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Students think the College Board is running a Reddit sting

225 points by hhs 6y ago

goda90 6y ago
On a related note, I've seen multiple posts online about technical difficulties with online AP tests like videos from students trying to press the submit button as the countdown timer is almost to zero and nothing happening. Some claimed they contacted College Board and were told they'd have to troubleshoot their computers during the makeup exam. That seems unreasonable for such an expensive test.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  They should have Amazon run the exams. They are the one tech company committed to their services actually working when needed.
  - schoolornot 6y ago
    They outsource their certification exams to Pearson and PSI. Both platforms are riddled with bugs.
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      Oh, the education giants are horrible.
      - applecrazy 6y ago
        As a college student, don’t even get me started on Pearson/Cengage. Terrible UX, horrible glitches, and the “access codes” which only exist to shake down students for money and undermine the used textbook market.
        MattGaiser 6y ago
        Was you just a couple of years ago...
        HarryHirsch 6y ago
        Complain to your university. We outsource grading the weekly portion of homework to Pearson because there is no money for TA's. The alternative would be a fulltime position to administer a LONCAPA instance for the institution, but in the current financial climate that's an impossibility.
        DangitBobby 6y ago
        Access codes that cannot be purchased independent of a textbook. The fact that these companies structure their "products" that way bothers me less than the fact that universities allow their students to be exploited by it. Learning that they don't actually care about my personal or financial wellbeing really disillusioned me to the whole college education system.
        lonelappde 6y ago
        Using a Pearson-controlled compu-text is a very simple sign that the professor or administration (whoever has decision making power) is terrible and not worth attending.
        saagarjha 6y ago
        That’s all well and good until you realize that the class is a graduation requirement and it’s not going to improve anytime soon.
      - bransonf 6y ago
        Nearly every single one. In college, I probably used close to a dozen different web applications for assignments. Math, chemistry, engineering, biology, Spanish. I can't remember the name of the web app for my calculus homework, but this was the only one I kind of liked, and ironically it was free. I think it might have been webwork. And in a CS class we used Perusal, which I liked as well, but the grading was an awful black box. The others cost several hundred dollars, sometimes per semester. I remember the immense frustration of my Spanish professor, who sent an email to their support at least once a week. Their answer was always "We only support Firefox" That did not stop dozens of students from using Chrome and Safari, myself included. I remember once getting frustrated with the homework, so I wrote a little JavaScript to brute force a question. The security was generally awful. My fondest memory was using Github to submit assignments, and later as a TA to grade these assignments. Much less friction. Obviously, I think college professors are looking for a way to reduce their burden of creating assignments and grading, but these education giants put out poor quality apps, knowing they'll generate revenue regardless. Frankly, I think there needs to be a widespread effort to open source education. Both content and assignments. There is no justification to charge tens of thousands in tuition and top this off with a few more thousand in jank software.
        MattGaiser 6y ago
        Open source is never going to be good enough for non-technicals in institutions. They want the support contracts, nice installers, and good UIs. They want an answered RFP which proves that it meets some 200 requirements. They want someone they can just pass a support issue off to.
        dylz 6y ago
        mymathlab is the antithesis of good UI
        MattGaiser 6y ago
        You have to compare it to GIMP.
        6y ago
  - vulcan01 6y ago
    Funnily enough, I think that they are running on AWS Lambda.
  - zackbloom 6y ago
    They actually did, many of the errors students have been experienced are with Amazon’s Lambda product.
    - joncrane 6y ago
      They mean "Amazon should run" the exams, not "they should have built their exam submission infrastructure using AWS." Lambda is part of Amazon's Cloud Computing subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is a utility like DigitalOcean or any hosting provider. It's not some kind of guaranteed success strategy.
      - artificial 6y ago
        This made me smile. AWS is now the new Microsoft in the sense that "nobody got fired for picking AWS" or like the gold plated cables at Big Box Store to the less informed. MoAr BeTtAR.
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      Amazon Lambda is basically like a part though. I mean contracting Amazon to build the system and operate it. Wasn't the Lambda error a resource limit one?
dehrmann 6y ago
Looks like they're not preparing for it well, but I'm sure there's going to be more cheating than usual this time around. I bet there will be some oddities in score distribution and students with unimpressive SAT score who suddenly nailed AP Calculus.
- x0x0 6y ago
  I think Calculus is actually one of the most robust tests to googling. You either understand the material well enough to apply it, perhaps with a quick reminder of eg a particular trig substitution, or you don't. Using my previous example, you're not going to learn either recognize a trig substitution is appropriate or how to apply a trig substitution in the 3 minutes or whatever you have per question. edit: NM, I forgot wolfram alpha. oof.
