Just to throw it out there, I graduated during the pandemic, and it was so frustrating not only the amount of cheating that occurred, which meant that if you didn't cheat you fell behind; but also how professors responded. I had a few professors who made exams ridiculously hard with strict time limits, just because they expected people to cheat. So the exams were designed in a way they cheating was the only way to get through it, which just encouraged more people to cheat. Not to say every person cheated, or every professor designed tests to be harder, but both groups were larger than you'd expect.
The good news is I think that with classes being in person again things will go relatively back to normal. Honestly I don't think I can fault students who cheated during the pandemic, it was just so abnormal that most people did whatever they had to to cope.
I had an experience like this in Numerical Methods in university years ago.
The exams were incredibly difficult for bad reasons: you had to calculate many iterations of an algorithm by hand. You also had to memorize a bunch of algorithms (rather than understanding how they worked or how to modify them to solve different problems).
The professor also had a "can't do anything about it" attitude, and so the entire class was blatantly cheating as a result, and I got the worst grade of my academic career.
It sort of broke the camel's back for me; I consider our current approach to academics to be fundamentally broken.
It's harder to design exams where people cannot cheat, but it's certainly possible. Randomize the orders of questions on the test. Have multiple versions the same question (e.g. in a math exam, change a 2 to a 4, or a sin to a cos). Now you have unique exams for each student.
Most importantly, design questions that require critical thinking, and allow everyone to use their computers/books/notes/whatever. That's far more representative of real life anyway.
These simple changes would both make cheating very difficult, and result in better learning: memorizing a bunch of crap the day before an exam will have basically no impact in my life. Learning how to reason critically about the subject matter will give me lasting benefits, even if that subject never comes up again.
This ProctorU stuff is just quadrupling down on a fundamentally broken approach and making it much worse.
We had a particularly articulate young man in our graduating class that argued that checking the book is ultimately not cheating in the world of professional CS and software development. Rather, it’s considered being responsible. So why should we be taking tests that treat it as anomalous or cheating?
He convinced one professor, possibly two, but if he had any more luck than that, I wasn’t in those classes with him.
Most of what we do is synthesizing facts into knowledge. But I know from copious personal experience that there is a wide grey area between recalling a fact at will and forgetting it exists entirely. I am fairly good at recalling concepts in general terms. Y might be applicable in this case, but I need to check the details to be sure/explain how.
Which is also why I think banning computers from planning meetings is stupid. You want us to agree to do things without being able to spot check any of our hunches that will drastically effect our estimates? That’s a winning plan /s.
> I had a few professors who made exams ridiculously hard with strict time limits, just because they expected people to cheat. So the exams were designed in a way they cheating was the only way to get through it, which just encouraged more people to cheat.
That’s such a strange response to that expectation. For the class I teach, I made my exams open book, open notes, open internet and gave them a extended time to work on the exam. If they’re gonna cheat, they’re gonna cheat. Don’t fight the tide. But the questions I asked where analysis/synthesis questions that couldn’t simply be looked up, and student performance was on a bell curve with a 80 average (in line with previous years). I think a lot of professors need to embrace the situation and adapt rather than forcing a police state on students during exam times.
> Honestly I don't think I can fault students who cheated during the pandemic, it was just so abnormal that most people did whatever they had to to cope.
Cheating is never OK. Look what that lead to. A few bad apples ruined it for the other students. People have to learn, that their behavior in such a setting does not only affect themselves. In this case it very negatively impacted everyone studying with them.
> it was so frustrating not only the amount of cheating that occurred
Yeah, it's crazy that cheaters are the protagonist of the ban e-proctoring story.
What if the university only admitted students who don't cheat?
How do we know that policy works for real at a place like Caltech?
Academic culture is accommodating, and you feel that way too. But universities must know that cheating harms everyone, it's a losing proposition. The right response should have been to suspend grading.
I graduated in 2000, and cheating was rampant if you knew where to look.
One variety was legal - you’d have a doctors note to get a reasonable accommodation for ADD. In the 90s, it was pretty trivial to do that. Once you had that, you were taking tests in a facility that made cheating very easy (open book) if you were motivated.
Does anyone in academia know if tests are designed on a curve? You can give a test that everyone gets 100% on (assuming they show up) and you can give a test that everyone fails. Is part of creating a test thinking about how many students in your class are capable of scoring A’s, etc or is it just a side effect
Places that take academic honesty seriously tend to find ways to not have cheating happen in the first place. Caltech is notorious for it's take-home exams for instance.
But let's look at the reality of a student at a normal institution or trying to get into college today; it's a series of high stakes exams that decides your future. And a prisoners' dilemma since as soon as someone cheats you have to do it as well just to keep up. This used to be high risk high reward but now, thanks to the pandemic, it suddenly became low risk high reward. No wonders everyone is doing it.
