They've moved to Lockdown Browser without the recording, and to Zoom proctoring. In my opinion, neither are particularly effective measures against cheating, and I'm sure they are trivially bypassable.
The effect of these tools being phased out is that exams now must be harder or less student friendly. Typical practice in some of my courses has been to not allow students to go back to answered questions, while giving large amounts of questions with insufficient time. The exams are scaled, but I can imagine people doing worse in this kind of stress.
One of my courses, which only had about 8 students and two instructors, decided to do an oral examination, which ended up being basically a very in-depth, one on one conversation about the course material and based on the expectations set in the syllabus (so, no surprises).
While obviously not practical for large rosters, this was by far the best exam format that I have ever done in my many, many years of schooling. I'm sure not everyone would prefer it, but the students unanimously agreed to try it (wouldn't have done it that way otherwise), and it was just so great. It was not at all like an oral thesis defense, which was what I was a little worried about.
Professors are also given quite a lot of flexibility in their grading. My mother had a fun story about a professor she had in college - a professor of a really hard math class who wanted to save on exam time. He announced "exam will be hard. Anyone willing to settle for a D, bring your report cards forward, I will mark them D and you can leave. No exam.". Some people came forward, got their Ds marked, and left. Once the door closed, he said "Anyone willing to accept a C, please come forward". Some did. After the door closed there, he announced to the remaining smiling students expecting easy As/Bs: "I'll see you all for the exam tomorrow 8 am".
No way this could happen in USA.
I've heard that story many decades ago in the form of a joke. It may have started from a professor who genuinely didn't care about failing students but did care about identifying the best.
This really is the best case, but as you note it was 8 students so quite manageable.
It requires a little skill on the part of the examiner, but you can quickly find out how much material the student knows with much higher accuracy than other exam formats, in my opinion.
One of the skills needed is to be able to make it conversational-feeling and reduce the anxiety of students. You can often tell when a student mostly knows what is going on but has misstated or misremembered something, and guide them around the place they got stuck.
One unfortunate thing is that poorly done, orals can be very uneven.
And while it was possible to de-anonymise, the academics were all in support of blind grading so why would they?
The only exceptions were projects where everyone was assigned a different topic, and graded presentations.
Of course, this is simpler in STEM subjects - it's not like you can guess someone's race or gender from their switching power supply design. Subjects that prize in-class participation and lengthy essays would probably be harder to blind-grade effectively.
If you are teaching a 4th yr/masters mixed class of 11 by yourself, you pretty much get to know who is who whether you want to or not. I suppose avoiding handwriting can help if it's appropriate (e.g., won't work on a math course) but I suspect you'll know everyones style by then anyway.
It certainly could, but it also certainly couldn't. I imagine being confidently incorrect is likely to produce a worse result than being unconfidently(?) incorrect, for example.
Similarly, a less confident speaker may end up spending more effort justifying their answers, which could better expose their knowledge.
I think it would depend quite a bit on the examiner in this case. Some people may even be simply biased against particularly confident speakers, particularly considering the relative positions of the speaker and examiner.
If the examiner isn't much more knowledgeable about a topic than their students, then something else has gone wrong.
I'm delighted to hear that it went so well, and I am a believer in the idea. I have seen, from time to time, oral thesis defenses become rather tense and difficult, and think that things go better in proportion to the preparation of both student and examiner. Any general observations about what worked, for those contemplating giving exams in this fashion?
The examiner (one of my two instructors) had a list of questions/topics that we had to get through, but the specifics and flow were natural and spontaneous rather than artificial and forced.
What made the conversation good was that the examiner discussed points that I raised, raised points that I didn't, asked my opinion on e.g. real world implications of theories or conclusions that could be drawn if this or that were true, et cetera. This made it two-way and engaging. While he did not give me any answers, of course, when it was clear that I could bring up and sufficiently discuss a topic, then he would go into details, which would trigger even more detailed responses from me, and so forth. In this way I think he was able to probe the depths of my understanding while not needing to employ a one-sided question/answer format.
I think that it is difficult to bullshit a topic in depth with someone else who knows what they are talking about, so an oral exam probably does not need to be a hardcore opposition like a thesis defense might be.
The allotted time was maybe 30 or 45 minutes (I don't quite recall), after which the examiner would tell you what grade they would recommend. If it was a grade with distinction, then of course you would say thanks and be done. If it was less than distinction then you could request another 10 or 15 minutes of further examination to try to show your mastery. (I passed with distinction, so I didn't go through that part, but I assume it would have been a continuation? But maybe it would get a little more intense if you were trying to improve your performance at the last minute? I don't know.)
I was able to see current and past residence data, which I suppose could have helped me verify the student's identity ("what post code[0] do you currently live at?"), but I tried not to look at that information when possible.
Lecturers also had access to this system (it dealt with some submission data), so I guess they may have had access to view residency data?
This is just an educated guess based on my experience, though.
[0]: For American readers, think ZIP code
Crazy stuff.
My own experience of making up those cheat sheets is the same as yours, the effort put in to create them is an excellent teaching tool in itself, as you're studying and distilling all the stuff you don't know well, and by the time you're done, you hardly have to refer to it in the exam anyway.
For physics, they'd just give us a page with all the formulas but with no context aside from the letters in them, so if you knew roughly what it should look like, you could find it and you're not at so much risk of making a basic error under pressure.
This raised eyebrows of the TA's proctoring the exam, but like, if you don't know the stuff, a page isn't going to help you at that point.
She's a fully online professor, though, so maybe that's the difference? Different dynamic from the traditional, in-person classes professors?
I also don't think anything but her quizzes are multiple choice? Everything else is essay format, participation (discussion posts in class forum), and a HUGE paper, so there's really nothing to cheat on, aside from plagiarism, and ... there are ways of catching that.
