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College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software

• ev1 6y ago
  I have never once seen this software meaningfully work in any reasonable manner other than be a massive privacy violation and be a massive waste of time for the GSIs being forced to go through a timestamped log of every time a student blinked. How about writing open-book tests in ways that are impossible to cheat on if you don't understand the material? You've had almost a year to adapt. Why outsource student PII to a developing country sweatshop? This all seems absurd to me, it's been much easier to just write a one-liner inline script to hook blur, focus, visibilitychange, and onkeydown and log the userid when the event happens.
  • RegnisGnaw 6y ago
    >> How about writing open-book tests in ways that are impossible to cheat on if you don't understand the material? You've had almost a year to adapt. So in a remote test situation, explain how this is possible without use of these software. I can think of many scenarios where a second person can be in the room and doing the exam.
    • ev1 6y ago
      I can also think of many scenarios where group project-based assessments can be completely done by someone else. I've seen people pay others to physically attend as them, pre-COVID, literally hand over their student ID to be physically present and take a test. You can't really stop all of them.
      • tgv 6y ago
        That's no reason to lower the bar even further.
        • klodolph 6y ago
          That’s a curious way to frame the problem. The harm from these anti-cheating measures is evident.
          • tgv 6y ago
            The one I replied to gives as reason: you can't stop them all. Let's just give everyone a MSc, shall we?
            • klodolph 6y ago
              > Let's just give everyone a MSc, shall we? Are you claiming that having open-book tests makes it so that everyone can get an MSc? That’s what it sounds like you’re saying, so I assume that I just don’t know what you’re arguing. Every system is going to catch some percentage of cheaters and wrongly punish some percentage of innocent people. The pandemic has put us in a bad position where we can’t use some of the more effective systems (in-class tests) for assessing knowledge / preventing cheating, so we are forced to come up with some kind of compromise, and in many subjects, open-book, take-home tests work very well (although they require more work from the professors).
              • tgv 6y ago
                The professors are overworked already. So that's one reason not to. Second, cheating is also fairly easy on open questions. Just get someone to prompt you the answers. That's what the proctoring software is for. But it's the style of justification: because you can't catch them all, just ignore the problem. That's not ok. Education is supposed to teach you something else than cheating.
    • jjk166 6y ago
      What stopped people from having someone else do their take home tests before the pandemic? On a more constructive note, it seems pretty simple to require some portion of responses to reference the lectures such that only someone who attended the class in this semester would be able to correctly answer, for example "use the method we discussed in the first half of lecture 3, use the third of the four numbers I told you to write down that day as variable y, if you weren't in class that day instead do X" If a test comes back and someone claims to not remember the material from any classes but still got everything right, that warrants scrutiny. If someone currently enrolled in the class is helping a person cheat, you can use standard anti-cheating techniques like comparing answers.
      • RegnisGnaw 6y ago
        >> What stopped people from having someone else do their take home tests before the pandemic? Nothing except these tests were not take home prior to COVID. >> On a more constructive note, it seems pretty simple to require some portion of responses to reference the lectures such that only someone who attended the class in this semester would be able to correctly answer, for example "use the method we discussed in the first half of lecture 3, use the third of the four numbers I told you to write down that day as variable y, if you weren't in class that day instead do X" If a test comes back and someone claims to not remember the material from any classes but still got everything right, that warrants scrutiny. If someone currently enrolled in the class is helping a person cheat, you can use standard anti-cheating techniques like comparing answers. So you are expecting the student to remember 100% of what they heard in the online classes? Or more likely the student would write down these details and handle it to the cheater to use during the take home exam. Or the cheater would "do X". In most cases the one doing the helping is not a current student, so it doesn't help. I've passed college classes not attending any classes. Doing assignments, exams, and mid-terms. So would I be penalized for not attending classes?
        • jjk166 6y ago
          > Nothing except these tests were not take home prior to COVID. Take home tests were definitely a thing before covid. > So you are expecting the student to remember 100% of what they heard in the online classes? Or more likely the student would write down these details and handle it to the cheater to use during the take home exam. Or the cheater would "do X". In most cases the one doing the helping is not a current student, so it doesn't help. I expect students to take notes for their open book exams. If you're competent enough to identify all the material needed for the cheater to do an open book test, congratulations you have the knowledge to pass the test. If you just record every piece of information possible, congratulations you have spent way more time and effort than it would have taken to just learn the material. If you don't attend any classes, do X. You're not being penalized for doing that, it just warrants scrutiny. If this is an entry level course that an intelligent person could teach themselves the material, then it probably doesn't matter if you cheated or not, you'll be found out in higher level courses. If this is a high level course, your department would probably have a good idea of how capable you are from past performance. If the guy struggling to get a C in introductory physics gets a perfect score on his quantum final without going to class once, that is super suspicious.
    • ghaff 6y ago
      And yet I had many open book tests/assignments decades ago before there were even personal computers. Technology doesn't solve everything and some things aren't worth trying to solve 100%.
      • RegnisGnaw 6y ago
        At the same time it doesn't mean we should not try to solve them to say 90%.
  • easton 6y ago
    > This all seems absurd to me, it's been much easier to just write a one-liner inline script to hook blur, focus, visibilitychange, and onkeydown and log the userid when the event happens. If you're curious, this is exactly what Canvas does to detect foul play (although they don't advertise it for that, it just goes into the log)[0][1]. Schools don't think it's good enough, so they spend thousands on these more invasive solutions. [0]: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-view-a-quiz-log-for-a-student/ta-p/580 https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I... [1]: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/blob/master/public/javascripts/quizzes/quiz_taking_police.js https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/blob/master/public...