Really, it's a great equalizer. Pre-Pandemic, it was a common strategy to get "diagnosed" with ADHD to get extra time during exams. But for that you needed well connected parents. Now everyone can cheat.
> Honestly I don't think I can fault students who cheated during the pandemic, it was just so abnormal that most people did whatever they had to to cope.
I beg to differ. Saying that dishonesty is acceptable in certain scenarios will only motivate them to further partake in bad acts. In extreme cases, the child will end up as a criminal.
We employed the method of mixing the order of questions, not giving question titles, and having a pool of subtly different questions (a negation or a different constant slipped in) in order to vastly increase the amount of necessary communication to collaborate.
We had the students turn on their webcams just to discourage them sitting in the same room, which basically would negate our former efforts. Neither did we flag any behavior nor did we record anything or used some automatic software.
I believe that worked quite nicely. A few cheaters were easily spotted when they had the wrong constants in their answer.
I understand that not every course and exam style is suitable for that. But for our databases course, it was applicable.
I think that this was not much more invasive than a traditional exam. Anything more, like watching the screen, or having audio, would make me feel uncomfortable.
Especially at universities I don't see the reason for invasive e-proctoring.
When I was studying (physics, early 2000s in Germany), we didn't even have a honor system, we had the assumption that everybody is there to learn something. If you cheat, you harm yourself.
Progress was assessed by weekly excercise sheets where you were encouraged to work together with others, and to learn how to use the library to find solutions. After each semester there would be a test for each course, and you would get a certificate if passed. Attendence to lectures was usually not checked. The tests were "closed" and watched, but if you were determined you could probably have easily cheated. Anyway regular cheaters would have failed miserably at the latest in the oral exams or the lab courses.
I think a major function of universities is to teach people to be independent and responsible, and if we school-ize them we loose a lot.
I teached a C class during coronavirus lockdown in France and I also did something of the sort (having different question per student, mixing their order, etc).
But I think, most importantly, I put a lot of emphasis on group work & home work.
This has also its own issues. I like to do group homework because I believe that in the real world, you rarely work alone, and group work allow to have more fun project than what you can do in a 1-2h exam. On the other hand, I know some student hate it because there is always a slacker in every group. And home work is also an issue because not every student has time to work outside of school sadly. I try to give time during the classes for them to work on their homework but it is not all the time possible (limited number of hour for the whole course).
Overall, I hate grading and exams, I consider that my job is teaching, not grading, but this doesn't really work in the real world sadly.
This semester all my exams are open note, no proctoring. I think it is harder for professors to write a good exam this way (they need to make the questions things that test understanding instead of just recall.) I’m certainly doing way better with this method, but I think I am still learning the subject just as well as I would in the “old” method of stressful proctoring and memorization.
It seems like with software, you could easily write math questions with different inputs, as you suggest (in fact, our homework software already did that for math last semester), but it seems that those tools are not built into the testing software so much. It definitely seems like a solvable issue though!
>We employed the method of mixing the order of questions, not giving question titles, and having a pool of subtly different questions (a negation or a different constant slipped in)
What an awful burden to put on the shoulders of the already overworked and underpaid professors.
Imagine a business that sells deliverable medical testing kits. This business is the best at what they do; they sell more kits than any other organization, they cost less, they're delivered faster, and are superior in any way, shape, KPI, or form imaginable to traditional alternatives. The only issue being that each kit is in fact a bloodletting kit, and their intended use is to inform you which of your four humours is out of balance.
I'm of the opinion that e-proctoring, whatever its privacy concerns, is fundamentally an exercise in "doing the wrong thing faster". Our exams are a poor reflection of student ability. Our exams have no bearing on actual proficiency in the subject matter. Our exams are ineffectual at catching cheaters. Leaving aside any discussion of privacy, e-proctoring (and traditional proctoring) fails to accomplish its fundamental goals.
To automate these exams, to make them ever-more scalable and easier to distribute, is not a victory. We've merely perpetuated a flawed system.
If we want a meaningful assessment of student ability then we need to use better methods. Dethrone exams from our curriculum. Leverage project-based assessments. Use oral exams where feasible. Replace the infinitely looping lecture halls with recorded videos and open-source textbooks. Use the recovered instructor time for something meaningful. This is not a Gordian knot. It can be solved with a little courage and a little pragmatism.
I've been saying this for years, but academia is filled with stupid administrators who are incapable of evolving the state of teaching / learning because their salary depends on having administrative bloat.
I can see why universities want to use a system like this.