For advanced degrees, though, I'm not so sure. I expect someone which a masters or Ph.D. to actually be an expert in the subject matter, not just someone who is really good at figuring out how to solve problems. A big part of that is being able to internalize the information so well they you in effect become a resource that could be used by an undergraduate student. This internalization goes beyond rote memorization, but memorization is a big part of it too.
Just a disclaimer, though - I do not have an advanced degree, so maybe I expect too much from those who do? A big reason why I have no interest in pursuing one is that many people with a masters degree I find have little expertise to show for it, they could have just as easily learned the same information by self-study or being fortunate enough to find interesting work. (the hiring landscape is a separate topic)
I still cannot "remember" how to perform a discrete-wavelet-transform from memory (my honor's thesis) but i found myself digging into it a couple of months ago (just fiddling on pet projects). An hour on googling got me on the track. Point is there is so much even those with advanced degrees have to know and having to retain it all in memory all the time is both infeasible and wasteful. Yet expecting kids/young adults to do this is truly hypocritical and disingenuous.
2. Master’s degree courses follow all kinds of schemas for examination. From oral exams, to in person no extra material allowed, to open book, and take home. Being on both sides (taking the exams and creating them) I can say that it really doesn’t matter if you allow people to take the exam home and collaborate among each other. These types of exams are designed to really test a deep understanding and ability of the material. There have been exam questions where an entire class of >20 students are not able to solve it. People that are really good are able to have a shot at it and maybe make some progress, and that differentiates the good from the exceptional.
3. Nowadays undergraduate degrees are a commodity so it feels they need to make sure only the good students get one. But in the end it doesn’t really matter, since most employers (exceptions of course) will want to see how much value the candidate add, which does not correlate with having a degree or good grades
Of course you can, making up results is a time-honored tradition!
It does take a certain amount of skill to do it believably, though.... ;-)
At graduate level, there is too much stuff. You know the outline, you know where to find stuff. But you don't need to know everything exactly. If you forgot one passage from a definition, that should not cause a failure. Because in 'real Mathematics' you get to look at references.
A nice trick for open book is to make it time-infeasible to just look up everything. But allow students access to the materials incase they have a brainfart.
Which is a load of dingos kidneys.
Gate keeping.
All the good doctors I've ever been to have a wall of reference material and use it, even if only to show the patient, but it's there and accessible.
And besides, it's not like practising medical doctors don't make heaps of mistakes.
The number one cause of complications in a medical setting is medical intervention, so it could be argued doctors should be using more reference material and not relying on their over worked brains.
I lived with a orthopedic surgeon doing a specialization in pediatric orthopedia.
He was very very very good based on my understanding of the places he had worked, the offers he had to undertake his specialization, the change in operation waiting times and his model of how he worked within the hospital, and that immediately after returning to his home country he was head of the newly created orthopedic pediatrics ward.
His description of how he would approach a surgery was straight-forward:
- he would review the surgical referral, his notes from his patient intake
- he would review appropriate notes and documentation from the hospital on the allowed surgeries allowed, including reference texts on that particular surgery
- he would create a full plan for entering, performing, and exiting the operation
- (surgery)
- he would review the plan, add notes on how it actually went
So it's not like he woke up, walked into a surgical room, and ad-libbed it.
As an anecdote, he said he liked B-students for his surgical teams because they had to work hard to get there.
I also was good friends with a very nerdy emergency room doctor. He offered the anecdote that he was "called out" for using Google. His justification was that "once you throw in the appropriate medical terms, all you're getting is the latest research on treatments--and I was attempting to offer the best and latest in proven care". He also made the several changes to the shifts at the ER, including using time-sheet and patient data to show that patient outcomes suffered during longer doctor shift rotations. His anecdote on his schooling; "I was a bad student, and I'm a poor doctor, but my job is to get you stable until we can intervene properly". He funded a startup and wrote (in Java) a medical EMR system.
We need more doctors, if that means changing the culture within the profession so they're more inclined to use those reference material that would be good thing.
Overall I think an oral exam run by a skilled examiner is the best of all worlds, but it isn't practical for a section of 500 undergraduate students. It's quite doable for a seminar or manageable up to say 10-15 students, becomes difficult after that.
In some European universities, the outcome is such a foregone conclusion that the candidate's family is laying out the buffet, peeling the cling film off the plates, and unboxing the champagne bottles as the "defense" begins.
In the UK however, I've never seen this. It's generally a small room with candidate, an internal examiner, an external examiner from another university who is an expert in the field, and a convenor to record the minutes of the examination. The outcome is by far from a foregone conclusion.
A good student who is an expert in their field, is well-read and up to date on their work and the surrounding literature will perform well and have little to fear. Someone who hasn't written their own thesis, or didn't really have an understanding of the area, and thus isn't really an expert, will have a very unpleasant time, and will likely be failed, or be sent away with major corrections to be completed to the satisfaction of the examiners, possibly including a full oral re-examination.
America is leaking again.
Ok, from a terminology point of view that's fair - it isn't the same everywhere by any means.
However, most if not all of the graduate programs I know if internationally have something roughly equivalent, whether they are comps or prelims or qualifying or whatever.
The basic idea is that a department (and university, generally) has an interest in maintaining the quality of their programs, and one way to do that is to make sure that your students never leave with glaring holes in their background. The best way to do this is some sort of comprehensive evaluation, and the time to do it is at or near the beginning of a program - otherwise there is no time to address deficiencies.
The common factor among all UK PhDs I know of is that there is a rigorous viva at the end, where the outcome for the sudent is not a foregone conclusion. Despite the shorter overall duration of the PhD (~3 to 4 years typically), the oral examination can (rightly) cover material far beyond the scope of your thesis - if you are an expert in your field, you will be able to have a knowledgeable and informed discussion as a peer with your external examiner, who will be a recognised expert in the field. I'm definitely a big believer in the importance of being able to have a well-informed discussion around the area of your work, and actually found the whole viva process very enjoyable and cordial - a nice chat about the wider field, my and the examiners' own previous work, some debate of the merits of different approaches, and then onto a run-through of the thesis, chapter-by-chapter, skipping any pages where there were no points for discussion or contention.
