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I'm a professor in the humanities so I can write tests that make it harder to cheat than some other fields. I cringe whenever I hear someone using these invasiv

I'm a professor in the humanities so I can write tests that make it harder to cheat than some other fields. I cringe whenever I hear someone using these invasive kinds of software. There has to be a better way than making students install spyware.

tomp 6y ago
> I can write tests that make it harder to cheat than some other fields This might be my prejudice speaking (I studied math) but isn't this basically because grading is that much more subjective? So it would cut both ways, harder to cheat but also less objective / impartial assuming no cheating.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  My university does a lot of oral math exams. After failing 3 times you have the option for an oral test as a last chance and people do indeed fail math in large numbers. I was on the other side as an academic assistant for a few days (no role in testing) and I can tell you that oral math exams about algebra can be as hard as you want them to be, especially if you have problems with tests and get nervous. You have to take drugs against that. The prof I had was a bit of a dick but he was really good at measuring how well you understood the concepts and if you ware able to apply them to problems.
- jccalhoun 6y ago
  Not necessarily. I do a lot of questions that are here is a situation. What concept does this illustrate? Now sure, they can look up the definition of the concepts but they will still need to be able to identify how the concept relates to the situation.
ht_th 6y ago
Sure. Have at most ten to twenty students per teacher. Then the teacher can spend a couple of hours per student to assess their understanding. Unfortunately, in education quantity seems to be prioritized over quality. When you have over 50 students, let alone over 200 hundred, good luck grading authentic open-ended projects or papers in just two weeks. As a result, most tests consists of multiple-choice questions and standard-format open questions. It is unclear to what extent they test students' understanding, and students do become quite proficient test takers, but at least theses tests can be executed given the current constraints of available staff, acceptable rigor, and student expectations. Unfortunately, you cannot move these type of test to an online setting and expect students not to cheat at all. It is too easy to talk to classmates, look at the study materials, or even on the Internet for some hints to answers or even the actual answers. The only option many institutions saw was to move to a draconian proctoring solution because they just lack the means to roll-out anything else given the constraints they have to work with. Ideally, they would re-evaluate their choices regarding quality versus quantity, but because they need the large number of students to stay afloat, nothing meaningful will happen.
- ghaff 6y ago
  > Then the teacher can spend a couple of hours per student to assess their understanding. That sounds as if you're steering close to a whiteboarding interview which a lot of people will claim isn't great. Take home tests aren't perfect but I had plenty of them in school. And even when I didn't I don't think I had just about any engineering class that didn't assign problem sets that counted for a decent portion of your grade. If you can do take-home problem sets, you can do a take-home exam.
  - ht_th 6y ago
    Taking home exams or assignments are great, but they need to be assessed as well. Here too, the number of students is a limiting factor. With too many students, the best a teacher can do is summative assessment and generate a reasonable grade for the student. Personally, I think formative assessment is far superior to summative assessment, but formative assessment takes a lot of effort from the teacher. Often more than is allotted to her for assessement (or the whole course!). I was thinking more about a larger project or paper with quite a lot of freedom for the students that would take the teacher hours to get familiar with and give constructive formative feedback on. As part of that, an oral section to discuss the project and paper with the student would be great as well. In assessment, I would like the teacher and student to be partners rather than opponents. If a student understands the material, together they should be able to have a conversation where the student can reflect on her understanding and learning to the extent where the teacher can determine that the student has passed the course. Of course, if there is an intense interaction between the student and teacher throughout the course, the whole idea of a final assessment becomes pretty meaningless. I know, my ideas are a bit far-fetched and there are a lot of practicalities that are difficult to work out. But one can dream!
  - bzbarsky 6y ago
    > That sounds as if you're steering close to a whiteboarding interview which a lot of people will claim isn't great. One major difference is that unlike a whiteboarding interview there are presumably clear expectations as to what one is expected to have learned in the class and therefore what topics the discussion will cover, and at what depth. Another issue with whiteboarding interviews, specific to computer-related subjects, is being asked to write code on the whiteboard, which is a severely unnatural act in all sorts of ways compared to the way one normally writes code. But an in-person assessment in a proofs-based math class, for example, would not have that problem. Similar for a CS (as opposed to software engineering) class. And in a software engineering class, the concept of "test" is pretty odd, for the same reasons that whiteboarding interviews are; I'd expect longer-term projects to be closer to the right evaluation tool.
ebiester 6y ago
How many students do you have and what's your teaching load? I think that's another primary consideration. Teaching a 3/3 (or god forbid, a 4/4) with 30 students in each makes for a rough grading experience.
visiblink 6y ago
I haven't used any essay-checking or exam-taking software yet. Even so, based on what I've heard from my immediate superior, I'm flagging somewhere between 10-20% of all of the plagiarism and cheating cases in my faculty. It's not hard to detect (generally good writing mixed with bad on essays / the repetition of similar phrases by different students on exams), but it does take a bit of time to confirm and you need to write a some policy-consistent boilerplate to make it simple to take action. Some here have suggested that we need to write the equivalent of "open book" exams for the online environment. I'm not sure that would be beneficial. It's still important to exercise your mental faculties. People who can recall information and reason for themselves are still more valuable than those who can cut and paste. Or to put it another way, you need to understand the math in order to wield a calculator well.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  In a lot of disciplines, open book doesn’t help you solve problems all that much. It might supply some of the pieces required to solve problems, but the ability to remember all of those pieces by rote vs. looking them up is really orthogonal to the ability to apply them to solving a novel problem. Indeed the ability to find the requisite information to solve a problem in a timely manner is an important skill in itself and more accurately represents the real world problem solving one is preparing for.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

tomp 6y ago

> I can write tests that make it harder to cheat than some other fields This might be my prejudice speaking (I studied math) but isn't this basically because grading is that much more subjective? So it would cut both ways, harder to cheat but also less objective / impartial assuming no cheating.