• wccrawford 6y ago
  IMO, the problem isn't the software. It's how humans are using the software. The software itself shouldn't have any control over the student's grades. A person should have to review the flags and actually find some wrongdoing. Not just push 'yes' and walk away.
  • alistairSH 6y ago
    Except that the software is generating "scores" based on facial movement/expressions. Facial recognition/scoring is known to result in racist outcomes (links in article). The software isn't suited to its purpose.
  • klodolph 6y ago
    This is an echo of the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument that has been going around for ages. Let’s say you’re only using the software to flag suspicious behavior, and bringing in humans to make the final decision. What happens when (inevitably) the software disproportionally flags people with dark skin because it is not trained to recognize dark-skinned faces? Or when the software disproportionally flags poor people, or people with families? It means that those groups of people will be targeted by the (human) bureaucracy and tasked with defending themselves, when they’ve done nothing wrong. Humans will inevitably trust the algorithm, they will use the algorithm’s outputs to justify their own biases, and even investigations come with a cost. There’s this meme going around that the “algorithm isn’t biased, it’s the data”, but that argument doesn’t really hold water—machine learning systems, by default, learn to recognize correlations, and correlations in the real world collected with real sensors contain biases. ML, by its nature, picks up and encodes those biases, and you must make an effort to remove them—you can’t just throw an ML algorithm at a pile of data.
    • Terrario 6y ago
      I think this misses the parent’s point. The point is to not let the algorithm make decisions. The human bureaucracy is suppose to be there to determine the quality of the flags and analyze whether there is any discrimination at play. A company that lacks this human element is negligent and should be held responsible. Unless algorithms can be trialed and held accountable, they shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions. Also guns don’t kill people, people do. Otherwise explain to me why it would be okay for certain institutions to be armed but not individuals. If guns are the problem, then no one should have them (including the military/police).
• ege_erdogan 6y ago
  I see online synchronous 1-2 hour exams as a mistaken result of the "let's emulate in-person teaching in a remote setting" mindset. You don't succeed in remote teaching and learning by trying to make it as close as possible to the in-person setup. You have to treat it as an entirely different problem. Consider the synchronous exam. It is a perfect method of grading in-person. It is hard to cheat and all people take the same test in the same place. It is as fair as it can get. In an online setting however, people can face all sort of troubles in a few hour window in their home. Your internet might stop working, neighbor might be making too much noise etc. Everyone takes the exam in a different setting and it is as unequal as it can get. It is also practically impossible to prevent cheating.
  • mshumi 6y ago
    Crazy idea in this space. Eye-tracking will eventually be standard on consumer VR headsets that can be had for $300. As someone following the industry closely, I believe that the Oculus Quest 4 or a device like it will certainly have eye-tracking support. Obviously if one were to take their test in a VR environment with their eye-movements tracked it would be almost impossible to cheat. Eyes also provide a good biometric identifier. Mirrors, screens, exploits, etc can be foiled using software locks, HMDs cameras and imu data. Of course I'm not advocating a testing system like this, but it would put a hard stop to cheating on synchronous exams, enforce some level of standardization, and should be accessible to every student in the 1st world. Understandable privacy and ethics issues with something like this. It is probably better to address why people cheat in the first place and make education less reliant on exams. (continuous low-impact variable feedback vs discrete high-impact fixed feedback)
    • limitedmage 6y ago
      Good luck wearing a VR headset for a full 2 hour exam. I get headaches if I wear one for more than 10 minutes, and the weight is uncomfortable and messes with my hair. More surveillance technology is not the solution.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• swiley 6y ago
  There has to be a point where students will revolt against the abusive behavior of universities in the US right? Or is this just another social pathology that we need to rethink?
  • Hongwei 6y ago
    They can if they stop enrolling and paying tuition. There are plenty of options online for college-style certifications that most employers in my industry (software engineering) would accept. I get that other professional training with certifications would be harder to do online, but those tend to be done in community colleges anyway. The most "abusive" shops are universities offering BS degrees to students swimming in debt.
• motohagiography 6y ago
  Running essays through searches for similarity is one thing, this de-facto remote polygraph is quite another. Polygraphs are bullshit and basically select for submissive behavior, which I suppose is what these institutions are looking to reward, but it is conspicuous that nobody called these surveillance schemes what they truly are: degrading.
• serjester 6y ago
  From the many students I know, I can tell you that cheating is rampant in online learning. The average GPA has gone up 0.3 points at my alma mater. I don't think people understand just how widespread it is. This software isn't ideal but there's no good solutions here short of major rethink of how these classes, and possible all of the college, is structured.
  • ghaff 6y ago
    Certainly I had many take-home exams in college and grad school. (Of course, I had many proctored in-person exams too.) So one solution is to switch to open book take home exams as much as possible. The other frankly is to have an honor code and, at some point, recognize that some people will cheat but they're mostly hurting themselves.
    • andreilys 6y ago
      Scholarships, internships and grad school spots are a scarce resource. Students who cheat can secure a higher GPA with less effort. That effort can be redirected towards looking for internships and improving grad school applications. So I fail to see how cheaters are only “hurting themselves”. Morality aside, if you pursue a cheating strategy your pay-off will be much higher when we consider the scarcity of resources available to students.
      • ghaff 6y ago
        That's why I wrote "mostly." Some reasonable measures to deter casual cheating may well be worthwhile. At some point though you draw a line where you start hurting honest students more than cheaters. You're not going to prevent it 100% absent draconian measures.
