching come from a worldview in which the information stored in your head is your only resource. That wasn't true in the past where you could consult colleagues, look things up in books or call experts - and it's certainly not tr…

Most if not all of my upper classes in school were open book. Even my beginning CS classes for Java was open book. There was no way you had enough time to finish the tests if you look up every answer. You would have to learn topics on the spot if you didn’t study, it was near impossible to do with the time constraints.

Most of my upper classes were heavily weighted towards group projects anyway.

Re: Remote scan of student’s room before test violated his privacy, judge rules

#94

Post by _steady »

wolframhempel wrote: post #72

This has been eluded to by a few other comments already, but I think it's worth stressing: Maybe the problem is that our definition of "cheating" doesn't make sense anymore. Our methods of teaching come from a worldview in which the information stored in your head is your only resource. That wasn't true in the past where you could consult colleagues, look things up in books or call experts - and it's certainly not tr…

Curricula

Re: Remote scan of student’s room before test violated his privacy, judge rules

#95

Post by Barrin92 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #67
Barrin92 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are any of these criticims backed by evidence? Rote memorization is one of the, if not the most important backbone of excellence in any discipline. Pianists play scales, chess players memorize and repeat, athletes do the same, virtually any excellent programmer I've met shares one trait, they program a lot . frontal teaching to large audiences isn't dehumanizing, it's simply effective reflected empirically by the lar…

> Pianists play scales, chess players memorize and repeat, athletes do the same, virtually any excellent programmer I've met shares one trait, they program a lot. They practice applying the knowledge . > frontal teaching to large audiences isn't dehumanizing, it's simply effective reflected empirically by the large amounts of excellent graduates coming out of countries that focus heavily on that style of teaching. LO…

Almost all knowledge is tacit, there's no clear line between applying and learning, it's a feedback loop. In fact obsession with abstract knowledge has always been weird to me. How far does reading about swimming get you?

The offshoring thing is literally just about that. The nastiness and cultural mismatch of that industry. The huge Chinese and Indian domestic tech industries show that they can build successful things, just not necessarily for foreign markets.

Re: Remote scan of student’s room before test violated his privacy, judge rules

#96

Post by lotsofpulp »

antipurist wrote: post #79
lotsofpulp wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what is the point in artificially creating a test situation where the student is isolated from resources she'll have at her disposal in real life? I can envision many scenarios where a person needs to be quick on their feet and does not have time to look things up. Drivers, pilots, doctors, etc. Certification provides a lot of value to society. The other point of testing is to separate wheat from chaff. To see i…

Those scenarios can be better tested through simulations. E.g. to pass a driving exam you are presented with a road situation, and given only a few seconds to respond — this completely eliminates the possibility of looking things up on the internet. A similar approach can be used for other disciplines. > separate wheat from chaff Wheat can demonstrate/use the knowledge, chaff can't. Why does it matter whether the kno…

Because you do not know if the results are the same before making the decision to go with person A or person B. There are time costs in figuring out if someone can do something or is capable of learning how to do something, so test(s) of various kinds are used as a proxy.

Re: Remote scan of student’s room before test violated his privacy, judge rules

#97

Post by klabb3 »

wikfwikf wrote: post #84
blitzar wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pearson VUE I was so happy when the pandemic hit and the second part of a qualification I was doing could be remotely proctered - everyone from professionals to crack addicts were taking tests of some sort at the same time at the test centre. My concentration broke when the crack addict picked up the monitor and smashed it on the ground and stormed out, im not sure it they were doing a Cisco qualification or a driv…

How did you know the person was addicted to crack?

Guess who sold him the crack.

Re: Remote scan of student’s room before test violated his privacy, judge rules

#98

Post by trashtester »

lbriner wrote: post #85

There is often a lot of criticism of "learning by rote" and often the blanket rebuttal is "we all have access to Google" etc. however there is a very big difference between someone who knows something and someone who has to look it up, which is why I will never accept a job candidate who will "learn what they need to learn". How long would an experienced dev honestly take to learn a mid-level amount about e.g. Kubern…

> I will never accept a job candidate who will "learn what they need to learn".

That's funny, because I would say the opposite, if they do NOT, "learn what they need to learn", I would find it problematic.

I'm not a Java programmer, but it happens regularly that when java programmer truly get stuck, I go through their code and find the bugs, learning what I need to learn on the fly. Let's say they're having problem with network connectivity, I can learn how that should be done, reason about fault tolerance and teach myself how to look at the traffic in wireshark.

I'm not a infrastructure operations person, but if there are strange behavior in the trace, I can sit down with those who are, understand the network topology, and understand where and why the tcp connection may have issues, teaching myself what I need as I go.

Then I bring the network person and app developer together, go through the findings, explain to the developer what this looks at from the network side and explain to the network infra person what that means for the programmer. If there are some kinds of network instability that is irreducible, I can show the developer design patters that ensure that the code he's writing is resilient to that kind of problem.

I'm also not a Data Scientist, but when the Data Scientists are having problems, I can sit down and look at their problem, learn about the methods they're using, find patterns they did not see, prerequisites that were not met, or find errors in their math.

The key is to have both deep and broad knowledge of the basics of the technical and mathematical fields. THOSE I do mostly know pretty well, from half a lifetime of being curious and taking the time to really understand things, instead of just memorize them. If you know the foundations well enough, learning a given application can be learned very quickly.

Re: Remote scan of student’s room before test violated his privacy, judge rules

#99

Post by Xylakant »

lbriner wrote: post #83
janekm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or we could accept that in this day and age, expecting kids to recite factoids broadcast to them by a "teacher" doesn't make any kind of sense any more, with google in everyone's pocket. And testing in the typical style that fails when a student can use a textbook or google makes just as little sense.

This is a common rebuttal but despite the fact that everyone does have google in their pockets, clearly a lot of people never use it to learn and only use it for entertainment so testing what they know off by heart does still matter imho. When we locked down in the UK, millions of people were furloughed for 6 months+. How many of those people retrained, studied etc.? Not as many as we might hope because education is…

The rebuttal is not aimed at „everyone can learn“, but at „you can look up things that you required to memorize two decades ago.“ I can look up any important constant to hundreds of decimal points, find explanations for almost all publicly known algorithms, way more information than I could ever memorize. Tests often still pretend that knowing this is important. But what‘s more important is knowing what to look for and how to transform the general knowledge you can read into a solution. That’s a skill and it needs training and it‘s the skill that‘s important and should be tested for.

But those tests are harder to design, harder to grade and you cannot reuse them - since someone will just post the solution on the internet. And you need to prevent students from just sharing the solution during the exam.

Re: Remote scan of student’s room before test violated his privacy, judge rules

#100

Post by trashtester »

geek_at wrote: post #92
smabie wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've been able to take online classes for decades, why is this suddenly a problem? Moreover, if people want to cheat they can find some way to cheat regardless of any countermeasures you deploy.

> if people want to cheat they can find some way to cheat regardless of any countermeasures you deploy I was a Academic highschool teacher for 8 years and I agree with your statement but also don't think that we should make it too easy for them. At minimum a screen recorder so the students know even if they were not caught during the exam, they could later be caught Bonus anecdote When the first bluetooth phones hit…

At some point, when a student find a truly novel way to gain an advantage, that can be seen as a kind of creativity, and may point to a strong career (hopefully within the law).

However, if lots of students cheat in the same way semester after semester, the school has a credibility problem.

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