EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

Re:EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd by ModernMech on Thursday April 22, 2021 @12:22PM (#26904579)

Since the pandemic began, I've been giving my CS students take home exams, and the results have been so great. They are open everything, including the internet, and the students have 4-5 days to work on the exam, which is a project. I just don't have the ability to police 150-200 students as to whether they are cheating. So I assume they will cheat, and give them a cheating-resistant exam. Instead of asking knowledge-based questions they can look up, I've moved to analysis and synthesis type questions, as well as more substantial projects.

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd by LegitShady on Thursday April 22, 2021 @12:31PM (#26904697)

You sound like a good teacher. My experience at university was that the good teachers were a minority. Most would do their research and the minimum for teaching.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd by ModernMech on Thursday April 22, 2021 @12:41PM (#26904819)

I'm teaching faculty, so I don't do research. Research faculty are right to prioritize their research -- they are incentivized to do so by administration. Their tenure is predicated almost 100% on their research output and the grant money they bring in. Teaching ability is an afterthought when it comes to tenure and promotion. It doesn't make them bad people or bad at their job, it's just that their job isn't really teaching according to basically every signal sent their way by the admin.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd by LegitShady on Thursday April 22, 2021 @01:07PM (#26905133)

I understand the incentives, but teaching is part of their job even if they need to do research, and from the student perspective they are bad professors. If all I needed was to learn it from the book/youtube/internet and take tests, there would be no need for professors and they wouldn't exist.

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd by ajkjk on Thursday April 22, 2021 @01:38PM (#26905513)

Kinda disagree, doing a bad job of teaching isn't OK regardless of whether it's incentivized by your job. You have moral responsibilities too, like putting in a good effort for people who are relying on you.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd by munificent on Thursday April 22, 2021 @12:43PM (#26904843)

> 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.

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?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd by ModernMech on Thursday April 22, 2021 @01:12PM (#26905190)

I think one thing I can't protect against is students completely faking their identities. Meaning if I expect Matt Smith, and Matt Smith has hired John Doe to interact with me all semester, I can't detect that, because I don't really know who Matt Smith is. But Matt Smith would have to know that John Doe will be available to impersonate him for the next 3 years because they will be taking several courses with me. If Matt Smith is rich enough to hire a double to essentially go through college for him, then good on Matt Smith for being independently wealthy I guess.

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]