  - jedieaston 6y ago
    It’s a single FRQ, which must be completed in 45 minutes and you get a calculator. I think if it’s a typical AP calc question, you’d have enough time to reference stuff.
  - HeavenFox 6y ago
    AP Calculus allows you to bring a graphing calculator, and one of the approved calculator was the TI Nspire CAS, which has a very sophisticated computer algebra system that can do a lot of the things wolfram alpha can - like calculating the antiderivative. So you might be overestimating how much advantage wolfram alpha can confer :)
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      There are certain sections where calculator use is not permitted, however.
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    But take-home tests are some of the least robust to pinch hitting.
- 6y ago
jackson1442 6y ago
I took the AP Chem exam last Thursday, fortunately without incident. One of my friends was unable to submit his AP Literature assessment, facing the same error popup that has plagued so many of the other students. I've heard from several other students in my district that have had a similar problem. My brother had an AWS Lambda error message when he tried to access his exam the first time; CollegeBoard had surpassed their Lambda service limits (Fortunately he was able to access his exam after trying again). Their online tooling has never been great–AP Classroom takes at least 3 tries for me to access, one to log in again which then redirects back to AP Central, one that just redirects back to AP Central, then finally one that takes me to my assignments page. This certainly isn't an easy problem to solve. CollegeBoard definitely should have designed a more stable system to host their exams on, but as with anything digital, there's always an opportunity for error–even moreso since everyone takes the exam at the same time (which is an entirely different can of worms, with students in Guam taking exams at 1a, 3a, and 5a). If I were to design these assessments, I'd have it be an untimed, synthesis-based assessment, more similar to AP Computer Science Principles[0], with their Digital Portfolio. Simply having a deadline for all students to upload to a basic tool (which already exists as CB's Digital Portfolio system). Like the current exam, have the submissions sent back to teachers for validation (there's nothing on the current system that validates your identity, simply paste in your AP ID and enter your name/dob, and you're in the system). I think if a student can write a well-formed essay over a topic, they can get college credit. In science classes, they could design an experiment and simulate a lab report. CS classes can create a program, etc. [0]: https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-computer-science-principles/exam https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-computer-scien...
- joncrane 6y ago
  I wouldn't be shocked if College Board just signed up AWS ProServe to a big contract. If not, details in profile, College Board!
- entee 6y ago
  I agree to a certain extent on your revised assessment framework, but I’m not sure it would work very well in some of the basic sciences. As someone who has gone to college for these things and beyond, I can tell you there’s very little as a “practicum” that I could have demonstrated coming out of high school or early college. This is in contrast to CS, where if you build a program, the fact that the program exists and solves a given problem correctly is ipso facto a demonstration of understanding. Further, it’s a demonstration of fairly comprehensive understanding of the coursework (you’d have to grasp >80% to have the program work at all), which I have trouble seeing how to do that in say, chemistry. You propose a lab report, with example data, and I actually really like that idea, but I think it would fail on that last score. Looking back, AP chem is a lot of inorganic reactions (lots of memorization, some principles), acid base work, some organic chem, some lab techniques. It’s fairly scattered. A single (or several) lab reports would not capture all of it, especially given that chemistry doesn’t work perfectly predictably even with a post-graduate understanding. There’s a reason basic science lab courses do boring experiments, it’s because those work reliably. Anyway, I like the idea, and want to hear more on how to do it, but a lab report would have to be supplemented by something else to really evaluate understanding in the sciences.
MattGaiser 6y ago
In the information age, we are going to need an alternative to testing merely information in an easy to grade way.
bnj 6y ago
Are colleges even going to accept high scores on these exams for credit / advanced placement? It's a shame the college board decided to go through all this instead of refunding the fees they collected from students, especially when the value proposition on the students' side is uncertain. Add in behavior like "posting content to confuse and deter those who attempt to cheat" when internet research during the exam is not actually a violation of their rules, and the organization starts to look fairly predatory.
- abdullahkhalids 6y ago
  Cambridge International Examinations (UK based high school board for O/A levels) is giving students grades on their O/A levels based on the grades they got in their last few internal school exams [1]. Universities will pretty have to accept them if they want a reasonable intake of students. [1] https://www.cambridgeinternational.org/covid/ https://www.cambridgeinternational.org/covid/
  - Gaelan 6y ago
    In the US, AP tests aren't really used for admissions—that primarily falls on the SAT/ACT, GPA and the more subjective things (essay, rec letters, etc). AP tests mainly are just for the college credit.
- applecrazy 6y ago
  I believe the College Board surveyed universities on whether they’d take these virtual exams for credit. Most institutions said yes. edit: really? respond instead of downvoting.