Unlike European vivas though, there's no family or friends, no champagne corks being popped mid-defense, and no foregone conclusion of the outcome. I've been at European vivas with the family of the candidate preparing the celebratory buffet at the back of the auditorium while the questioning continues!
While the UK model is probably preferable in a lot of ways, this sounds much more enjoyable :)
At least that's the theory - I don't know if in practice it holds up; most of the grad students and later I knew from that system came from oxbridge which has a number of quirks.
My experience of it was that if you are genuinely knowledgeable and approaching being an expert in your field, it is an enjoyable experience, and just like having a (longer than usual, but not uncomfortably long) conversation with someone about a topic that you both share a deep interest in. There is nothing to worry about, as you can have a nice discussion about an interesting topic, and share interesting ideas etc.
I'm not sure if it's a lower bar for grad as such - I think it's got fewer "formal" requirements, and far more informal requirements. The most common way to "fail" is to simply not submit the thesis.
My impression was that someone failing their viva was seen as a serious failure on the part of their supervisor, who should not have let them submit without being more prepared.
That matches my limited experience with UK, although I've seen north american ones without a foregone conclusion - seems really dependent on institution.
> The most common way to "fail" is to simply not submit the thesis.
I think that's true everywhere, lot's of people just don't complete. I've heard somewhere that the "ABD" (all but dissertation) rate in US is nearly 50% at 10 years, if you go across all disciplines.
The two are pretty much equivalent, but with different names.
Open book is also fine in this case because without a base of memorized understanding an open book isn't that helpful anyway.
If you don't know the answer to a question and you look it up, that's not cheating, it's research, or at least referring to reference material, which is always permitted in real life. Except for some contrived or rare circumstances someone will now point out. Even the Apollo 11 crew had support.
Any professional in any industry is allowed to say: "I don't know" and "I'll get back to you" and "let me look that up".
I don't know about you, but I tend to want my pilots, surgeons, and lawyers to tend towards self-competent, and I don't think those circumstances are contrived or rare. It's not to say that they can't ask for help before or during flight/operation/trial -- and in fact asking for help and crew-resource management is important for those fields -- but not all fields are like software engineering or aerospace where there may be dozens or hundreds of people that can help you in a timely fashion if you have completely no idea what you're doing. I'd prefer pilots, surgeons, and lawyers that didn't cheat their way into their jobs.
Real life isn't always kind enough to only give problems that someone has already solved and published somewhere you can find.
Knowing how to find or determine the current correct answers yourself is often more useful in the long run than memorizing what amounts to trivia. This is especially true when it comes to open ended and quickly changing fields...
This doesn't solve the problem of a student having an expert sitting off camera, feeding the student the answers.
Employers, students and society as a whole have all moved on; they want assessment to demonstrate that students can do what the course has taught them (known in the jargon as “alignment”), not memorise a bunch of facts that they can regurgitate on demand.
Which is the hard problem these solutions try to address, because even if the correct student is sitting in front of the computer, that doesn't mean he isn't just proxying the questions and answers to someone else (possibly paid).
Brute force memorization, however, are subject to decays and constant forgetting. It is astonishingly difficult to memorize a bunch of meaningless numbers unless you taken the time to do a mnemonic for it.
So they'll keep asking stupid questions as if the student was a database being queried. It's no wonder that people can solve them by querying actual knowledge bases! Schools won't accept that: they are selling degrees and they don't want to make it too easy for students to pass their courses. So they come up with the absolutely ridiculous notion of cheating.
The whole thing's so phony and artificial it's mindboggling. I don't think it's even possible to get a high quality education anymore. Maybe if a student is lucky enough to have a one-on-one mentorship.
Giving students different exams (selections of slightly and subtly different tasks from a task pool), not showing task names, and mixing up the order of tasks for each student seems to work quite nicely.
The increased overhead to communicate which exact answer they need, finding out which other student has the exact same task, etc., has worked really well for us. Of course, you have to have it in a way where they do not have much time left over to shoulder this overhead.
Edit: So students are going from "What's the answer for 5" to sharing the topic of the task, the task description (there may be a negation hidden in there), and the constants and other students needing to compare. Maybe they aren't even at this task-type in their exam yet, as the order is mixed.
Edit2: We weren't really watching the video stream. It was just to discourage students actually sitting side-by-side, which would decrease the communication overhead drastically.
As for alternative options, most my classes used open book paired with more limited time restraint, possibilities of questioning students if anything looked suspicious immediately after the exam, and making the tests harder and scaling afterwards. Although there'll always be bad apples, I'm thankful many of my profs has adapted very well to help the students learn.
Student's post: https://www.reddit.com/r/UBC/comments/hgiiu1/midterm_started...
Proctorio CEO's comment (u/artfulhacker) got deleted back is on removeddit, Linkletter is also here defending the student as well: https://www.removeddit.com/r/UBC/comments/hgiiu1/midterm_sta... https://www.reddit.com/r/UBC/comments/hhbowl/proctorio_ceo_m...
I think at the very least, all exams ought to be designed as "open book" with a time limit. that at least eliminates the issue of students using unauthorized resources. I'm not sure what can be done about students who collaborate on exams or go so far as to hire someone to take it for them. perhaps a few students could be randomly selected for each assessment to explain a few over their answers over zoom?
It isn't a minority. It is an overwhelming majority if they think they can get away with it.
https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2017/02/cheating_in_college_...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-academic-cheating-1....
Not defending Protorio here, but I didn't really understand how rampant cheating was, either, until I became friends with someone who works at a University.
Growing up, my friends and I would never dream of cheating and would fear the consequences of getting caught, so the entire concept feels foreign. We also grew up in the era of in-person classes, before cellular phones were common.