A friend of mine is a University lecturer for physics and one of his students gave him an invite to the discord channel where half his students are in there sharing all the answers during the final exam.
He basically told me there is nothing he can do about it.
He talked to the head of department and they basically said if you have proof of specific people cheating then they can escalate it for those people but short of that, nothing can be done.
Not that I’m saying these systems are great either. But I really don’t know how exams in the current form can be conducted remotely without endemic cheating.
We tested a couple eproctoring products last year while we geared up to move every exam online.
We disliked them on ethical grounds, but also as ultimately unpractical.
I had also a bad feeling about the vendors, there was a strong whiff of "bad used car salesmanship" in the whole interaction.
I also felt there was a correlation between the push for these tools and bad or antiquated teaching methods.
Then to our relief the education authorities in our region straight banned the practice so we just drew up a document with various ideas about how to go about online assessment in a humane and reasonable way and we went through thousands of online exams with very few incidents.
When I was TAing last year we had to proctor the students via zoom (trust me its not fun for anyone). Quite frankly I found different professors approached things in different ways. All the exams were made open book, because its impossible to figure out if people are looking at their notes.
One of the profs decided to make it impossible to cheat by basically making the exam so hard that even the A+ students would have a hard time solving it. This worked well in preventing cheating because for the A+ students to collaborate with others they would need spare time. On the other hand it left lot of students very demoralized.
Some of the other profs came up with question randomization schemes. So the assesment tool would shuffle questions for different students. People were still on discord channels but to not much effect. Of course this required that the professors (or the TAs) were conversant with basic programming skills.
For humanities oriented assessments however, I know most of the profs chose to do things via project work (it's a bit hard to cheat when writing essays. You can't possibly have the same argument as someone else so...)
One thing I can't help but wonder is that I realized when we moved things online we missed out a lot on student interaction. Students were generally far more aggressive for their own grades, often at the cost of other students. Furthermore, I found students were far more ready to abuse the teaching staff than when we were physically there. Conversely, teaching staff was far more strict and stressed out than before. I can't help but wonder if the same courses were conducted face to face whether there would be more kindness all round.
I think making the exam really hard is more likely to backfire and push people to cheat. One of the main drivers of cheating is the perception of unfairness. The time limitation is not really an obstacle if you're organised, just divide and conquer doing a subset of the questions each.
> For humanities oriented assessments however, I know most of the profs chose to do things via project work (it's a bit hard to cheat when writing essays…)
This is true of copying and collusion generally, but not of commissioning unique work from an essay mill, which is shockingly prevalent in humanities subjects for this very reason. I am aware of no effective defence against this other than in-person exams or oral vivas. I’m glad I’m not a humanities lecturer right now.
I was recently sponsored by my employer to do a professional certification which involved an online e-proctored exam. I was asked to install the e-proctoring software on my personal computer, because corporate security policy does not allow unvetted 3rd party software onto company devices. I told my employer that's my policy too, and that I would need to be supplied with a separate laptop if they wanted me to take the exam. They did.
I think if universities want to mandate use of e-proctoring software, they need to provide temporary/burner devices too.
I think most people couldn't care less about installing software on their PC. You can always dual boot and create a partition for proctored exams and wipe it (which isn't 100% the same but pretty close)
The issue is the fact that I have my camera on and there are people who I do not know who can see me and my room. I don't know how this information is being stored and who is seeing it.
The (almost) only problem that's left is the requirement of having the webcam on.
Regardless of the client-side software that you can't trust, there are also third-party servers that will store all the recordings with personal information for a potentially long time, which is unacceptable and isn't fixable by temporary hardware (as we don't have a temporary face).
Me and my roommate are first year undergraduate students. We do different bachelors; I have taken all my tests this year with online proctoring, my roommate has had all his tests without online proctoring.
The proctoring process is actually pretty simple: I have a Google Chrome extension installed that I enable when I have to take an exam. It takes 5 extra minutes before the exam: I have to show my identification, the materials I'm using on my desk, my ears to check whether I'm using wireless earphones, and do a quick sweep around the room. It records my screen, my webcam, and my microphone. Of course, the system is not fool proof (I've heard some students use post-its on their display), but communicating with other students becomes nearly impossible.
My roommate is actually jealous of my proctoring. He does not cheat, but knows most others in his year do. There are groups of students who meet up and take exams with each other. As a result, some of his peers consistently get higher grades, while my roommate clearly put in more effort and is more capable of achieving a high grade on his own. Because the barrier to cheating is so low, it almost becomes a requirement to cheat if you want to achieve grades that are high relative to your peers.