      • read_if_gay_ 6y ago
        > Students who cheat can secure a higher GPA with less effort. That effort can be redirected towards looking for internships and improving grad school applications. This is definitely not the reason why most people cheat. > Morality aside, if you pursue a cheating strategy your pay-off will be much higher As with any kind of lie, you will have to cheat more and more to compensate for previous cheating, and eventually your little web of lies will come back and bite you in the ass.
• happynacho 6y ago
  Comp Sci majors are the ones that are definitely beating the system though. Speaking from experience.
  • souprock 6y ago
    Ah yes. Did you use Ghidra, IDA Pro, Binary Ninja, Hopper Disassembler, Radare2/Cutter, or something else? How many bytes did you have to modify? Put it on your resume.
    • scollet 6y ago
      Sounds like intercepting the video buffer in kernel-space would be a good start.
  • avgDev 6y ago
    Software people in general like "hacks". We game hiring process by reading books like "Cracking the coding interview". However, the hiring process is broken but that is a different story. I worked super hard in school, did well and pulled several all nighters. I work at an enterprise now and my algorithm knowledge is useless. I just build enterprise web applications, which is fine. In software any job you take you will be learning new stuff and new way of doing things. I gained much more from classes that focused on building actual working projects instead of strict algorithms and testing. In our AI class we had to pick an AI algo and implement it in a popular game, one of the best experiences in school.
• chriskanan 6y ago
  I just got rid of my exams for my deep learning courses once the pandemic hit. It doesn't make sense to have these traditional exams with remote education.
  • aejnsn 6y ago
    Boom. That’s it. It’s not cheating that’s the problem—that would be an epitome of a red herring. Emulation of a traditional environment with online learning software is not how it was intended to be used, nor is it practical. Even when I was in college, the number of traditional courses serving additional content through Moodle/Blackboard was stupid high. I understand honor system and all that jazz. But really, if the ~15-some athletes in a business 200-level section are going to gather in the library to cheat together...then maybe the quiz should have been delivered traditionally. At least then, I wouldn’t have to hear the half-a-class rant from the professor about what losers the cheaters are.
• sleepysysadmin 6y ago
  In a couple other thread people recommended Grammarly. I'm giving it a try right now. I without question wrote every bit of this text. It's saying I plagiarized. I feel like plagiarism software isn't quite there yet. 1 thing is for sure though. I certainly don't use enough commas.
• jccalhoun 6y ago
  I'm a professor in the humanities so I can write tests that make it harder to cheat than some other fields. I cringe whenever I hear someone using these invasive kinds of software. There has to be a better way than making students install spyware.
  • tomp 6y ago
    > I can write tests that make it harder to cheat than some other fields This might be my prejudice speaking (I studied math) but isn't this basically because grading is that much more subjective? So it would cut both ways, harder to cheat but also less objective / impartial assuming no cheating.
    • raxxorrax 6y ago
      My university does a lot of oral math exams. After failing 3 times you have the option for an oral test as a last chance and people do indeed fail math in large numbers. I was on the other side as an academic assistant for a few days (no role in testing) and I can tell you that oral math exams about algebra can be as hard as you want them to be, especially if you have problems with tests and get nervous. You have to take drugs against that. The prof I had was a bit of a dick but he was really good at measuring how well you understood the concepts and if you ware able to apply them to problems.
    • jccalhoun 6y ago
      Not necessarily. I do a lot of questions that are here is a situation. What concept does this illustrate? Now sure, they can look up the definition of the concepts but they will still need to be able to identify how the concept relates to the situation.
  • ht_th 6y ago
    Sure. Have at most ten to twenty students per teacher. Then the teacher can spend a couple of hours per student to assess their understanding. Unfortunately, in education quantity seems to be prioritized over quality. When you have over 50 students, let alone over 200 hundred, good luck grading authentic open-ended projects or papers in just two weeks. As a result, most tests consists of multiple-choice questions and standard-format open questions. It is unclear to what extent they test students' understanding, and students do become quite proficient test takers, but at least theses tests can be executed given the current constraints of available staff, acceptable rigor, and student expectations. Unfortunately, you cannot move these type of test to an online setting and expect students not to cheat at all. It is too easy to talk to classmates, look at the study materials, or even on the Internet for some hints to answers or even the actual answers. The only option many institutions saw was to move to a draconian proctoring solution because they just lack the means to roll-out anything else given the constraints they have to work with. Ideally, they would re-evaluate their choices regarding quality versus quantity, but because they need the large number of students to stay afloat, nothing meaningful will happen.
• perched_robin 6y ago
  Burn the universities to the ground.
  • justin_oaks 6y ago
    Interesting strategy. What after that?
    • higerordermap 6y ago
      That's a knee jerk reply. But there's a point to that. Democratising education is great for literally every industry except education industry itself. There should be some way to do that.
    • perched_robin 6y ago
      Build a replacement, wait for it to become exploitative, burn it to the ground, repeat.
• parzivalm 6y ago
  The thing that has always frustrated me about anti-cheating/anti-plagiarism software is that it almost always only hurts people that did something by accident or unintentionally. When I took the one kubernetes certification exam as part of an old job, you used software like this and at one point I leaned too close to the screen and the proctor couldn't see my face and that got me flagged. People that want to cheat or game the system will find ways, it isn't hard to do. In undergrad we setup a copy of the code checking software that our department used so that we could share code without it getting flagged as copies. I'm sure there are ways to game these systems too if you are motivated enough. One of the issues is also just academia being so hyper-focused on thinking everyone is there to become an academic which is not the case for the vast majority of people. So these exams and the guidelines for student evaluation is grounded in that expectation instead of the reality.