Some of the cheating stories I hear from my friends in University are mind-blowing. Everything from (college) students thinking the proctor won't notice them using their cellular phone during tests, to people trying to hire test-takers who show up with fake IDs. They had to start giving proctors photos of each student because checking IDs wasn't enough any more.
The situation is much more complicated than it sounds. As soon as one person gets away with cheating, it becomes a cheating arms race as even the good students feel the need to cheat to keep up. If an entire institution becomes notorious for rampant cheating, the value of every graduate's degree goes down.
Obviously the Proctorio solution is terrible, which is why I expect we'll see Universities push to return to in-person classes sooner rather than later while keeping remote as a 2nd class option.
That's basically what happened here: The school expected students to cheat and looked for solutions to address it.
I think it's very important that universities have very significant consequences when students are caught cheating. Cheaters don't generally start by hiring people to write their papers and take tests for them. They test the waters with little cheats here and there, pushing the boundaries over time.
If Universities made examples out of students who were 100% confirmed cheating beyond reasonable doubt, the amount of cheating would decline significantly. Instead, we're stuck with this game of half-baked anti-cheating systems which some students approach as game.
I don't think that actually follows. As I understand it, many universities and zero tolerance plagiarism and cheating policies. The problem is, when you have no middle ground and your policy is extreme, you leave yourself very few options in the cases where you don't want to or can't easily expel the student. If your policy is expulsion for cheating, then not doing so and providing a lesser punishment is seen as favoritism if the student has resources, or is used as ammunition for their own case by students with resources if offered to a deserving student otherwise.
I think the actual solution is well defined, less flexible, but not overly harsh punishments. Any student caught cheating or plagiarizing is not expelled, but immediately either fails the class or drops two letter grades (and a second time in the same class would be failing the class no matter what if the more lenient option was chosen initially).
With extreme consequences teachers are going to be hesitant to report small and borderline cases, because the consequences are so large. Make the consequences manageable for the single occurrences but problematic if they keep happening, and you'll correctly catch those serial cheaters and those occasional ones that are better off just taking the hit (and maybe dropping and retrying the class) instead of letting them slide because the punishment is disproportionate to the crime.
Think of it this way, if the crime for stealing a candy bar was life in prison, would you call attention to the person next to you that you just saw steal a candy bar? Does the store attendant actually call the police, or just take the candy bar back and tell the person to leave? What if the person is rich, and it actually causes you problems to turn them in, because it's worth it to them to make sure they don't suffer that major negative consequence be exerting their influence? If the punishment is seen as disproportionate to the crime, people will make their own decisions to avoid what they see as a problem with the system, and it also means that people with resources are more likely to exert those resources to avoid those problems, to the detriment of those around them (and they'll mostly get away with it, because who wants to die on the hill of making sure someone is punished for something so inconsequential?).
When I went to school they made a big deal out of the student ethics board, and if you were caught cheating you were brought before it. It was implied that you would be kicked out of school and your cheating conviction would be appended to any other school's request for your transcript.
I don't know how prevalent cheating was at the school.
Completely agree. For many students their lives and futures will literally be determined by the result of a single test. Under these circumstances, not using every resource available to win is simply stupid. Why would someone not cheat if possible?
The truth is academic integrity was doomed the second degrees became necessary for employment. People who care about academic integrity are those who are there by choice, not those who are pursuing a degree to improve their chances in the job market. The only possible solution to this problem is to end the "everyone must go to college" meme. Good work opportunities that don't require decades of education would go a long way.
Having taught at several institutes in the Anglosphere, a disproportionate amount of cheating I've witnessed has come from those who speak English as a second language. Difficulties with English and the need to 'save face' probably push otherwise honest students into doing this. Which also says something about admission tests. It's something of an open secret that administrators turn a blind eye to suspicious admission results, as enrolment and tuition money are a strong incentive.
It's not an easy problem to solve, but I suspect proper admission filtering would eliminate the bulk of cheating, and the remainder could probably be dealt with by empowering professors.
If the professors or TAs are paying attention, they already know who the cheats are. It's not hard to spot when weak students suddenly start acing tests and mastering skills they didn't understand the week prior. There needs to be more leeway, institutional support, and incentives for academics to challenge suspicious students, e.g. via oral examinations.
Trying to solve this using software is just an attempt to avoid tackling the real problems.
Money talks. TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) scores tend to be treated as gospel, even when it's clear from emails that the student has nowhere near the level of proficiency indicated by the test results.
A friend of mine copied an assignment to the point that he even included the other person’s name in the code.
He got 100% and a note telling him not to copy again.
I can understand why it happens though. For the professor to take it further, they'd have to escalate it within the school, involving a whole load of bureaucracy, meetings, production of evidence, and likely a formal hearing with the student, etc. Unfortunately, there's often no incentive or institutional support for professors to do any of this.
...and yet I never thought to wonder how they managed to keep passing exams.
Maybe skills tests in an interview process is not such a bad thing.
As an employer, I don't care what piece of paper you have from what school. I only care about how well you can do the job I need to be done.
To be blunt, duh. I agree degrees are very imperfect & crude indicators of what you're try to measure, but what is your alternative? I'm getting DoS levels of applications blasted at me, how do I filter to an effective level that removes the same cheating mechanics mentioned here?
I'm fine with this in theory, but lots and lots of places bungle it so badly that they're no longer testing programming skills, they're testing rote regurgitation of memorized code under pressure. If your job legitimately requires that, for everyone's sake get out of the industry.
Personally, I think a degree doesn't say much about a person's ability to do what is required in the job.
Maybe we should just get better at giving skill tests in interviews.
Testing whether they can remember a specific leetcode question is worse than checking for a degree.
Is that controversial?
Maybe some institutions are simply selecting their students wrong?