I do not believe proctoring is a breach of my privacy. Google Chrome's sandbox is good at explaining what information the extension is requesting, and when it is turned on. Chrome's battle-tested sandboxing makes me confident that the extension is not snooping through my files, for example. It only sees my screen. I can hide things I do not want the online proctor to see before the exam starts. Similarly with my room, you can hide everything that would breach your privacy before the exam starts. Of course, online proctoring is invasive, but I believe students should think more carefully about the dilemma our teachers are facing. Lack of online proctoring discourages smart students, discourages learning, and hurts the reputation of the university in the long term with unreasonable diploma's. This pandemic requires flexibility from everyone, and simply crying "privacy" without considering both sides is short-sighted. The data recorded for online proctoring is reasonable, and does not bring us closer to any kind of "big brother" scenario.
> Similarly with my room, you can hide everything that would breach your privacy before the exam starts.
The need to hide things is itself an effect of privacy having been breached. Privacy isn't just to keep information secret, but also to provide a space in which you can be comfortable because it is your own space. Needing to hide things away is a reaction to privacy being breached, not a way to preserve privacy.
College is a game. If you arent cheating, you really dont care about your gpa and waste too much time in school. Those students that cheat and get away with it are actually much wiser than your friend seeing as they save way more time.
I took a course recently and the final exam had this kind of eproctoring setup where I would have to install proprietary software, show the examiner around my room, under my desk and so on.
An adjacent issue, not from a privacy standpoint, but from an "inappropriate use of tech" standpoint, is anti-plagiarism software.
A relative of mine recently took an English course, and constantly had to lobby for re-evaluation of low grades caused by false positives with Turnitin[1].
The issues were varied, but the most frustrating one was that passages in her paper that were quoted and footnoted were marked as "sourced from the internet". Turns out that would happen with any passage quoted from a book that someone put on the internet, somewhere.
Of course, instructors are supposed to manually review for this sort of thing, but it's such a basic miss. One that's going to get worse over time. People put existing source material on the internet, and it gets indexed.
I may not be neurotypical, but surely I'm not the only one having a hard time not parsing the domain name as "Bane Proctoring", which admittedly sounds rather ominous.
Recent gatech OMSCS graduate here. I fail to recognize any real issue with proctoring. I have used proctortrack and honorlock.
* proctoring software can be installed before an exam and uninstalled afterwards. It doesn’t need to stay on your pc/browser, and its activation is very obvious. I have no info about permanent security issues caused by such software.
* what proctoring does is mostly recording video and audio (possibly with room scans at the beginning ) and uploading it to a remote server for later verification. Then, such footage is automatically scanned for anomalies. The teacher can then check what happened in flagged content parts and choose what to do. The system does not impose a “cheater” label by itself.
* proctoring systems don’t force a closed book approach. I took open book exams where the only enforcement was “be alone and no collaboration with other people during the exam”.
It seems that some people are concerned with some very specific details of some implementations, or with shitty teachers that say some people cheated just because they were flagged for whatever reason.
Some things that happened to me and I still passed the exam:
* a coworker accidentally entered the room where I was taking the exam and I had to talk with him to send him away.
* I had to change my position since I had setup my laptop in a way that was unbearable for a many-hours exam, and I briefly exited the webcam view.
I contacted the teachers when this happened and I got no issue at all.
Of course some teachers happened to be silly, at the beginning of the pandemics: I heard things like “no drinking, no eating, no restroom” for 4 hours exams. Blame the people, not the software.
I agree that these e-proctoring measures seem draconian, but the flip side of this is absolutely RAMPANT cheating at universities. I don’t know what kind of fair system lies between these two issues.
Also, the domain is poorly chosen, “Bane Proctoring” sounds like a particularly terrifying proctoring service.
How I am hacking my university exams.
- installed a virtual machine
- renamed reg keys values to hide drivers name
- use vm hardner etc.
- on host machine installed charles to get response(html) of the proctor website
- wrote a python script that takes in response html and outputs google search result for all the questions at once
I got lucky and University hosted a mock test through which i was able to grab the whole proctor website
The proctor software dev. Didn’t obscure the JS
Found so many vulnerabilities that led me to go full god mode.
I can get questions paper 60min before the exam starts.
> A federally-funded study found that even the best facial recognition algorithms fail to work on Black and brown people, trans and non-binary people, as well as children and women in general.
I assume it is black and brown trans and non-binary people. I don't see an algorithm fail because someone identifies as anything. However, why even mention it here, in this context? It makes the people behind this sound ridiculous.
Aside from the technical difficulties with image recognition on BPoC which make this sort of tech a non-starter, I think universities and schools need to (finally) find a way to assess people that does not involve anything that can be cheated by having a book open next do the computer. Projects and papers and weekly problem sets to solve are a way better way to assess people.