  • RegnisGnaw 6y ago
    >> People that want to cheat or game the system will find ways, it isn't hard to do. As someone who taught a college, that's a flawed statement. Let me propose this to you. You teach Calculus 1000 and there is an end of term exam. Your normal end of term exam is one where everyone sits in the same room, proctors are looking for cheats, things checked, etc. Instead this year you tell your students that this year it will be a take home exam with the following rules: 1) they have 2 hours to do it during the team home peroid; 2) no cheating by the honor system. Do you think the rate of cheating will be the same? I mean by your logic, it should be.
    • pwinnski 6y ago
      The idea that an honor code is enough is belied by the fact that software like this catches cheaters, no? I mean, we're obviously upset about false positives, and we should be. But I'm presuming that some people are caught who were cheating, and without the software they would have cheated and not been caught. We can suggest that with an honor code in place, maybe some of those cheating students would have not cheated, because... I mean, if they were willing to cheat with software in place, I'm not sure why would have been deterred by an honor code. I think in about 98-99% of cases, people who claim an honor code prevents cheating are deluding themselves. Yeah, if you don't have any way of catching cheaters, then you can pretend you have a 0% cheating rate. But it's pretend. P.S. I'm not speaking for my employer at all.
• supportlocal4h 6y ago
  If a prof needs a final exam to be able to assess a student's proficiency, they are doing it wrong.
  • cipherzero 6y ago
    Not saying you’re wrong, but what are you proposing as an alternative? How should comprehensive knowledge be tested? Weekly homework/projects? P.s. love the user name.
    • nullspace 6y ago
      For my Masters degree, most of my courses were absolutely like this. Our assignments were difficult and heavy. There was no expectation that you should complete them without Google or reference material. In contrast, the "final exams" were either non-existent or extremely easy and account for only 10-20% of the grade, where they existed. I really liked this approach. Make your assignments very difficult. Alternatively, give difficult 10-15 minute quizzes every other week. IMO, it's a much better way of evaluating students.
• TrackerFF 6y ago
  This is, IMO, just lazy professors that didn't bother to make exams for the digital space. Instead, they invested money and resources in digital proctors - with all the invasive pains that come with it. If you can't bother to make a proper exam, don't bother. Rather make the classes pass/fail on project work, or grade the classes on projects / home exams. Trying to bring a 100% replica of the physical exam space into the digital space is just a recipe for disaster.
  • t-writescode 6y ago
    While some of it may be lazy professors, it may also be that professors don't know how to create exams in this new world, or they're not being given the appropriate resources. What do you think it would take to bring educators up to this new standard that is very different?
• hahamrfunnyguy 6y ago
  Using this software sounds idiotic. They're trying to apply methods to in-person learning to distance learning. Instead of focusing on detecting cheating, they should be re-evaluating their grading and teaching methodology so that cheating is unproductive. Prioritize in class participation and essay writing. If tests are needed, they can be timed and open book. Great example of why our educational system isn't all that good. I took a year of Japanese in college. A big part of the grade was memorizing and performing these dialogs. If you didn't remember the dialog word for word, you'd get points off. I wasted a lot of time trying to memorize those stupid things when I could have been acquiring new vocabulary words or studying Kanji. I took a trip to Japan a couple of years go, and did some brushing up for a couple of months before I left. I learned more in those two months than I did in my entire time at school.
• iandanforth 6y ago
  A few points: Their "powerful AI engine" is almost certainly just humans. It might have a few off-the-shelf components like face detection but most of what they claim to do is just so easy to outsource that almost all companies do it. If there is any delay between the system observing a suspect behaviour and the student being told to correct it then they are definitely using humans. An institution using a service like this is a huge red flag. You should take it as an indicator of a low quality administration if not a low quality institution. As an engineering problem this task is hard. Ryan Calo (Prof of Law, UW) once presented a fascinating bit of research on trying to automate something as simple as fining someone for speeding. Given perfect information how do you build the system? If someone exceeds the speed limit for 1 second, do you fine them? If everyone around the person is exceeding the speed limit do you use the same rules? If someone oscillates between just above and just below the speed limit, how many times do you fine them? If someone exceeds the speed limit and stays there does this result in fewer fines? How do you square the code written with the law as written? The problems are so extensive it may be that application of rules like this require human level judgement. Proctoring an exam may turn out to be an AI-complete problem.
  • gruez 6y ago
    >Ryan Calo (Prof of Law, UW) once presented a fascinating bit of research on trying to automate something as simple as fining someone for speeding. [...] Most of the problems you've listed only exist because of expectations caused by inconsistent/lenient enforcement by human police officers. People don't seem to have a problem with strictly enforced rules in finance. eg. "your bank account can't below zero without triggering a overdraft".
    • mcphage 6y ago
      > People don't seem to have a problem with strictly enforced rules in finance. eg. "your bank account can't below zero without triggering a overdraft". I think a lot of people have problems with strictly enforced rules in finance. Especially when banks re-order daily transactions in order to maximize overdraft fees.
• pdkl95 6y ago
  > At the self-described “heart” of the company’s monitoring software is Monitor AI, a “powerful artificial intelligence engine” that collects facial detection data [...] to identify “patterns and anomalies associated with cheating.” > "... people who have some sort of facial disfigurement have special challenges; they might get flagged because their face has an unexpected geometry.” So this company is extrapolating "patterns ... associated with cheating" from facial geometry. This is just phrenology laundered through their "powerful artificial intelligence engine" black box. Predicting behavior from the shape of someone's skull is still bullshit pseudoscience, even if the calipers[1] are replaced with a bunch of linear algebra. [1] http://antiquescientifica.com/phrenology_calipers_George_Combe_on_Wells_bust.jpg http://antiquescientifica.com/phrenology_calipers_George_Com...