The best however, is a 1:1 code review with a TA or Prof. Randomly jumping to files, reading the code and asking questions about it. Extremely hard to copy a codebase and learn it well enough you can explain it but really easy to do if you wrote it yourself.
re the 1:1s with TA/professor, I agree. if you can explain code that you didn't even write, you might be even more deserving of that A.
Sure the later can copy their assignments. But once they'll hit a non-trivial assignment or a code review in a more advance class they won't be able to fake it anymore. You are just delaying their transfer to another major. And that gives the CS department one extra course they can collect tuition from and justify hiring TAs for...
The sky's the limit when you think about it really.
1) Version control all assignments. I force them to make periodic commits throughout the week. If they want to copy a project wholesale, they have to do so in a way that takes a lot of time and effort.
2) Comparing bytecode. If they change the names of variables, comments, spacing, etc. these superficial differences will be lost in compilation.
3) Oral explanations. Now that everyone has guaranteed access to screen recording software, I force my students to record an explanation of their work. They go through their code line by line and explain it to me. I can tell very quickly when a student is explaining code they haven't written. If they are explaining code they haven't written to a satisfactory degree, then they've at least demonstrated they've learned something.
4) Remove incentives to cheat. Give them all the resources they need and more than enough time. Provide easily accessible venues like chatrooms and forums where they can ask questions anonymously. Provide opportunities to improve prior poor grades so they feel like failure is okay.
This doesn't eliminate cheating 100%, but from my experience it does seem to cause cheaters to fail, as their cheating does not pass for acceptable work. The students who earn an A come to see me during office hours and I know they are doing the work. I would say very rarely does someone earn an A who is not on my radar as being an obvious high-performing student. If a student is cheating and earning an F or D, I can't say I care much about that.
Notice none of these methods involve an invasive surveillance regime. I don't require cameras on at all time, 360 degree views of work areas to prove no one is helping, software to monitor tabs and processes... all this is completely futile. The students hate it and it incentivizes them to find ways to thwart it. They feel justified in doing so. I saw one post that advocated running a high speed fan to drown out typing noises, wearing reflective glasses in a dark room to foil eye tracking software, putting Vaseline on the camera... all to what end? To cheat on a psych exam? It's an arms race that's not worth fighting. The solution here is to adapt teaching methods with new technologies and testing methods.
Not everyone does projects over time, not everyone commits all the time. I don't like committing in progress work and I usually do work in big chunks with large breaks in between, especially for solo projects where I don't have to share code regularly with others.
Based on your criteria, I'd likely be considered a "possible cheater" just for having a different style.
Regardless though, my students usually are at a point where they don't have a commit style. They come to my class with no knowledge of git or version control -- I have to teach it to them.
Secondly, labeling you a possible cheater doesn't condemn you to anything, it just puts you on a shortlist of assignments to examine more closely.
Thirdly, this style of committing has helped more than a few students out when their computers die mid assignment and they need to move to another computer. It also allow me to help them with their assignments. When they come to me for questions, the first thing I ask is "have you pushed everything to your repo?" Instead of trying to debug over a virtual desktop connection, I can run their code locally and get to the cause much quicker in my own environment. It really works out well for everyone involved.
Question: if (when) a student hands in an assignment without the periodic commits, what happens? How do you measure & set expectations for sufficient frequency of commits? (i.e., 1 single commit is too few, I assume that once a day is enough, but where's the threshold?)
Thanks again for sharing - I'll be thinking about these for my own classes!
In terms of getting them to follow the commit guidelines, I give them a carrot and a stick. The carrot is, if they start N number of questions half way to the due date, they can get a penalty-free extension if they need more time to complete the assignment. This is to incentivize students to start early. I've found one of the biggest indicators of successful students is that they start assignments early. Students who start their assignment on the due date usually run into blocking issues (software not configured properly, computer not working right, network is down) that would be trivially overcome if they had started a day or two earlier. Students who have this habit quickly correct within an assignment or two.
The stick is by the midterm, I start requiring it more strictly by subtracting points for not following the guidelines. I think of it like a math assignment; if all you provide on a math exam is the solution, you'll get little to no credit for that. Showing your process is part of the work in math, and I treat it the same way in my classes.
Every semester, students fell into the same buckets. - Those I rarely saw who nailed everything (and were getting an A or a high B because they understood the material), - Those I saw constantly who were going to get an A or a B (because they sometimes didn't understand things from class, or when they did, wanted to make sure; or for a few, understood it all, but knew the importance of showing they cared about the material to the professor and TAs) - Those I saw constantly who were going to get a C or a B (they rarely understood from class, but were willing to put in the work to try to) - Those I never saw who were going to fail (they didn't show up to anything).
It was pretty much invariably this latter group that got caught cheating. That's not to say the other groups didn't, but they at least got working code, did really well on the exams (pre-COVID, proctored in person), and in conversation were able to show they understood, so I'm a lot less concerned about them.
I think it could possibly scale to larger classes as long as the grading team scales with it. I'm not sure how public universities handle their grader allocations.
No one wants to hear this answer because it means actual work for the teaching staff (compared to, say, automated scoring of multiple-choice tests), but it is, in fact, the answer.
It's not just "actual work", writing high quality tests and projects and then grading them is multiple full-time jobs worth of work. It's equivalent to interviewing 100 job candidates every week, forever.
Projects they had to demo, and they had a published rubric. While it was possible sometimes to play to the rubric, it still meant there was very little work to figure out a grade.
Tests, on the other hand, I had to dig in, understand what they were trying to do, figure out if it worked, and award partial credit. I guess the prof could have done multiple choice to make grading easy, but that has all kinds of problems with actually testing anything.
The fact that the university doesn't provide adequate staffing is not an excuse for short-changing the students still further.
Actual work for the already incredibly underpaid, over-worked teaching staff. As the money dries up in university funding, teachers are stretched thinner and thinner. That forces them to rely more on automated testing instead of having the time to actually know more about their students' performance. That in turn makes it easier for students to cheat.