- TAForObvReasons 6y ago
  Some schools don't just accept the scores as-is. After getting a 5 on AP Chem, I had to pass another entrance exam and take a freshman organic chem class to get the AP credit
  - brewdad 6y ago
abhisuri97 6y ago
https://www.reddit.com/u/dinosauce313 https://www.reddit.com/u/dinosauce313 for reference.
eanzenberg 6y ago
Honeypotting minors is so unethical I don’t know where to begin. These kids’ futures could’ve been completely fucked
- catalogia 6y ago
  While honeypotting teenagers does seem kind of fucked up, it's not the honeypotting that would have been screwing over the kids trying to use reddit to cheat on their exams. That's very much a "hoist with their own petard" scenario.
- elliekelly 6y ago
  It also bothers me that they cancelled exams of students they said had planned to cheat. The College Board should have given them an opportunity to take the exam and see if they participated in the cheat chats before cancelling their score. In my mind thinking about cheating, researching ways to cheat, and even planning on cheating isn’t the same as actually cheating. Anxious kids who are studying do all kinds of dumb stuff and joining a subreddit of potential cheaters doesn’t necessarily mean the student is a cheater. You have to give someone - especially a kid - the opportunity to do the right thing.
  - vulcan01 6y ago
    Yeah. What if those kids just joined the subreddit for fun, and didn't actually plan on using it?
- intopieces 6y ago
  These are Advanced Placement tests for college credit. Nothing future fucking about it.
  - eanzenberg 6y ago
    Cheating in higher education is a serious offense. Think loss of scholarships, failed classes the kill your gpa, expulsion.
vulcan01 6y ago
Found the below on the CollegeBoard website today [1]. Only effective for the second week of AP exams. > Students with an unsuccessful submission will see instructions about how to email their response on the page that says, “We Did Not Receive Your Response.” The email address that appears will be unique to each student. [1]: https://apcoronavirusupdates.collegeboard.org/faqs https://apcoronavirusupdates.collegeboard.org/faqs
nickysielicki 6y ago
If you think abstractly about pedagogy as a social science, it's very obvious from seeing how much education is struggling with cheating that the field has had zero progress in the past century. We need to stop conflating social development, socialized childcare, and education systems. Here's my shitlist: * Children should attempt hard problems that they can make progress on, but probably cannot solve. It is wrong that schools give nearly zero exposure to truly hard problems, and plenty of exposure to trivilally solvable problems. And no, making them tease out the meaning of a word-problem doesn't qualify as difficulty. I mean give them a problem that makes them find a wikipedia page and learn on their own. * Computers are here to stay. I remember when I was little, I was told that I wouldn't always have a calculator on me. That is demonstrably false, I literally do not go anywhere without a computer in my pocket. Furthermore, that computer has a WolframAlpha app that can interface with server clusters running the most advanced computer algebra systems in existence. Why did I learn stoichiometry? There is something deeply wrong with education if students could easily pass an AP Physics exam with access to WolframAlpha, and will (probably) have access to WolframAlpha in every practical application of their AP physics education, but are artificially prevented from having access during the exam. Why don't the tests correspond to real-world application of the subject? Oh, it's more convenient for you to evaluate it this way? That's tough shit, figure it out. * Students should have an entire day dedicated to math, and then they should have an entire day dedicated to English, etc. Some students might get bored and tired, sure, because sometimes learning isn't pleasant. But over and over on this site we hear that successful developers are the people who are able to maintain focus for long periods of time on difficult problems. Why do students waste 35 minutes a day switching classrooms? * There is not enough differentiation of students. Advanced students have so much of their time wasted. The advanced 3rd graders should be hanging out with advanced 6th graders. The way that the education system is collapsing from cheating and going online-only is nothing short of exciting to me. A lot had to go wrong for us to get to this point -- answer banks exist because everyone uses the same textbook and the same curriculum. Cheating with other students exists because group-work is the natural state of humans. Students aren't excited about the work they do because they sense that there's a magical oracle on the internet with the solution to the simple problems they're solving. It's all going to fall apart and that's something to celebrate. The thing that I'm most afraid of is that Americans have lost the ability to take risks at aggregate and think radically about redesigning institutions. All of these problems that I'm talking about are just as bad in every other country in the world. Some country is going to figure it out and they're going to reap the rewards, and I'm afraid that America isn't brave enough anymore to be the first.
dylan604 6y ago
Even if they are, so what? Sure, time would probably be better spent making their online testing actually work. However, anti-cheating is always something these types of tests prepare for whether that's exam room monitoring or trying to protect their online exams. Setting up a honeypot to get students seems exactly like the lazy method these people would attempt.
- jedberg 6y ago
  Why is setting up a honeypot lazy? If they had been good at it it would have worked flawlessly. Just disqualify anyone who copy/pastes answers from the known shared workspace.
jedberg 6y ago