  • Balgair 6y ago
    > This is just phrenology ... It's probably worse. I'd bet that in addition to humans with non-'normal' heads, it would also flag the blind, deaf, sufferers of Tourette syndrome, certain muslim women, bearded men, humans of african descent, humans of asian descent, etc. > even if the calipers[1] are replaced with a bunch of linear algebra. I love this line. If your head does not fit the space of eigen-heads, throw an error.
    • MengerSponge 6y ago
      Yup https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/07/1006132/software-algorithms-proctoring-online-tests-ai-ethics/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/07/1006132/software...
    • AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      And the non-neurotypical.
  • throwaway5752 6y ago
    It's clearly just looking for people looking at another computer or otherwise glancing elsewhere before entering answers. It's not phrenology. It may not be effective, either, and I don't want to be put in a position of defending this company. But it shouldn't be interpreted as they analyzing if someone looks like a cheater.
• caymanjim 6y ago
  College students are easy to manipulate because they're young and naive and still used to taking orders from control figures like their parents. They need to realize the power they wield and simply refuse to participate in this intrusive monitoring. They don't have to play the game, and the school can't exist without their tuition.
• primroot 6y ago
  This reminds of what Filtered.AI does. Except that it does it for some sort of automated job interview. When interviewing through them, I had to install a Chrome Plugin that recorded audio, video, and browsing activity at all moments. But I guess they're just trying to fix the software engineer interview process.
  • driverdan 6y ago
    Gross. If someone asked me to install spyware for a job interview I'd blacklist the company as a place I'd never want to work.
    • dghlsakjg 6y ago
      Seconded. Who would want to work at a place that installs surveillance-ware on the personal machine of a prospective employee? If you're technical interview team can't tell that I didn't do technical work myself within about 5 minutes , then there is a lot wrong with your whole organization.
• nlh 6y ago
  I found myself brewing with rage while reading this article. The approach of closely inspecting a student's words & physical actions while taking a test just feels...dated. Ancient. Anachronistic. Embarrassing. In the real world of 2020+, almost everyone has a portable Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in their pocket. Let people use calculators. Heck, let people use Wikipedia! If they copy an incorrect fact from Wikipedia, well, that's their problem and penalize them for that. Education needs to be considered in the context of the world we live in. If you want to test students, then develop ways of TESTING students - move to live oral exams. Written long-form essays. Develop education techniques that USE the tools we're blessed to have around us instead of fearing them. I don't have all the answers as I haven't thought about this deeply enough. But I've got to imagine there are ways of testing learning & knowledge that aren't based on fact memorization & regurgitation or performing calculations in your head that can easily be done on a calculator.
  • MattGaiser 6y ago
    There are, they just cost a heck of a lot more. You can no longer have a course taught for a $3000 adjunct.
  • mercurialshark 6y ago
    > move to live oral exams. Written long-form essays. Yes. The application of principles, concepts and information is not terribly difficult to test in either a timed or take home setting.
    • thaumasiotes 6y ago
      Live oral exams can be an effective method of assessment. They can also be confounded by the testee's charisma. (See: any discussion of programming interviews, which are live oral exams.[1]) They do have the advantage of degrading fairly gracefully from in-person examination to remote examination. They're also tremendously expensive compared to a test given en masse. [1] Oral exams in a school setting would feel much fairer to people than programming interviews do, mainly because you know what to expect on an exam in a class you just took.
• searchableguy 6y ago
  I curious if proactive measures to curb cheating like inthe parent post results in lesser people cheating outside of college environment. Any controlled studies? Are college students more ethical and honest than their non college counterparts?
  • KMag 6y ago
    > results in lesser people cheating outside of college environment What metric are you using to determine which people are "lesser"? Less educated? Less motivated? Less intelligent?
    • searchableguy 6y ago
      Sorry, I meant lesser = fewer.
• kart23 6y ago
  Voice of San Diego has been doing some great reporting. This is yet another example. Profs who use these things are examples of teachers who just don't care enough to revamp their courses to involve more project, critical-thinking assignments, or exams where cheating won't help. They don't want to do the work to adjust the course for remote learning, and just give the course that they always teach, and do whatever it takes to get as close to the in-person exam that they used to have.
  • MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
    This has been my experience in college so far. My technical college I was at before had better policies for online learning and preventing heating by just making you work more so that cheating would just make it harder toward the end.
  • ebiester 6y ago
    What is the hourly rate that you would expect for a professor? Consider that a tenure track professor (ignoring adjuncts) making $60,000 is expected to teach 3-4 classes, write original peer-reviewed research, and perform "service" (which takes the form of helping the university run itself, external speaking events, and advising.) Each individual class takes 15-20 hours a week for a course they haven't taught before (which is common). Some classes require managing a group of Teaching Assistants for classes of 500 people. Other universities may have a teacher responsible for as many as 70 students without a TA. So, that ends up being a 60 hour week. (This is average; I've seen more.) So, without overtime, that ends up at a little more than $22 an hour for a 10 month contract. (The summers, in which they are either paid a small sum for summer classes, are not included. However, that's also when they are expected to research and write and publish, all technically unpaid. If you consider that time as paid, drop the $22 to $20 an hour.) So, when you talk about "not caring enough," consider that they do not get stock options for working another 20 hours a week. Further, a large portion of their job is bringing prestige to the university. That is why their job is based on the output of their research rather than their teaching. As such, in the first 7 years of the job, they are being judged on their publications first and their teaching second. As such, you are upset with a professor because they are only working 60 hours and not dedicating more time to what is a secondary concern for promotion and, for pre-tenured professors, keeping their job. If you want professors to care, you need more lecturers paid the same amount to teach fewer courses. However, that makes university more expensive. (Or, you end up hiring adjuncts making sub-minimum wage for the same workload, sans research.) It's a hard problem that looks easy on the outside.