raxxorrax 6y ago
My university does a lot of oral math exams. After failing 3 times you have the option for an oral test as a last chance and people do indeed fail math in large numbers. I was on the other side as an academic assistant for a few days (no role in testing) and I can tell you that oral math exams about algebra can be as hard as you want them to be, especially if you have problems with tests and get nervous. You have to take drugs against that. The prof I had was a bit of a dick but he was really good at measuring how well you understood the concepts and if you ware able to apply them to problems.
jccalhoun 6y ago
Not necessarily. I do a lot of questions that are here is a situation. What concept does this illustrate? Now sure, they can look up the definition of the concepts but they will still need to be able to identify how the concept relates to the situation.

ht_th 6y ago

Sure. Have at most ten to twenty students per teacher. Then the teacher can spend a couple of hours per student to assess their understanding. Unfortunately, in education quantity seems to be prioritized over quality. When you have over 50 students, let alone over 200 hundred, good luck grading authentic open-ended projects or papers in just two weeks. As a result, most tests consists of multiple-choice questions and standard-format open questions. It is unclear to what extent they test students' understanding, and students do become quite proficient test takers, but at least theses tests can be executed given the current constraints of available staff, acceptable rigor, and student expectations. Unfortunately, you cannot move these type of test to an online setting and expect students not to cheat at all. It is too easy to talk to classmates, look at the study materials, or even on the Internet for some hints to answers or even the actual answers. The only option many institutions saw was to move to a draconian proctoring solution because they just lack the means to roll-out anything else given the constraints they have to work with. Ideally, they would re-evaluate their choices regarding quality versus quantity, but because they need the large number of students to stay afloat, nothing meaningful will happen.

ghaff 6y ago
> Then the teacher can spend a couple of hours per student to assess their understanding. That sounds as if you're steering close to a whiteboarding interview which a lot of people will claim isn't great. Take home tests aren't perfect but I had plenty of them in school. And even when I didn't I don't think I had just about any engineering class that didn't assign problem sets that counted for a decent portion of your grade. If you can do take-home problem sets, you can do a take-home exam.
- ht_th 6y ago
  Taking home exams or assignments are great, but they need to be assessed as well. Here too, the number of students is a limiting factor. With too many students, the best a teacher can do is summative assessment and generate a reasonable grade for the student. Personally, I think formative assessment is far superior to summative assessment, but formative assessment takes a lot of effort from the teacher. Often more than is allotted to her for assessement (or the whole course!). I was thinking more about a larger project or paper with quite a lot of freedom for the students that would take the teacher hours to get familiar with and give constructive formative feedback on. As part of that, an oral section to discuss the project and paper with the student would be great as well. In assessment, I would like the teacher and student to be partners rather than opponents. If a student understands the material, together they should be able to have a conversation where the student can reflect on her understanding and learning to the extent where the teacher can determine that the student has passed the course. Of course, if there is an intense interaction between the student and teacher throughout the course, the whole idea of a final assessment becomes pretty meaningless. I know, my ideas are a bit far-fetched and there are a lot of practicalities that are difficult to work out. But one can dream!
- bzbarsky 6y ago
  > That sounds as if you're steering close to a whiteboarding interview which a lot of people will claim isn't great. One major difference is that unlike a whiteboarding interview there are presumably clear expectations as to what one is expected to have learned in the class and therefore what topics the discussion will cover, and at what depth. Another issue with whiteboarding interviews, specific to computer-related subjects, is being asked to write code on the whiteboard, which is a severely unnatural act in all sorts of ways compared to the way one normally writes code. But an in-person assessment in a proofs-based math class, for example, would not have that problem. Similar for a CS (as opposed to software engineering) class. And in a software engineering class, the concept of "test" is pretty odd, for the same reasons that whiteboarding interviews are; I'd expect longer-term projects to be closer to the right evaluation tool.

ebiester 6y ago

How many students do you have and what's your teaching load? I think that's another primary consideration. Teaching a 3/3 (or god forbid, a 4/4) with 30 students in each makes for a rough grading experience.

visiblink 6y ago

I haven't used any essay-checking or exam-taking software yet. Even so, based on what I've heard from my immediate superior, I'm flagging somewhere between 10-20% of all of the plagiarism and cheating cases in my faculty. It's not hard to detect (generally good writing mixed with bad on essays / the repetition of similar phrases by different students on exams), but it does take a bit of time to confirm and you need to write a some policy-consistent boilerplate to make it simple to take action. Some here have suggested that we need to write the equivalent of "open book" exams for the online environment. I'm not sure that would be beneficial. It's still important to exercise your mental faculties. People who can recall information and reason for themselves are still more valuable than those who can cut and paste. Or to put it another way, you need to understand the math in order to wield a calculator well.

colechristensen 6y ago
In a lot of disciplines, open book doesn’t help you solve problems all that much. It might supply some of the pieces required to solve problems, but the ability to remember all of those pieces by rote vs. looking them up is really orthogonal to the ability to apply them to solving a novel problem. Indeed the ability to find the requisite information to solve a problem in a timely manner is an important skill in itself and more accurately represents the real world problem solving one is preparing for.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]