The college board was in a tough spot this year. They couldn't really cancel the exams -- Juniors need them for college admissions, and Seniors need them for college credit. But they also have to instill trust in the system. Which led them to them having claims on their website that the test was "uncheatable" and had "the highest level of integrity" while on other parts of their website claiming they had deployed extreme security measures to thwart cheating. At the end of the day I suspect the colleges will just accept the scores under the assumption that it would be poor form on their part to give the students a hard time about something they had no control over.
- Traster 6y ago
  I'm sorry this is just not true. They weren't in a tough spot at all. People who have to go and work in a warehouse for minimum wage with no PPE are in a tough spot. >But they also have to instill trust in the system. Yes, and I have to rob a bank to demonstrate I'm rich. What you're saying is that they're in a tough spot because they can profit from lying and chose to do so.
  - anoncareer0212 6y ago
    This is extremely combative and any message is lost through the tone. The first is a logical fallacy and the second is conspiratorial. What was the alternative, not offer exams?
    - Traster 6y ago
      If their exams can't be trusted they shouldn't be trying to instill trust in their exams. What you are suggesting is literally that they should commit fraud to hide their incompetence. The fact is the system they've created can't be trusted. So no, it's not an imperative for them to make people trust the system, it's the opposite. We all know full well that they aren't in a position to run the exams correctly, and yet rather than accepting that and working on ways to move forward without the exams, we've decided a consensual hallucination that the exams were fine is the best option. Oh, and screw the kids who couldn't submit the exams. It's more important that the the college admissions board has an easy life. And as if that's not crazy enough, the examiners have decided to try and entrap the students. If you don't see how insane that is - that more time is being spent trying to entrap sutdents, than to be honest about the veracity of the test results, you've really fallen off the deep end.
seemslegit 6y ago
I'm more curious how well the 'we made a whole new batch of tests under emergency time pressures so that students won't benefit from googling' claim holds up, I mean google certainly did its part here during the last decade by becoming less and less useful for finding answers to non SEOed questions and yet...
- MayorMonty 6y ago
  As a student who took 3 AP tests this week, it holds up well. The main weapon CollegeBoard leveraged is that these exams were only 45 minutes long. For example, AP Calculus had two questions: A 25-minute, and a 15-minute question, each with 9 or 10 parts. There simply just isn't enough time to Google anything. If you look at Google Trends data [0] you can see hilarious spikes in related terms during the exams, but if you didn't have a good handle on the material then you would just run of out time. [0]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&geo=US&q=derivative https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&geo=...
  - seemslegit 6y ago
    Is there a sample questionnaire online ? What about someone using Wolfram Alpha etc. ?
    - MayorMonty 6y ago
      https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/pdf/ap-2020exam-sample-questions-calculus-ab.pdf https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/pdf/ap-2020exam-sample-qu... The exams are designed with algebraic solvers in mind and typically, you don't actually find derivatives and integrals. Instead, they'll show you a graph or table instead of the equation itself. Typically students are allowed to use a TI N-spire CAS CX on their exams, which has a lot of the same capabilities as WolframAlpha.
willart4food 6y ago
r/entrapment
- ganstyles 6y ago
  No, making something available isn't entrapment.
kilroy_jones 6y ago
At what point do we stop wasting time and energy trying to build better tools to catch cheaters and start focusing on building a better system of education and assessment? If a kid can cheat, pass, get a degree and go out and not fail in the real world, what does that say about the validity of the tests? Even futher, what does that say about the world we live in?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- WalterBright 6y ago
  > If a kid can cheat, pass, get a degree and go out and not fail in the real world I've known many cheaters (they tend to brag about it). The ones that do good work don't need to cheat, and the cheaters don't stop cheating once they graduate. Who'd you rather work for / hire / trust with your money: 1. a cheater 2. not a cheater ?
  - st1ck 6y ago
    In some countries it's pretty normal and expected for students to cheat in school, but after they find a job where they are treated with trust and respect and given real-world problems to solve, absolute majority will stop playing tricks.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      If they have to cheat to solve the toy academic problems, how are they going to solve real problems?
      - AareyBaba 6y ago
        They become managers and hire other people to solve the problem.
      - saagarjha 6y ago
        Well, toy academic problems often have no relevance to real problems.
nearmuse 6y ago
Tests should have been stretched in time and spread across classrooms to have smaller groups of people to practice social distancing, not be administered online; it is a cheatfest.
mleonhard 6y ago
Why does the exam throw out all the student's answers if they fail to click the final button? It should just record each answer as they go. Then, if their computer dies or their Internet connection fails, at least they can get graded for the questions they successfully answered so far. The UX design is broken.