Amazon requires you show ID and have a camera on for their online peogramming screening.
I chose to not enable my laptop webcam and to instead apply elsewhere, mostly from self respect.
In paying an institute for education i doubt students have a similar luxury. I hope that the EU might enforce privacy similar to the move against cookies. Likewise i would love to see restrictions that prohibit facial recognition in private businesses without consent
I wonder to what degree is the cheating epidemics rooted in the fact that we have made a college title something of a Golden Calf. Or at least Bronze Calf with a thin gold finishing. (Even idol vendors cheat...)
Too many people feel the push to have a degree even if their capabilities (not just raw intelligence, but things like grit) aren't on the necessary level. Then they resort to cheating.
Important to suss out the two issues, because they are in conflict:
1) EProctoring is bad when it does not work as intended (racism, getting people wrong, etc)
2) EProctoring is bad when it works exactly as intended.
The second is the bigger issue, IMHO. I refuse to use it categorically. We teachers need to learn to adapt to the current world. This means understanding that there is very little use for this kind of testing in general. Very few situations in life require rote memorization in a time sensitive environment where you can't talk to people or use the internet. Teachers, teach better.
How are you supposed to assess whether a student has learned quantum mechanics, or chemistry, or calculus if any questions you ask them they can simply contact another student for help, or get someone to do it for them on sites like Chegg? Short of giving an individualized oral exam, which is not feasible for anything but tiny classes, proctored exams are necessary for assessment in such classes. This has nothing to do with memorization or time pressures, and everything to do with making sure the student is the one who actually did the work. In an ideal world one could trust students to do take-home exams on their own, but I’ve yet to be at a university where undergraduates did not take advantage of such trust…
The banning of such a tool is a good start. One could also think about creation of requirements for tools to protect student privacy in the future that goes beyond a specific tool or software.
[+] [-] TravisHusky|4 years ago|reply
The good news is I think that with classes being in person again things will go relatively back to normal. Honestly I don't think I can fault students who cheated during the pandemic, it was just so abnormal that most people did whatever they had to to cope.
[+] [-] cowpig|4 years ago|reply
The exams were incredibly difficult for bad reasons: you had to calculate many iterations of an algorithm by hand. You also had to memorize a bunch of algorithms (rather than understanding how they worked or how to modify them to solve different problems).
The professor also had a "can't do anything about it" attitude, and so the entire class was blatantly cheating as a result, and I got the worst grade of my academic career.
It sort of broke the camel's back for me; I consider our current approach to academics to be fundamentally broken.
It's harder to design exams where people cannot cheat, but it's certainly possible. Randomize the orders of questions on the test. Have multiple versions the same question (e.g. in a math exam, change a 2 to a 4, or a sin to a cos). Now you have unique exams for each student.
Most importantly, design questions that require critical thinking, and allow everyone to use their computers/books/notes/whatever. That's far more representative of real life anyway.
These simple changes would both make cheating very difficult, and result in better learning: memorizing a bunch of crap the day before an exam will have basically no impact in my life. Learning how to reason critically about the subject matter will give me lasting benefits, even if that subject never comes up again.
This ProctorU stuff is just quadrupling down on a fundamentally broken approach and making it much worse.
[+] [-] hinkley|4 years ago|reply
He convinced one professor, possibly two, but if he had any more luck than that, I wasn’t in those classes with him.
Most of what we do is synthesizing facts into knowledge. But I know from copious personal experience that there is a wide grey area between recalling a fact at will and forgetting it exists entirely. I am fairly good at recalling concepts in general terms. Y might be applicable in this case, but I need to check the details to be sure/explain how.
Which is also why I think banning computers from planning meetings is stupid. You want us to agree to do things without being able to spot check any of our hunches that will drastically effect our estimates? That’s a winning plan /s.
[+] [-] ModernMech|4 years ago|reply
That’s such a strange response to that expectation. For the class I teach, I made my exams open book, open notes, open internet and gave them a extended time to work on the exam. If they’re gonna cheat, they’re gonna cheat. Don’t fight the tide. But the questions I asked where analysis/synthesis questions that couldn’t simply be looked up, and student performance was on a bell curve with a 80 average (in line with previous years). I think a lot of professors need to embrace the situation and adapt rather than forcing a police state on students during exam times.
[+] [-] zelphirkalt|4 years ago|reply
Cheating is never OK. Look what that lead to. A few bad apples ruined it for the other students. People have to learn, that their behavior in such a setting does not only affect themselves. In this case it very negatively impacted everyone studying with them.
[+] [-] deregulateMed|4 years ago|reply
Their solution was to let us use whatever we wanted except other students. Cellphones, textbooks, laptop, Internet.
