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Re:My students cheated... a lot by DougN7 on Sunday May 29, 2022 @09:43AM (#31549067)
I think you might be who the top response is responding to. You seem to have inside knowledge that saving money is the top priority without considering any real-world resource constraints.
Re:My students cheated... a lot by ratww on Sunday May 29, 2022 @09:56AM (#31549143)
The top response is the one that brought the constraint of "scale" into this discussion, and that's what I'm addressing. Maybe you should bring your objections to them rather than to me. "Real-world resource constraints" is just a euphemism for "wanting to save money" in this case. I'll edit it to clarify that I mean the same.

And I'm not passing judgement on the choice made, nor saying the constraints aren't there, nor saying anyone should do anything different. I'm just pointing out that the scalability constraint will affect the test possibilities, which will affect the quality of the measurement. Feel free to disagree with this all you want.

EDIT: Also, I do happen to have some inside knowledge by having worked in higher education for about a decade, starting in the mid 00s. Coincidentally, most of my work was on cost-saving measurements, designing a few algorithms that allowed universities to reduce their teacher headcount (first at a university, then at a software vendor), so yes, the #1 goal there was saving money. But I don't think having done this affects my answer, nor I do think that I deserve special treatment. I'm merely answering to a chain of comments.

Re:My students cheated... a lot by pixl97 on Sunday May 29, 2022 @12:29PM (#31550402)
Wanting to save money also falls under availability of staffing trained to do this. Considerations of if the massive increase of expense and diversion of people from other economic endeavors is worthwhile.
Re:My students cheated... a lot by ratww on Sunday May 29, 2022 @12:45PM (#31550533)
Good hunch, but in my experience, availability of trained staff was never really an issue in practice. Hiring well trained university faculty was always purely an economical problem. Universities often already have a trained surplus of faculty employees working in a highly reduced capacity. Especially in the last 10-15 years where distance learning became commonplace, a lot of faculty was replaced by low-paid part-time quasi-teachers, which would be more than happy to be offered a permanent position. To further demonstrate that this is an economical problem: those quasi-teachers often have different job titles other than "teacher", depending on the jurisdiction, in order to evade laws and evade the reach of (often very powerful) faculty unions.