• lowbloodsugar 6y ago
  Why are we building exams that are only valid if people don't use google? Will google suddenly disappear when I get a job? Modern exams should require me to use google. What we need is a way to have every exam question be unique to each student. If a student google the "how to" and then does it, great! Is it fitting that Vernor Vinge wrote about this in Rainbows End [1]? He was a professor at SDSU. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End
• Sparkyte 6y ago
  I felt like this had to do with the generation of hacking kids in COD matches. Then they realize there are actual real life consequences to cheating.
• MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
  These companies should actively be put out of business. College is garbage as it is. Now theyre actively suppressing people with lower incomes and lesser resources or abilities.
• souprock 6y ago
  At least the online class cheating increases fairness. Now you can cheat without having the money to purchase a bogus disability claim. For many years now, all the well-off schemers have been taking tests with twice as much time as normal. Nobody in academia dares to push back at this fraud, out of fear that they might be pilloried for failure to accommodate. Honest students usually aren't even aware of just how unfair the system is. It affects high school, college admissions tests, and college. The whole system is put at risk by the fraud. Grades become less meaningful because we've added a randomish negative signal. That devalues everything.
  • thotsBgone 6y ago
    I had a lot of mental health issues and I registered with my school's accessibility services. I was surprised I could get extra time on tests, extensions, etc. so easily. Unfortunately, none of those accommodations were even helpful for me. An extension would just make me fall further behind on other work, and I didn't have test anxiety or a disability which would prevent me from taking tests quickly (though I was offered this accommodation anyway). The only accommodation that I took once or twice was having a teacher re-weight marks from a missed assignment to other assignments, which was only good for me if I was going to do well on those other assignments. I think for mental health, the most important things my school did for me weren't even accommodations. They were: letting me reattempt courses any number of times, letting me take a year off without even having to notify them, letting me take a reduced course load, and stuff like that. These things give no advantage to students who utilize them, but can make a world of a difference to students who need them. Without them I'd have failed my degree, but now I'm mentally healthy and I'm going to graduate soon. Anyway, it's shitty that some people abuse accommodations, but most of them don't give them an advantage over other students, and some students do need them, so getting rid of them is not really a solution. The main one that would give an advantage is increased test time (the solution to which is to write exams where students already have plenty of time -- the majority of my profs already do this). As for the whole system being put at risk, I think the whole system is going down the shitter anyway. Why do I need to pay thousands and thousands of dollars a year for an education which could easily be delivered for less than a tenth of that price? Prestige? I don't think universities will survive the modern Internet outside of programs which need hands-on lab experience.
• low_key 6y ago
  I took an online class in 2015 that used Proctorio. Even at that time the proctoring/anti-cheat software was a nightmare. I was semi-accused of cheating because of "anomalies" during one of my tests. It was quickly cleared up by talking to the professor. The software is a privacy disaster and any computer that has had any of this spyware installed should be considered compromised. I kept a separate hard drive and would swap it in to take tests. To fix the problem, grading measures need to be changed to accommodate the new world of online classes rather than trying to shoehorn old test proctoring into a remote space. This software only stops bad cheaters anyway. I'm already imagining the fights I'm going to have with my daughter's schools in the future when they ask us to install this malware.
  • withinboredom 6y ago
    Here’s the thing, if you want to cheat, you’ll find a way to cheat. This won’t stop anyone, it just stops casual cheating at a pretty hefty price. Hell, just reading this article, I thought of various ways by having someone off screen listening to you read aloud and a projector mounted after the test starts, on the ceiling by another person who’s off screen. You could have a kvm switch to a whole different computer, an AI overlaying data on the screen (reading from the video output, and injecting into the video output), or any number of ridiculously complicated setups. It probably won’t catch any serious cheaters.
    • toomuchtodo 6y ago
      Picture in picture monitor with multiple sources. Credit to someone who mentioned this in a previous thread.
    • Anon1096 6y ago
      Most proctoring software that records the student would trivially root out the cheating method you mentioned about reading aloud the questions to someone else. They usually record audio as well, and if the software detects significant microphone input, will flag the test.