You had 2 hours to answer 2 or 3 questions, it was definitely reasonable if you studied... But the questions were insane.
You know how homework would be assigned 1-50 odds? These were like the problems 74 and 76, 1/4 page long and difficult, multiple parts.
That seems as similar as engineering school got to the real would outside our sophomore and senior design projects.
[+] [-] an_opabinia|4 years ago|reply
Yeah, it's crazy that cheaters are the protagonist of the ban e-proctoring story.
What if the university only admitted students who don't cheat?
How do we know that policy works for real at a place like Caltech?
Academic culture is accommodating, and you feel that way too. But universities must know that cheating harms everyone, it's a losing proposition. The right response should have been to suspend grading.
[+] [-] Spooky23|4 years ago|reply
One variety was legal - you’d have a doctors note to get a reasonable accommodation for ADD. In the 90s, it was pretty trivial to do that. Once you had that, you were taking tests in a facility that made cheating very easy (open book) if you were motivated.
[+] [-] tppiotrowski|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 908B64B197|4 years ago|reply
But let's look at the reality of a student at a normal institution or trying to get into college today; it's a series of high stakes exams that decides your future. And a prisoners' dilemma since as soon as someone cheats you have to do it as well just to keep up. This used to be high risk high reward but now, thanks to the pandemic, it suddenly became low risk high reward. No wonders everyone is doing it.
Really, it's a great equalizer. Pre-Pandemic, it was a common strategy to get "diagnosed" with ADHD to get extra time during exams. But for that you needed well connected parents. Now everyone can cheat.
[+] [-] ridiculous_leke|4 years ago|reply
I beg to differ. Saying that dishonesty is acceptable in certain scenarios will only motivate them to further partake in bad acts. In extreme cases, the child will end up as a criminal.
[+] [-] fddddd|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] maweki|4 years ago|reply
We had the students turn on their webcams just to discourage them sitting in the same room, which basically would negate our former efforts. Neither did we flag any behavior nor did we record anything or used some automatic software.
I believe that worked quite nicely. A few cheaters were easily spotted when they had the wrong constants in their answer.
I understand that not every course and exam style is suitable for that. But for our databases course, it was applicable.
I think that this was not much more invasive than a traditional exam. Anything more, like watching the screen, or having audio, would make me feel uncomfortable.
[+] [-] captainmuon|4 years ago|reply
When I was studying (physics, early 2000s in Germany), we didn't even have a honor system, we had the assumption that everybody is there to learn something. If you cheat, you harm yourself.
Progress was assessed by weekly excercise sheets where you were encouraged to work together with others, and to learn how to use the library to find solutions. After each semester there would be a test for each course, and you would get a certificate if passed. Attendence to lectures was usually not checked. The tests were "closed" and watched, but if you were determined you could probably have easily cheated. Anyway regular cheaters would have failed miserably at the latest in the oral exams or the lab courses.
I think a major function of universities is to teach people to be independent and responsible, and if we school-ize them we loose a lot.
[+] [-] pfortuny|4 years ago|reply
Same results as always. Exactly the same.
Someone will have cheated. Well, as always: I am sure people cheat at my exams as they do at any other.
I do not repent and I do not think I would do otherwise.
*However*: I DID spend a lot of time preparing materials, attending tutorials, replying to emails, correcting my lecture notes, recording videos...
I honestly think my students acted in accordance to my attitude: if you are honest, we are going to be as well.
[+] [-] maeln|4 years ago|reply
But I think, most importantly, I put a lot of emphasis on group work & home work. This has also its own issues. I like to do group homework because I believe that in the real world, you rarely work alone, and group work allow to have more fun project than what you can do in a 1-2h exam. On the other hand, I know some student hate it because there is always a slacker in every group. And home work is also an issue because not every student has time to work outside of school sadly. I try to give time during the classes for them to work on their homework but it is not all the time possible (limited number of hour for the whole course).
Overall, I hate grading and exams, I consider that my job is teaching, not grading, but this doesn't really work in the real world sadly.
[+] [-] notenoughhorses|4 years ago|reply
It seems like with software, you could easily write math questions with different inputs, as you suggest (in fact, our homework software already did that for math last semester), but it seems that those tools are not built into the testing software so much. It definitely seems like a solvable issue though!
[+] [-] undfg|4 years ago|reply
What an awful burden to put on the shoulders of the already overworked and underpaid professors.
[+] [-] poplarstand|4 years ago|reply
I'm of the opinion that e-proctoring, whatever its privacy concerns, is fundamentally an exercise in "doing the wrong thing faster". Our exams are a poor reflection of student ability. Our exams have no bearing on actual proficiency in the subject matter. Our exams are ineffectual at catching cheaters. Leaving aside any discussion of privacy, e-proctoring (and traditional proctoring) fails to accomplish its fundamental goals.