225 points by hhs 6y ago

On a related note, I've seen multiple posts online about technical difficulties with online AP tests like videos from students trying to press the submit button as the countdown timer is almost to zero and nothing happening. Some claimed they contacted College Board and were told they'd have to troubleshoot their computers during the makeup exam. That seems unreasonable for such an expensive test.

MattGaiser 6y ago
They should have Amazon run the exams. They are the one tech company committed to their services actually working when needed.
- schoolornot 6y ago
  They outsource their certification exams to Pearson and PSI. Both platforms are riddled with bugs.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    Oh, the education giants are horrible.
    - applecrazy 6y ago
      As a college student, don’t even get me started on Pearson/Cengage. Terrible UX, horrible glitches, and the “access codes” which only exist to shake down students for money and undermine the used textbook market.
      - MattGaiser 6y ago
        Was you just a couple of years ago...
      - HarryHirsch 6y ago
        Complain to your university. We outsource grading the weekly portion of homework to Pearson because there is no money for TA's. The alternative would be a fulltime position to administer a LONCAPA instance for the institution, but in the current financial climate that's an impossibility.
      - DangitBobby 6y ago
        Access codes that cannot be purchased independent of a textbook. The fact that these companies structure their "products" that way bothers me less than the fact that universities allow their students to be exploited by it. Learning that they don't actually care about my personal or financial wellbeing really disillusioned me to the whole college education system.
        lonelappde 6y ago
        Using a Pearson-controlled compu-text is a very simple sign that the professor or administration (whoever has decision making power) is terrible and not worth attending.
        saagarjha 6y ago
        That’s all well and good until you realize that the class is a graduation requirement and it’s not going to improve anytime soon.
    - bransonf 6y ago
      Nearly every single one. In college, I probably used close to a dozen different web applications for assignments. Math, chemistry, engineering, biology, Spanish. I can't remember the name of the web app for my calculus homework, but this was the only one I kind of liked, and ironically it was free. I think it might have been webwork. And in a CS class we used Perusal, which I liked as well, but the grading was an awful black box. The others cost several hundred dollars, sometimes per semester. I remember the immense frustration of my Spanish professor, who sent an email to their support at least once a week. Their answer was always "We only support Firefox" That did not stop dozens of students from using Chrome and Safari, myself included. I remember once getting frustrated with the homework, so I wrote a little JavaScript to brute force a question. The security was generally awful. My fondest memory was using Github to submit assignments, and later as a TA to grade these assignments. Much less friction. Obviously, I think college professors are looking for a way to reduce their burden of creating assignments and grading, but these education giants put out poor quality apps, knowing they'll generate revenue regardless. Frankly, I think there needs to be a widespread effort to open source education. Both content and assignments. There is no justification to charge tens of thousands in tuition and top this off with a few more thousand in jank software.
      - MattGaiser 6y ago
        Open source is never going to be good enough for non-technicals in institutions. They want the support contracts, nice installers, and good UIs. They want an answered RFP which proves that it meets some 200 requirements. They want someone they can just pass a support issue off to.
        dylz 6y ago
        mymathlab is the antithesis of good UI
        MattGaiser 6y ago
        You have to compare it to GIMP.
        6y ago
- vulcan01 6y ago
  Funnily enough, I think that they are running on AWS Lambda.
- zackbloom 6y ago
  They actually did, many of the errors students have been experienced are with Amazon’s Lambda product.
  - joncrane 6y ago
    They mean "Amazon should run" the exams, not "they should have built their exam submission infrastructure using AWS." Lambda is part of Amazon's Cloud Computing subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is a utility like DigitalOcean or any hosting provider. It's not some kind of guaranteed success strategy.
    - artificial 6y ago
      This made me smile. AWS is now the new Microsoft in the sense that "nobody got fired for picking AWS" or like the gold plated cables at Big Box Store to the less informed. MoAr BeTtAR.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    Amazon Lambda is basically like a part though. I mean contracting Amazon to build the system and operate it. Wasn't the Lambda error a resource limit one?

dehrmann 6y ago

Looks like they're not preparing for it well, but I'm sure there's going to be more cheating than usual this time around. I bet there will be some oddities in score distribution and students with unimpressive SAT score who suddenly nailed AP Calculus.