The economics (as usual) are perverting the system. The individual participants are merely suffering from the perserve incentives of the system.
So I think I actually understand the system pretty well.
Edit: teaching is part of the job, dude. It just is. If you asked the average taxpayer (you know, the ones who pay the base salary before grant money is taken into account) whether teaching is an important part of the job, what do you suppose they're going to say?
If you don't want to teach, you need to find a job that doesn't involve teaching. If you accept a job that requires teaching, you're morally obligated to provide the best teaching you can.
Or so I see it.
Pre-pandemic I would give them a paper exam in which they had to read and identify bugs, or write code by hand. This was the tradition. Now they actually use their tools to the best of their ability, and I get to see what they are capable of.
You might think this testing paradigm would result in everyone getting 100%, but that's just not what I've seen. The distribution of grades the last exam was normal with a mean of 80%, pretty much in line with what I get during a typical semester. As we transition back to a classroom environment, I don't expect to move back to paper-based CS exams. They are just wrong on so many levels.
I've had professors that did more damage by 'teaching' (I use that term loosely) than if they had just said 'learn it from the book/online and show up for labs/tests/exams'. Mostly it was because they had no idea how teaching worked.
It's a very faculty-centric view because from a student's perspective, the teaching is 99% of the school. Very few will go on to research. They come to school to learn and earn a degree. If the University cannot provide good teachers, they are not a good university. If a professor cannot teach, they are not a good professor. That isn't a moral judgement, its just the subjective judgement from the other side of the school-desk.
The distribution is one thing, but grade correlation with other statistics might be more revealing. In particular, how do you know that wealthier students aren't hiring people to take the exam for them?
The other thing I do is I don't make exams so weighty. If you ace the exam but you don't do well on the assignments, you're not getting an A in the course. So the hypothetical wealthy cheater will have to keep their body double on retainer for the semester.
But I will say that the students who earn an "A" are ones I interact with fairly regularly. "A" students typically come to class, ask questions, engage with the assignments, start their assignments early, etc. And before anyone accuses me of playing favorites, I don't do any grading, and grading is anonymized. But I can easily predict the "A" students just by their work ethic. The idea of the brilliant student who doesn't come to class and effortlessly breezes through the exam is as far as I can tell after teaching thousands of students a myth. At least at my university. Maybe all of those kids go to MIT.
The university will pay repetitional consequences for claiming that the student learned particular things which they clearly didn't.
I maintain that cheating is almost always a pedagogical problem first, and a trust problem second.
Cheating becomes a convenient solution to a problem when you're dealing with a course with inadequate teaching, a difficult learning curve, or a lack of motivation for students to do their work to the best of their ability themselves, or a nonsensical curriculum. Fixing cheating doesn't involve surveillance - it instead involves removing the incentive structure that exists for cheating in the first place. This may involve rethinking grading, or course material, or assignments; but is certainly not impossible.
We act surprised when students "cheat" in CS exams that's expected to be done with only pen and paper - nearly any real workplace will give you an option of a text editor or IDE of your choice. So give them an IDE! Give them the API documentation! Don't create an incentive to test the waters to fix the broken rules of assignments.
Another relevant area of work is ungrading, or self-graded courses in general - when you remove the friction that grades cause in the feedback loop of learning; learning becomes an organic process for everyone involved. There's a lot of interesting pedagogical research, and just "cheating is rampant" doesn't scratch the surface of "but why is it?"
In addition, cheating is a game. Every second you spend drumming up cheating in front of your students is another second they think about trying to get away with cheating you. If you tell students they're not to be trusted, they will not give you any reasons to trust them; in many cases it's as simple as that.
A combination of good pedagogical design, and building a relationship of mutual trust with your students, is certainly more fruitful than creating an academic police state (of which Proctorio is only one part of). There will always be people slipping through the cracks, but there are other safeguards in the world to catch them too.
Another important thing is that conversations about cheating always assume a very specific framing of higher education - that they exist primarily as a gatekeeper or arbiter of who-knows-what; the university also has the purpose of providing an environment for learning. And in many cases, cheating is just a result of a failure to provide that environment.
In addition, if the primary beneficiary of university degrees are the employers (or the people who care about the who-knows-what stamp), then why do students foot the bill for tuition? If you choose to accept this framing of universities primarily as arbiters, isn't access to a degree just a head tax to enter the skilled labor market?
Or are they cheating at the "take these courses to become a more rounded person" stuff, like the insect biology courses for the CS students?
Still, you're paying a fuckton of money to supposedly learn stuff in college. Cheating your way through is a huge waste.
Higher level education is largely voluntary, and it's up to the person taking it up to decide what they gain from it. If they are only in it for a diploma, they'd get there one way or another.
To me, focusing on finding "cheaters" makes education a competition. I never felt cheaters got anything over me in my studies, and I never felt like I've got a lesser grade because of them. Does that happen in cases where you've seen "exam-sitting-for-hire" in action?
Even if you normalize your grading scale based on the students taking the exam right then, if your claim that "most students are honest" is true (and I believe it is), that should not affect any non-cheater significantly (unless you've got a small, non-representative group, but then normalizing grades is unfair to begin with).
So my question is: who are we trying to solve the problem for? What is the expected outcome, knowing that there will always be people who "cheat" their way through life too?
You might have worked very hard for a diploma from University X, but if it was found that University X was handing out diplomas like candy to other students that were not as academically rigorous, it weakens the value of your diploma.
It’s basically up to the instructor on how to run the class.
Some require proctorio, some are on Zoom with lots of TAs to watch the screen, some issue an exam on your own time where the browser monitors what you do / visit, and others just offer take home projects.
Handing over the solution for the problem to a software company shouldn't be an accountability shield for the Universities. Impacted students should sue the universities, and then they should sue the software company.
And suddenly, privacy invasion gets off the table quickly (as soon as you are not aiming for 100% non-cheaters, the cost becomes obviously too high for everybody else).