      • 6y ago
• at-fates-hands 6y ago
  So many privacy flags on this one, I'm shocked colleges are using this software. Just a few highlights from the article that really stick out: “You have to record your environment, you have to record the whole desk, under the desk, the whole room,” Molina recalled. “And you need to use a mirror to show that you don’t have anything on your keyboard.” On top of that, if the wireless connection was disturbed during an exam, Molina said, students would receive an automatic zero — no excuses. He said he didn’t realize he hadn’t sufficiently shown his notepaper to his webcam, or that his habit of talking through questions aloud would be considered suspicious. “At the beginning of the exam, you leave the area for about one minute without explanation,” Merrill wrote in an email to Molina. She added that it looked like he was using his calculator for problems that did not require a calculation and that he solved certain problems too quickly. As a result, Molina was given an F in the course and his case was submitted to SDSU’s Center for Student Rights and Responsibilities, where he could appeal the decision. Neekoly Solis, an SDSU junior and first-year transfer student, said each test-taker now has to verbally explain each of their calculations to their webcam every time they use their calculators during an exam. Then, she had to show the camera her desk, and underneath her desk, with her bulky desktop computer. She realized she was in a pair of shorts, and her webcam was picking up — and recording — seconds of her bare legs that could be seen by her older male professor. She was creeped out. “You have to do a crotch shot, basically,” said Jason Kelley, associate director of research at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy group based in San Francisco. He recalled watching a tutorial video from another proctoring system called HonorLock, horrified as he watched the video subject do a long pan of their body. Some other unsettling parts about the data their collecting: Respondus’s website states that the default data retention period for Respondus Monitor is five years, but the client can change that. And worse yet, what about the appeal process? Not exactly in the students favor: Molina appealed. But even well into the fall semester and over a month after the accusations were filed, the office had canceled his scheduled meetings twice due to coronavirus-related emergencies. After the third rescheduling, Molina finally had the chance to explain himself. One week later, he received a letter of “no action,” meaning the university would not pursue disciplinary action against him. He forwarded the letter to his business administration professors and requested that he get the grade he deserved. He said he had already emailed the student ombudsman twice, and never received a reply. Merrill finally gave him his grade back, almost two months after he’d received an F in the class. In conclusion, you have a dodgy software program, that's highly invasive to your privacy. It can take months to get your appeal figured out. In the meantime, you're left to twist in the wind. And worst of all, the company keeps your data for five years.
• heimatau 6y ago
  As a current college student (33 yr old). Higher education is just a terrible rite of passage. I could give them tips on HN but who am I kidding? I won't waste my brain power on their problems.
• NikolaeVarius 6y ago
  I wonder if all disciplines have this problem. Most of my engineering higher level classes were open everything not electronic. If you don't know how to tackle the problem, you're not going to finish on time.
  • godelski 6y ago
    This is honestly the better solution. In my upper division physics classes most exams were take home.
  • da_big_ghey 6y ago
    I remember some math classes that did it well: send students home with original assignments to do proofs. I guess it's theoretically open to having someone else do the assignment, but so are lots of other things. Because I could just sit and attack the problems like problems, without massive time pressure and my every action monitored, I enjoyed those assignments and exams. Similarly, in CS classes, I always enjoyed assignments where I got to go write a program to do something. Again, it could be cheated, but so could lots of other things. The fact that some students cheat shouldn't ruin classes for everyone else. Since cheaters do lower the value of a degree, maybe universities should start taking legal action against them instead. Provide a huge disincentive without messing everything up for the majority of students.
    • 542458 6y ago
      “Original assignments” as in everybody has a different assignment? If so, dang that sounds like a huge time investment to create and grade for the prof and TAs. WRT legal consequences for cheating: I mean, you can get kicked out of university. That’s a loss of thousands of dollars invested. And as a TA, if I knew I could be called in to testify in court every time I caught a student cheating... I’d never call it out. I don’t have time for that! And that still wouldn’t change that we’d have to be on the lookout for cheating.
• hacknat 6y ago
  I’m skeptical that you could train an DNN (or any AI) to detect cheating except maybe in browser usage patterns, but recognizing facial patterns!? What data set could they possibly have found to detect such a thing and what proof do they even have that it’s detectable?!
• godelski 6y ago
  I think this illustrates the problems I have with these ML systems. Technology is supposed to make our lives easier. While surveillance may help catch more "bad guys" (clearly something we as a society argue over the definition of) it also causes many a lot of anxiety. One has to question if the added incrimination is worth the cost of anxiety to the public. Personally I do not think this is a good trade because even long before all this surveillance technology I felt safe in society. I believe most people did even in the 50's and 60's. So has the added surveillance really helped decrease crime? Or is it just correlated? (I'm not even convinced it is correlated). As for tests, there is an easier solution to all this. Write your test as if it was a take home. Open notes. You can't stop people from communicating but often these types of exams/assignments it becomes clear who is doing it. In my undergrad all my upper division classes' exams were take home because "I can't test you on anything worthwhile in 2 hours." Honestly, most of us enjoyed these more. We often did the exams in the same room (we had the back of a building that was dedicated as a lounge to the physics students) and no one really cheated. The closest was "hey, I'm stuck on this problem and I know you are finished. Can I just use you as a rubber ducky?" (more like just explaining the problem to the person and the other person saying "uh huh" and no more) It also made me feel like an adult because our professors trusted us. As someone that frequently does poorly in a testing environment I was also surprised that I was able to get much higher scores on these tests despite the added complexity. The simple fact that I could "take a break and come back" was all the piece of mind I needed (or grabbing a beer when I felt frustrated). This also better reflected, in my opinion, what solving difficult problems were like in the real world. I could grab my book, go to the page that I know is helpful, sit and think, take of my shoes, pace, whatever. I was treated like an adult and it felt good.
• bpodgursky 6y ago
  My wife teaches CS (remotely right now) and I feel like a lot of the commenters here don't really understand what "cheating" consists of right now. The common vectors are: - Finding an answer online (on Chegg), and copy-pasting it. For homework, this is super common. Unless you build every assignment from scratch each quarter, there will be an answer available online. - Paying someone to take the exam for you. "Let them use wikipedia" resolves like 0% of the problems people actually run into when teaching remote classes. The problems are when people cruise through a class with 0 actual effort, through a combination of looking up answers online, and getting someone to just sit exams in your place.
• ashtonian 6y ago
  So do the students have any legal recourse here? Seems pretty invasive and I personally would not comply l possible but I'm not sure that would be an option.