x0x0 6y ago
I think Calculus is actually one of the most robust tests to googling. You either understand the material well enough to apply it, perhaps with a quick reminder of eg a particular trig substitution, or you don't. Using my previous example, you're not going to learn either recognize a trig substitution is appropriate or how to apply a trig substitution in the 3 minutes or whatever you have per question. edit: NM, I forgot wolfram alpha. oof.
- jedieaston 6y ago
  It’s a single FRQ, which must be completed in 45 minutes and you get a calculator. I think if it’s a typical AP calc question, you’d have enough time to reference stuff.
- HeavenFox 6y ago
  AP Calculus allows you to bring a graphing calculator, and one of the approved calculator was the TI Nspire CAS, which has a very sophisticated computer algebra system that can do a lot of the things wolfram alpha can - like calculating the antiderivative. So you might be overestimating how much advantage wolfram alpha can confer :)
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    There are certain sections where calculator use is not permitted, however.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  But take-home tests are some of the least robust to pinch hitting.
6y ago

jackson1442 6y ago

I took the AP Chem exam last Thursday, fortunately without incident. One of my friends was unable to submit his AP Literature assessment, facing the same error popup that has plagued so many of the other students. I've heard from several other students in my district that have had a similar problem. My brother had an AWS Lambda error message when he tried to access his exam the first time; CollegeBoard had surpassed their Lambda service limits (Fortunately he was able to access his exam after trying again). Their online tooling has never been great–AP Classroom takes at least 3 tries for me to access, one to log in again which then redirects back to AP Central, one that just redirects back to AP Central, then finally one that takes me to my assignments page. This certainly isn't an easy problem to solve. CollegeBoard definitely should have designed a more stable system to host their exams on, but as with anything digital, there's always an opportunity for error–even moreso since everyone takes the exam at the same time (which is an entirely different can of worms, with students in Guam taking exams at 1a, 3a, and 5a). If I were to design these assessments, I'd have it be an untimed, synthesis-based assessment, more similar to AP Computer Science Principles[0], with their Digital Portfolio. Simply having a deadline for all students to upload to a basic tool (which already exists as CB's Digital Portfolio system). Like the current exam, have the submissions sent back to teachers for validation (there's nothing on the current system that validates your identity, simply paste in your AP ID and enter your name/dob, and you're in the system). I think if a student can write a well-formed essay over a topic, they can get college credit. In science classes, they could design an experiment and simulate a lab report. CS classes can create a program, etc. [0]: https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-computer-science-principles/exam https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-computer-scien...

joncrane 6y ago
I wouldn't be shocked if College Board just signed up AWS ProServe to a big contract. If not, details in profile, College Board!
entee 6y ago
I agree to a certain extent on your revised assessment framework, but I’m not sure it would work very well in some of the basic sciences. As someone who has gone to college for these things and beyond, I can tell you there’s very little as a “practicum” that I could have demonstrated coming out of high school or early college. This is in contrast to CS, where if you build a program, the fact that the program exists and solves a given problem correctly is ipso facto a demonstration of understanding. Further, it’s a demonstration of fairly comprehensive understanding of the coursework (you’d have to grasp >80% to have the program work at all), which I have trouble seeing how to do that in say, chemistry. You propose a lab report, with example data, and I actually really like that idea, but I think it would fail on that last score. Looking back, AP chem is a lot of inorganic reactions (lots of memorization, some principles), acid base work, some organic chem, some lab techniques. It’s fairly scattered. A single (or several) lab reports would not capture all of it, especially given that chemistry doesn’t work perfectly predictably even with a post-graduate understanding. There’s a reason basic science lab courses do boring experiments, it’s because those work reliably. Anyway, I like the idea, and want to hear more on how to do it, but a lab report would have to be supplemented by something else to really evaluate understanding in the sciences.

MattGaiser 6y ago

In the information age, we are going to need an alternative to testing merely information in an easy to grade way.

bnj 6y ago

Are colleges even going to accept high scores on these exams for credit / advanced placement? It's a shame the college board decided to go through all this instead of refunding the fees they collected from students, especially when the value proposition on the students' side is uncertain. Add in behavior like "posting content to confuse and deter those who attempt to cheat" when internet research during the exam is not actually a violation of their rules, and the organization starts to look fairly predatory.

abdullahkhalids 6y ago
Cambridge International Examinations (UK based high school board for O/A levels) is giving students grades on their O/A levels based on the grades they got in their last few internal school exams [1]. Universities will pretty have to accept them if they want a reasonable intake of students. [1] https://www.cambridgeinternational.org/covid/ https://www.cambridgeinternational.org/covid/
- Gaelan 6y ago
  In the US, AP tests aren't really used for admissions—that primarily falls on the SAT/ACT, GPA and the more subjective things (essay, rec letters, etc). AP tests mainly are just for the college credit.
applecrazy 6y ago
I believe the College Board surveyed universities on whether they’d take these virtual exams for credit. Most institutions said yes. edit: really? respond instead of downvoting.
TAForObvReasons 6y ago
Some schools don't just accept the scores as-is. After getting a 5 on AP Chem, I had to pass another entrance exam and take a freshman organic chem class to get the AP credit
- brewdad 6y ago

abhisuri97 6y ago

https://www.reddit.com/u/dinosauce313 https://www.reddit.com/u/dinosauce313 for reference.