As far as reputation, I'd rather see schools focus on the successful students, which is somewhat done with all those research-paper-grading systems (not a perfect system by any means because of gamification, but at least idea in the right direction), but mostly done with bragging about scientific break-throughts to come out of their students and staff.
Still, what is the purpose of a reputation or "well-respected degree"? The goal should be knowledge and applicability of that knowledge to actual problems in life (known as "jobs"): it's not like anyone accepts any graduate without interviewing them first, which is to say that nobody trusts any school to have done a proper job of evaluating them. Most of those schools don't trust themselves, so they hold interviews for post-graduate studies too! :D
Nobody looks at the "lemons" coming out of a school to consider it a bad school (I am sure you can find plenty from "top" universities too), but on the successful ones. Do the successful ones change with more cheaters at all? (Sure, there is a turning point, but catching all of them is meaningless)
[1] There's quite a bit of research on this. Bretag is a key author.
> Unfortunately custom projects and the like won't work for teaching fundamental maths skills.
I am not sure I agree. One of the projects I did for my projective geometry class was to do an inverse of a projected drawing (in AutoCAD) and save a 3D .obj file. In differential equations course, I was given a project to prove a theorem that is generally missing from the school books (or usually given as an exercise). You can also let people devise proofs in a closed system of axioms and a few theorems.
It is a hard and different type of work, but I am certain you can both teach and get to know students with theoretical math projects. If they get someone else to do it for them, yet they are able to present it in front of the class (online) convincingly, they have likely understood the concepts, which is what teaching is all about.
While I am against these surveillance software, making sure that tests are fair is very hard, especially since everything is online now thanks to COVID.
A sibling program at the university exposed a cheating ring of ~15-20 people, and I think many were surprised that the result was to simply zero their grades for that class instead of more severe action.
/e I mention incidents and sizes since these programs are not thousands of students but tens or hundreds.
It sounds like the definition of cheating was very broad there.
I think cheating is quite common in the undergrad years, but gets less later.
As the original commenter notes, here the problem is being solved for "well-behaved" students, in a way which is easy enough for dishonest students to bypass and present themselves as well-behaved.
> So my question is: who are we trying to solve the problem for? What is the expected outcome, knowing that there will always be people who "cheat" their way through life too?
For one thing, all the harm that incompetent professionals can cause - and in a moddern society, the scope of that is not inconsiderable - in fact, Proctorio is probably an example.
Let's not lose focus on the real problem here, which is Proctorio being an aggressive vendor of garbage.
I would go so far as to say that the information age has made educational material so widely and easily available that the only value universities provide is signaling and wealth/class filtering.
Perhaps there is value in knowing someone has been able to work in a team setting and complete given tasks.
But there is another way to look at it: can all non-cheating students build bridges, design microprocessors or design rockets? I can give you an affirmative no.
coming soon to a tech interview near you.
Higher level education is largely voluntary, and it's up to
the person taking it up to decide what they gain from it.
If they are only in it for a diploma, they'd get there one
way or another.
Then again, I have a hard time envisioning what would someone cheat about in a legal exam, other than not memorizing the things, but that's to me just a signal that the content is badly presented (instead, put students in a pretend courtroom in a case that covers the study material, and they'll have to learn it, and learn to apply it).
But even if we accept it as so, it is not an argument to be so vigilant in catching cheaters majoring in other subjects.
Think of it another way. If you knowingly contract a member of the KKK to do your hiring, you can't pretend not to know why people of color don't get hired in your company.
Proctorio's issue may be more subtle than the "in your face" example I gave above but they're there and whoever contracts them does so with full awareness of them.
P.S. Because I'm sure the wave of downvotes is less about people supporting racism and more about ignorance, let me further support my point about such tech with real life examples:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5gxg3/proctorio-is-using-ra...
https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/28/22254631/university-of-il...
Why would you say that this is evidence of a 'screwed' system?
Proctorio reflects the cost cutting, hyper systemization of education, which is a trend that— every time I see it— seems to be antithetical to actual education.
Or in physics (my field), I do want a student to know U=RI. Not google it. Not look it up. I also want them to be able to transform it to U/R=I.
Any of these anti-cheating systems are trying to cut costs by enabling weaker teacher-student interactions.
What a scam
So your preferred solution would be to just stop all education for the duration of the pandemic? Although online education sucks, I'm not sure if most students would agree with you.
It's all a lot of smoke grenades to cover for:
- an education system/process that at its core is not about actual learning but "bulimia learning" aka memorizing the facts the profs deemed relevant for the exam and forgetting them the very second the exam is over to make space for new useless stuff that will be forgotten just the same way.
- an employment system that has "optimized" to needing as-standardized-as-possible papers that certify potential employees of having skill X so that hiring managers can easily separate between candidates that are "worth it" on paper without having to waste time on "unworthy" candidates - something that obviously fails as it chucks out a lot of the people that aren't built for bulimia learning but can't prove that (unlike an awful lot of the "certified" people) they actually know what they're doing
- "education" institutions that are more interested in getting grant money and income from student tuition rather than on training actually talented students
- and as a root cause of all of that: employers believing they need "university graduates" when the good old German-style apprenticeship system works just fine... with the side effect that apprenticeships cost the employer actual money for years for training the apprentice, whereas with university the students and their parents pay the bill for, sometimes, the rest of their lives
Education and employment is in dire need of reforms. Universities should be serving only those who are actually interested in science, companies should pay for educating the workforce they need instead of forcing generations of young people to take on unsustainable debts, and schools should be reformed to actually provide stuff people are going to use in their later career.
That doesn't mean there isn't a violation here, of course.
In one of the twitter thread I saw a screenshot form a professors email where they were mentioning that "X student had 100 more eye movements than Y student" and threatened to fail the entire class.
That email blew my mind because it seemed like the professor just didn't know or didn't care that the software was the problem here. And that's the real issue.