To automate these exams, to make them ever-more scalable and easier to distribute, is not a victory. We've merely perpetuated a flawed system.
If we want a meaningful assessment of student ability then we need to use better methods. Dethrone exams from our curriculum. Leverage project-based assessments. Use oral exams where feasible. Replace the infinitely looping lecture halls with recorded videos and open-source textbooks. Use the recovered instructor time for something meaningful. This is not a Gordian knot. It can be solved with a little courage and a little pragmatism.
[+] [-] DreamScatter|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Negitivefrags|4 years ago|reply
A friend of mine is a University lecturer for physics and one of his students gave him an invite to the discord channel where half his students are in there sharing all the answers during the final exam.
He basically told me there is nothing he can do about it.
He talked to the head of department and they basically said if you have proof of specific people cheating then they can escalate it for those people but short of that, nothing can be done.
Not that I’m saying these systems are great either. But I really don’t know how exams in the current form can be conducted remotely without endemic cheating.
[+] [-] fcatalan|4 years ago|reply
Then to our relief the education authorities in our region straight banned the practice so we just drew up a document with various ideas about how to go about online assessment in a humane and reasonable way and we went through thousands of online exams with very few incidents.
[+] [-] accurrent|4 years ago|reply
One of the profs decided to make it impossible to cheat by basically making the exam so hard that even the A+ students would have a hard time solving it. This worked well in preventing cheating because for the A+ students to collaborate with others they would need spare time. On the other hand it left lot of students very demoralized.
Some of the other profs came up with question randomization schemes. So the assesment tool would shuffle questions for different students. People were still on discord channels but to not much effect. Of course this required that the professors (or the TAs) were conversant with basic programming skills.
For humanities oriented assessments however, I know most of the profs chose to do things via project work (it's a bit hard to cheat when writing essays. You can't possibly have the same argument as someone else so...)
One thing I can't help but wonder is that I realized when we moved things online we missed out a lot on student interaction. Students were generally far more aggressive for their own grades, often at the cost of other students. Furthermore, I found students were far more ready to abuse the teaching staff than when we were physically there. Conversely, teaching staff was far more strict and stressed out than before. I can't help but wonder if the same courses were conducted face to face whether there would be more kindness all round.
[+] [-] mkl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noodlesUK|4 years ago|reply
This is true of copying and collusion generally, but not of commissioning unique work from an essay mill, which is shockingly prevalent in humanities subjects for this very reason. I am aware of no effective defence against this other than in-person exams or oral vivas. I’m glad I’m not a humanities lecturer right now.
[+] [-] jl6|4 years ago|reply
I think if universities want to mandate use of e-proctoring software, they need to provide temporary/burner devices too.
[+] [-] MisterSandman|4 years ago|reply
The issue is the fact that I have my camera on and there are people who I do not know who can see me and my room. I don't know how this information is being stored and who is seeing it.
[+] [-] pastech|4 years ago|reply
Regardless of the client-side software that you can't trust, there are also third-party servers that will store all the recordings with personal information for a potentially long time, which is unacceptable and isn't fixable by temporary hardware (as we don't have a temporary face).
[+] [-] mvanaltvorst|4 years ago|reply
The proctoring process is actually pretty simple: I have a Google Chrome extension installed that I enable when I have to take an exam. It takes 5 extra minutes before the exam: I have to show my identification, the materials I'm using on my desk, my ears to check whether I'm using wireless earphones, and do a quick sweep around the room. It records my screen, my webcam, and my microphone. Of course, the system is not fool proof (I've heard some students use post-its on their display), but communicating with other students becomes nearly impossible.
My roommate is actually jealous of my proctoring. He does not cheat, but knows most others in his year do. There are groups of students who meet up and take exams with each other. As a result, some of his peers consistently get higher grades, while my roommate clearly put in more effort and is more capable of achieving a high grade on his own. Because the barrier to cheating is so low, it almost becomes a requirement to cheat if you want to achieve grades that are high relative to your peers.
I do not believe proctoring is a breach of my privacy. Google Chrome's sandbox is good at explaining what information the extension is requesting, and when it is turned on. Chrome's battle-tested sandboxing makes me confident that the extension is not snooping through my files, for example. It only sees my screen. I can hide things I do not want the online proctor to see before the exam starts. Similarly with my room, you can hide everything that would breach your privacy before the exam starts. Of course, online proctoring is invasive, but I believe students should think more carefully about the dilemma our teachers are facing. Lack of online proctoring discourages smart students, discourages learning, and hurts the reputation of the university in the long term with unreasonable diploma's. This pandemic requires flexibility from everyone, and simply crying "privacy" without considering both sides is short-sighted. The data recorded for online proctoring is reasonable, and does not bring us closer to any kind of "big brother" scenario.