eanzenberg 6y ago

Honeypotting minors is so unethical I don’t know where to begin. These kids’ futures could’ve been completely fucked

catalogia 6y ago
While honeypotting teenagers does seem kind of fucked up, it's not the honeypotting that would have been screwing over the kids trying to use reddit to cheat on their exams. That's very much a "hoist with their own petard" scenario.
elliekelly 6y ago
It also bothers me that they cancelled exams of students they said had planned to cheat. The College Board should have given them an opportunity to take the exam and see if they participated in the cheat chats before cancelling their score. In my mind thinking about cheating, researching ways to cheat, and even planning on cheating isn’t the same as actually cheating. Anxious kids who are studying do all kinds of dumb stuff and joining a subreddit of potential cheaters doesn’t necessarily mean the student is a cheater. You have to give someone - especially a kid - the opportunity to do the right thing.
- vulcan01 6y ago
  Yeah. What if those kids just joined the subreddit for fun, and didn't actually plan on using it?
intopieces 6y ago
These are Advanced Placement tests for college credit. Nothing future fucking about it.
- eanzenberg 6y ago
  Cheating in higher education is a serious offense. Think loss of scholarships, failed classes the kill your gpa, expulsion.

vulcan01 6y ago

Found the below on the CollegeBoard website today [1]. Only effective for the second week of AP exams. > Students with an unsuccessful submission will see instructions about how to email their response on the page that says, “We Did Not Receive Your Response.” The email address that appears will be unique to each student. [1]: https://apcoronavirusupdates.collegeboard.org/faqs https://apcoronavirusupdates.collegeboard.org/faqs

nickysielicki 6y ago

If you think abstractly about pedagogy as a social science, it's very obvious from seeing how much education is struggling with cheating that the field has had zero progress in the past century. We need to stop conflating social development, socialized childcare, and education systems. Here's my shitlist: * Children should attempt hard problems that they can make progress on, but probably cannot solve. It is wrong that schools give nearly zero exposure to truly hard problems, and plenty of exposure to trivilally solvable problems. And no, making them tease out the meaning of a word-problem doesn't qualify as difficulty. I mean give them a problem that makes them find a wikipedia page and learn on their own. * Computers are here to stay. I remember when I was little, I was told that I wouldn't always have a calculator on me. That is demonstrably false, I literally do not go anywhere without a computer in my pocket. Furthermore, that computer has a WolframAlpha app that can interface with server clusters running the most advanced computer algebra systems in existence. Why did I learn stoichiometry? There is something deeply wrong with education if students could easily pass an AP Physics exam with access to WolframAlpha, and will (probably) have access to WolframAlpha in every practical application of their AP physics education, but are artificially prevented from having access during the exam. Why don't the tests correspond to real-world application of the subject? Oh, it's more convenient for you to evaluate it this way? That's tough shit, figure it out. * Students should have an entire day dedicated to math, and then they should have an entire day dedicated to English, etc. Some students might get bored and tired, sure, because sometimes learning isn't pleasant. But over and over on this site we hear that successful developers are the people who are able to maintain focus for long periods of time on difficult problems. Why do students waste 35 minutes a day switching classrooms? * There is not enough differentiation of students. Advanced students have so much of their time wasted. The advanced 3rd graders should be hanging out with advanced 6th graders. The way that the education system is collapsing from cheating and going online-only is nothing short of exciting to me. A lot had to go wrong for us to get to this point -- answer banks exist because everyone uses the same textbook and the same curriculum. Cheating with other students exists because group-work is the natural state of humans. Students aren't excited about the work they do because they sense that there's a magical oracle on the internet with the solution to the simple problems they're solving. It's all going to fall apart and that's something to celebrate. The thing that I'm most afraid of is that Americans have lost the ability to take risks at aggregate and think radically about redesigning institutions. All of these problems that I'm talking about are just as bad in every other country in the world. Some country is going to figure it out and they're going to reap the rewards, and I'm afraid that America isn't brave enough anymore to be the first.

dylan604 6y ago

Even if they are, so what? Sure, time would probably be better spent making their online testing actually work. However, anti-cheating is always something these types of tests prepare for whether that's exam room monitoring or trying to protect their online exams. Setting up a honeypot to get students seems exactly like the lazy method these people would attempt.

jedberg 6y ago
Why is setting up a honeypot lazy? If they had been good at it it would have worked flawlessly. Just disqualify anyone who copy/pastes answers from the known shared workspace.

jedberg 6y ago

The college board was in a tough spot this year. They couldn't really cancel the exams -- Juniors need them for college admissions, and Seniors need them for college credit. But they also have to instill trust in the system. Which led them to them having claims on their website that the test was "uncheatable" and had "the highest level of integrity" while on other parts of their website claiming they had deployed extreme security measures to thwart cheating. At the end of the day I suspect the colleges will just accept the scores under the assumption that it would be poor form on their part to give the students a hard time about something they had no control over.

