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A comment on College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software. Parent comment

Re:College students are learning hard lessons about anti-che... by dghlsakjg on Monday November 30, 2020 @06:48PM (#25260561)
If someone can figure out how to cheat on an exam where each answer depends on the previous, and the original seed is unique to each student, wouldn't it show a pretty thorough mastery of the subject matter?

I think the larger point is that it is fairly easy in any subject to design a test that is very hard to cheat on. It is much harder to find the resources in modern education to grade that test since each submission is likely unique.

Tests that are easy to grade (like multiple choice), tend to be tests that are easy to cheat....

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Re:College students are learning hard lessons about anti-che... by Tainnor on Monday November 30, 2020 @07:59PM (#25261038)
How do you propose that this should work e.g. in proof-based maths courses? You can't just tweak a theorem to prove by the value of some "unique seed", the theorem might become wrong.

It's true that you usually can't cheat your way through such an exam provided you actually write the answer yourself, but in a take-home situation you can always ask someone else to solve it for you.

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Re:College students are learning hard lessons about anti-che... by sudosysgen on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @02:06AM (#25263101)
You do what my teachers do and have unique problem generation software.
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Re:College students are learning hard lessons about anti-che... by Tainnor on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @06:10PM (#25271280)
what? how does that work?
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Re:College students are learning hard lessons about anti-che... by sudosysgen on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @08:44PM (#25272353)
You give it a few hundred problem classes, and constraints for possible answers, and it will randomize the class of problems and generate a unique problem as well as calculate the answer. Then you submit the answer as well as your work and it gets corrected.

For things such as proofs, it might give you a problem for which the theorem is needed, then ask you to solve the problem, indicate which theorem you used, and then prove the theorem.

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Re:College students are learning hard lessons about anti-che... by Tainnor on Thursday December 03, 2020 @08:50AM (#25288782)
Do you have any example of any software that can generate problems for actual proof-based courses (e.g. abstract algebra)? I'm having a really hard time imagining this, we can't even fully automate theorem proving - how are we supposed to automate theorem generation? And this ignores the fact that you also need to make sure that all the proofs are "of the same difficulty" in terms of fairness.
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Re:College students are learning hard lessons about anti-che... by sudosysgen on Thursday December 03, 2020 @09:30AM (#25289134)
Ah, no, the theorems would have to be manually selected. But given a high enough number and an automatically generated context it makes cheating much harder.
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Re:College students are learning hard lessons about anti-che... by RegnisGnaw on Monday November 30, 2020 @07:09PM (#25260717)
The problem is COVID. You can’t have a large gathering. So everyone is doing their exam at home.

Please tell me how you would structure such an exam without a proctoring system as described.

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Re:College students are learning hard lessons about anti-che... by bzbarsky on Monday November 30, 2020 @10:52PM (#25262114)
One option, if you have a reasonably low student-to-instructor ratio: make it an oral 1-1 exam for each student. A video call with the instructor and the student; you ask questions, they answer. If you have 20-ish students, it will eat up half a work-week or so, which is more work than grading 20 exam papers, but not _that_ much more.

Of course if you have 50 students per instructor this is not going to work...

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Re:College students are learning hard lessons about anti-che... by dghlsakjg on Monday November 30, 2020 @07:42PM (#25260907)
It depends on the subject. I studied computer science and econ.

Computer science: Solve a complex problem in code. Include a git history. Be ready to defend your program design if I get suspicious.

Econ: Long answer question: Pick 5 concepts that we learned about that you think are most important. Explain them as you would to a ten year old.

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