• madhadron 6y ago
  For those of us who went to University of Virginia, this seems truly weird. I was allowed to take my exam anywhere I wanted. In physics, a lot of us would just head up to the much more comfortable tables in the physics library to take our exams. If someone walked in wanting to talk, we would say, "Pledge" (that is, we were under pledge not to cheat on the assignment) and they would say "OK" and leave. And then there were the take home, open book, open notes, you have three days to finish this exams...
• ilaksh 6y ago
  I haven't been buried on HN for awhile so I will go ahead and present my opinion. It's clear that the proper execution of anti-cheating is critical to avoiding a situation where the cure is worse than the disease. Having said that, I do think that it is needed and will improve college efficacy. Cheating in college has been an epidemic, with a majority of students surveyed saying they have cheated, and a significant percentage of those saying that it's acceptable. If the courses are too hard or curriculum irrelevant or course loads too high, then those problems should be fixed. Cheating is not the answer.
• qwerty456127 6y ago
  All the "anti-cheating" (spying) software should be outlawed.
• colechristensen 6y ago
  Fuck grades. They were already a problem in universities and this is their final and worst form. University systems have the major problem that a significant portion of students are only there for a degree, and their participation is playing the game in order to get that piece of paper, and the GPA number rating them. The core of this problem is the question “will this be on the exam?” Testing of course can be an important part of learning, but making that the metric by which you decide to hand out degrees substantially damages the value of testing as a teaching tool, and damages the value of a university as a place for research and learning. Another way needs to be found to sort students into degree worthiness. Raising humans for the first quarter of their lives in a dystopian police state is not what anybody should strive for. We need to figure out how to measure people less.
  • schoolornot 6y ago
    Got a BS/MS in CompSci in my twenties when I was immature as a person, now doing online classes for a non-tech major. As an "adult student" the system seems 10x more broken than it was when I was a high school graduate. Being young and tuition-free it was easy to grind through the material just worrying about the next test in the next class. Now, here I am as a tricenarian trying to relax and understand hundreds of pages of anatomy material while everyone else seems to just binge seems so asinine. After 75 pages of reading, exams continue to be a black box. Here I am paying for instruction and the professors can't be bothered to tell me what's important to know for the career let alone the test. I got one teacher to chat off the record and he basically said to "get through it." What a disservice to students. Why are there still weeding-out classes? How many doctors, surgeons, programmers, engineers would there be in the world if it wasn't for these classes? The Montessori education system and the like seem so superior. College should be pass/fail.
    • csa 6y ago
      I agree with a lot of your comment, and I basically think large swathes of education are just fundamentally broken for a variety of unfortunate reasons. That said, I would like to answer this question: > Why are there still weeding-out classes? In majors that are oversubscribed (e.g., pre-med, CS, etc.), these classes weed out the people who like the idea of the major/career more than the actual work involved. Good weeder courses (and I think that these exist) allow later classes in the major path to be more focused on the capable and motivated learners rather than baby-sitting the less-capable and less-motivated. There are two reasons why this is desirable: 1. There is no way that a department could get through the same amount of material if they had to accommodate the less motivated and less capable in all of the courses. 2. Your department will get a reputation in the field for having students who are capable of X, Y, and Z. Typically, if someone can't make it in the weeder classes at their school and they still want to enter that career path, then maybe it's better to go to a less competitive school. This sounds elitist, and maybe it is, but that's the workaround in our current system.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• mensetmanusman 6y ago
  This sounds like a nightmare. Just use all this time we have to give 1:1 verbal exams to test knowledge and gaps.
  • 542458 6y ago
    Then you’re mainly testing oral English skills. Also, in most subjects I could mark an exam in a fifth of the time it took a student to write - whereas with oral exams it takes at least as long as the exam took. Quintupling the load on TAs and profs sounds like a raw deal.
• AbhyudayaSharma 6y ago
  These 'anti-cheat' softwares don't actually prevent cheating. One of my teachers tried to use one called MyPerfectice (thankfully we persuaded her to switch). I think most of these are built without any understanding of the constraints set up by the browser. I don't know about the others but MyPerfectice gives you 4 or 5 window going out of focus events before making your attempt invalid. The funny thing is that they allow students to upload files from their system and allow focus to be lost during that. So if you click the upload button, it opens the OS file selection window and you are then free from all the checks they set up. Open a new window and cheat as much as you like. I'm wondering if it's possible to just do a custom build of Firefox/Chrome that does not trigger these out of focus events. Coming to the video streams, just record a 1-2 minute video of yourself staring into your screen from your webcam and loop it through OBS. No one will notice anything. For MyPerfectice, it is even easier, they have their camera controls exposed as unobfuscated global objects. So you can essentially do something like `camera.stop()` and the webcam light turns off.
• sershe 6y ago
  A fairly typical form of exam in Russia is "written-oral", where students are writing a test together as usual, with everyone given different problems to solve/theorems to prove/things to describe, but the time slot is way larger than required for most people, and in the end when you are done a professor (of which several are usually present) sits with you for 5-15mins to discuss whatever you wrote, maybe asks some extra questions, and gives you a grade on the spot. So, if you copy a perfect solution and have no idea how what you copied works, you are likely to fail anyway; if you just happened to get unlucky with your problems you may still be able to talk your way into a B/C showing you know stuff. This sounds like an absolutely perfect match for zoom, since the problem where there are a bunch of people in the audience constantly discussing some other problems (or problems similar enough you can get a hint) doesn't exist anymore, and you don't need to book a large room for 6 hours so the stragglers could all be talked to by professors.
• dusted 6y ago
  Stupefying how this can be happening when we consider the vast amount of science-fiction depicting these kinds of situations, maybe someone took them for instruction videos instead of warnings..
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