Traster 6y ago
I'm sorry this is just not true. They weren't in a tough spot at all. People who have to go and work in a warehouse for minimum wage with no PPE are in a tough spot. >But they also have to instill trust in the system. Yes, and I have to rob a bank to demonstrate I'm rich. What you're saying is that they're in a tough spot because they can profit from lying and chose to do so.
- anoncareer0212 6y ago
  This is extremely combative and any message is lost through the tone. The first is a logical fallacy and the second is conspiratorial. What was the alternative, not offer exams?
  - Traster 6y ago
    If their exams can't be trusted they shouldn't be trying to instill trust in their exams. What you are suggesting is literally that they should commit fraud to hide their incompetence. The fact is the system they've created can't be trusted. So no, it's not an imperative for them to make people trust the system, it's the opposite. We all know full well that they aren't in a position to run the exams correctly, and yet rather than accepting that and working on ways to move forward without the exams, we've decided a consensual hallucination that the exams were fine is the best option. Oh, and screw the kids who couldn't submit the exams. It's more important that the the college admissions board has an easy life. And as if that's not crazy enough, the examiners have decided to try and entrap the students. If you don't see how insane that is - that more time is being spent trying to entrap sutdents, than to be honest about the veracity of the test results, you've really fallen off the deep end.

seemslegit 6y ago

I'm more curious how well the 'we made a whole new batch of tests under emergency time pressures so that students won't benefit from googling' claim holds up, I mean google certainly did its part here during the last decade by becoming less and less useful for finding answers to non SEOed questions and yet...

MayorMonty 6y ago
As a student who took 3 AP tests this week, it holds up well. The main weapon CollegeBoard leveraged is that these exams were only 45 minutes long. For example, AP Calculus had two questions: A 25-minute, and a 15-minute question, each with 9 or 10 parts. There simply just isn't enough time to Google anything. If you look at Google Trends data [0] you can see hilarious spikes in related terms during the exams, but if you didn't have a good handle on the material then you would just run of out time. [0]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&geo=US&q=derivative https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&geo=...
- seemslegit 6y ago
  Is there a sample questionnaire online ? What about someone using Wolfram Alpha etc. ?
  - MayorMonty 6y ago
    https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/pdf/ap-2020exam-sample-questions-calculus-ab.pdf https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/pdf/ap-2020exam-sample-qu... The exams are designed with algebraic solvers in mind and typically, you don't actually find derivatives and integrals. Instead, they'll show you a graph or table instead of the equation itself. Typically students are allowed to use a TI N-spire CAS CX on their exams, which has a lot of the same capabilities as WolframAlpha.

willart4food 6y ago

r/entrapment

ganstyles 6y ago
No, making something available isn't entrapment.

kilroy_jones 6y ago

At what point do we stop wasting time and energy trying to build better tools to catch cheaters and start focusing on building a better system of education and assessment? If a kid can cheat, pass, get a degree and go out and not fail in the real world, what does that say about the validity of the tests? Even futher, what does that say about the world we live in?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
WalterBright 6y ago
> If a kid can cheat, pass, get a degree and go out and not fail in the real world I've known many cheaters (they tend to brag about it). The ones that do good work don't need to cheat, and the cheaters don't stop cheating once they graduate. Who'd you rather work for / hire / trust with your money: 1. a cheater 2. not a cheater ?
- st1ck 6y ago
  In some countries it's pretty normal and expected for students to cheat in school, but after they find a job where they are treated with trust and respect and given real-world problems to solve, absolute majority will stop playing tricks.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    If they have to cheat to solve the toy academic problems, how are they going to solve real problems?
    - AareyBaba 6y ago
      They become managers and hire other people to solve the problem.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      Well, toy academic problems often have no relevance to real problems.

nearmuse 6y ago

Tests should have been stretched in time and spread across classrooms to have smaller groups of people to practice social distancing, not be administered online; it is a cheatfest.

mleonhard 6y ago

Why does the exam throw out all the student's answers if they fail to click the final button? It should just record each answer as they go. Then, if their computer dies or their Internet connection fails, at least they can get graded for the questions they successfully answered so far. The UX design is broken.