The distraction this posed had a measurable impact on my scores on these tests.
What's crucially important is that this type of software is BANNED. I now have a new question to ask schools when my kid applies to one.
Of course, like all religions, not all members will follow the beliefs all the time. At least that's what I tell myself while sinning with a non-free video game I installed. Many a pastor has molested children, but the courts still recognize those religions. So when the founder of this religion is caught duel-booting Windows, we'll just remember that the religion is divine, even if the people aren't.
Seriously, the day my university required this would be the last day they received a dime from me. And I’d be getting a refund for the current semester.
I really hope institutions using this rethink and the company just dies.. some things should not exist.
>And I tend to close my eyes a lot because it helps me visualize the problem
Nvidia has added eye-correction feature to it's Maxine platform(SDK with set of ML features for video conferencing) it can correct our eyes in real-time to show that we're looking at the camera even when we didn't. When I first saw it's demo the first thing which came to my mind was these proctoring tools[1]. It's a matter of time before all major video conferencing tools add these features or 3rd party plugins/hacks which enable it.
I'm not against these proctoring tools, Especially since there are not many options during lockdowns but considering what's at stake they deserve all the scrutiny they can get and if a company threatens with lawsuits for genuine criticisms it tells a lot about their business practice; Sadly this seems to be very common in the e-education sector(Checkout unicorns claiming to have placed 10 year old in Google after taking their 'coding' class and the retribution faced by activists for showcasing the lies).
Apple demonstrated this in Facetime about a year ago, but I don't know what happened to it. I don't use Facetime, so I can't confirm it was ever implemented. But clearly it's on big tech's radar.
> LSU student body president Stone Cox said that the fees, which could come out to $300, were prohibitive for students.
What the hell? Not only are universities mandating students infect their systems with malware, but they're making the students pay for the privilege? That's ridiculous.
Thankfully, it's a good filter for deciding which employers I don't want to work for. I can only imagine what it's like working for a company that trusts their employees that little.
https://gdprhub.eu/index.php?title=Rb._Amsterdam_-_C/13/6846...
> The Amsterdam Court of First Instance rejected the request by student representatives and an individual student for a preliminary injunction against the use of digital surveillance software for exams by a public university. The court ruled that measures against covid-19 did not allow for a suitable alternative and the processing could therefore be based on Article 6(1)(e) GDPR.
> (e) processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller;
What's the point of GDPR if you can side-step it in this way?
Will take the privacy regulators a few years, justice moves slow. But if I was a Proctorio shareholder I would be very very unhappy if my company got stuck in years of unresolved legal issues with unknown (and high) potential fines.
Can't install shady third party drivers, can't install stuff like that that mess with hypervisors (and anyways, every app kind of runs in a sandboxed process anyways) and your app can go in the background at anytime!
Don't like it? Roll your own devices.
We hardly need more entities pushing for this dystopia...
Yet you could only link to one example for a totally different program ExamSoft.
They had a thick dark beard above a dark shirt and dark glasses with reflections (on a much lighter skin tone). They also look like they have a second eyebrow due to the lighting on their eye lid and glasses.
It could be their head shape tied to their race I guess, but you have a sample of one from a different program which we know nothing about what it's doing.
> "or reading questions out aloud [2]" > "I am so glad that this kind of abuse was not yet common when I was in university. I love sitting in the (dark) basement, it helps me concentrate."
Compared to going to exam rooms full of people with noise and lighting outside of any control? When were students allowed to read out loud in the 'old' days?
We are in a pandemic, millions are dying, I don't get this attitude, what's the alternative? not do exams? I know I cheated, I know most other people at uni cheated with the old system which was hard to cheat at. Hell yes we would all cheat more if the new system allowed us to.
The videos in question are still on Youtube under Proctorio Reuploads for what it's worth.
https://pimeyes.com/ can find the shitty twitter photo of their computer rejection screen from "ExamSoft" across the global fucking web.
I put in the photo from twitter and it popped out. And that's the fucking stupid 'photo' of the fucking stupid 'rejection screen' on a program that's not even Proctorio.
Sooooo Pimeyes is Polish, maybe it's the programmers from the USA and the fact you have all lost your minds and want to be racist because it makes up for you lack of ability to program. Because the Polish can facial recognise on a USA phone photo of a rejection screen.
Yes Dang... here it is, you did this on a different comment but we know this is the one it's about (Still keen for shadow ban, replies are the worst)
this is some serious 1984 type shit.
Procto-: Anus; (more frequently) rectum;
-torio: radioactive chemical element (in spanish)
Therefore, it is a radioactive anus?
(like me)
Apparently it's a supervision software that students are forced to install on their private computer and (as expected) it'll do its worst to invade your privacy and flag "suspicious" things, based on which the university might punish you.
"Suspicious" here means wearing glasses [3] or looking around in the room or blinking too much [4] or having eye and/or skin colors [1] that are difficult for AI to track or reading questions out aloud [2]. Because everyone knows that a good student is white, sits in a bright room, and will continuously stare at his/her PC screen while thinking about a difficult math problem, I guess. WTF?
I am so glad that this kind of abuse was not yet common when I was in university. I love sitting in the (dark) basement, it helps me concentrate. And I tend to close my eyes a lot because it helps me visualize the problem. I'm sure this kind of misguided software would have failed me.
And the worst part is: Bugs in this software will fail students in the real world. [4]
So it is crucially important that this type of software receives a lot of scrutiny to make sure it works as planned. But it seems that Proctorio is suing this guy for doing exactly that: Documenting how the software is supposed to work by linking to Proctorio's YouTube videos.
[1] https://twitter.com/uhreeb/status/1303139738065481728
[2] https://www.insider.com/viral-tiktok-student-fails-exam-afte...
[3] https://proctorio.com/frequently-asked-questions
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/UBC/comments/g2ub05/god_kicked_out_...