[+] [-] MereInterest|4 years ago|reply
The need to hide things is itself an effect of privacy having been breached. Privacy isn't just to keep information secret, but also to provide a space in which you can be comfortable because it is your own space. Needing to hide things away is a reaction to privacy being breached, not a way to preserve privacy.
[+] [-] mkl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MeinBlutIstBlau|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hrnnnnnn|4 years ago|reply
I did not take the exam.
[+] [-] tyingq|4 years ago|reply
A relative of mine recently took an English course, and constantly had to lobby for re-evaluation of low grades caused by false positives with Turnitin[1].
The issues were varied, but the most frustrating one was that passages in her paper that were quoted and footnoted were marked as "sourced from the internet". Turns out that would happen with any passage quoted from a book that someone put on the internet, somewhere.
Of course, instructors are supposed to manually review for this sort of thing, but it's such a basic miss. One that's going to get worse over time. People put existing source material on the internet, and it gets indexed.
Also, see this example from Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/h731k/thank_god_for_tu... Argh.
[1] https://www.turnitin.com/
[+] [-] LysPJ|4 years ago|reply
[...] a form of exam proctoring which involves monitoring student behaviour during exams administered electronically [...]
[+] [-] ShroudedNight|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alanfranz|4 years ago|reply
* proctoring software can be installed before an exam and uninstalled afterwards. It doesn’t need to stay on your pc/browser, and its activation is very obvious. I have no info about permanent security issues caused by such software.
* what proctoring does is mostly recording video and audio (possibly with room scans at the beginning ) and uploading it to a remote server for later verification. Then, such footage is automatically scanned for anomalies. The teacher can then check what happened in flagged content parts and choose what to do. The system does not impose a “cheater” label by itself.
* proctoring systems don’t force a closed book approach. I took open book exams where the only enforcement was “be alone and no collaboration with other people during the exam”.
It seems that some people are concerned with some very specific details of some implementations, or with shitty teachers that say some people cheated just because they were flagged for whatever reason.
Some things that happened to me and I still passed the exam:
* a coworker accidentally entered the room where I was taking the exam and I had to talk with him to send him away.
* I had to change my position since I had setup my laptop in a way that was unbearable for a many-hours exam, and I briefly exited the webcam view.
I contacted the teachers when this happened and I got no issue at all.
Of course some teachers happened to be silly, at the beginning of the pandemics: I heard things like “no drinking, no eating, no restroom” for 4 hours exams. Blame the people, not the software.
[+] [-] spoonjim|4 years ago|reply
Also, the domain is poorly chosen, “Bane Proctoring” sounds like a particularly terrifying proctoring service.
[+] [-] raverpundit|4 years ago|reply
I got lucky and University hosted a mock test through which i was able to grab the whole proctor website The proctor software dev. Didn’t obscure the JS Found so many vulnerabilities that led me to go full god mode. I can get questions paper 60min before the exam starts.
[+] [-] dna_polymerase|4 years ago|reply
I assume it is black and brown trans and non-binary people. I don't see an algorithm fail because someone identifies as anything. However, why even mention it here, in this context? It makes the people behind this sound ridiculous.
Aside from the technical difficulties with image recognition on BPoC which make this sort of tech a non-starter, I think universities and schools need to (finally) find a way to assess people that does not involve anything that can be cheated by having a book open next do the computer. Projects and papers and weekly problem sets to solve are a way better way to assess people.
[+] [-] erhk|4 years ago|reply
I chose to not enable my laptop webcam and to instead apply elsewhere, mostly from self respect.
In paying an institute for education i doubt students have a similar luxury. I hope that the EU might enforce privacy similar to the move against cookies. Likewise i would love to see restrictions that prohibit facial recognition in private businesses without consent
[+] [-] inglor_cz|4 years ago|reply
Too many people feel the push to have a degree even if their capabilities (not just raw intelligence, but things like grit) aren't on the necessary level. Then they resort to cheating.
[+] [-] jrm4|4 years ago|reply
1) EProctoring is bad when it does not work as intended (racism, getting people wrong, etc)
2) EProctoring is bad when it works exactly as intended.
The second is the bigger issue, IMHO. I refuse to use it categorically. We teachers need to learn to adapt to the current world. This means understanding that there is very little use for this kind of testing in general. Very few situations in life require rote memorization in a time sensitive environment where you can't talk to people or use the internet. Teachers, teach better.
[+] [-] krull10|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tchalla|4 years ago|reply