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It's actually very disappointing that this whole monitoring system was deemed necessary to begin with. How screwed is the system that anyone one would believe t

• buran77 6y ago
  It's just another tool to internalize the discrimination. As long as nobody hits both them and their clients hard, holding them responsible for building the tool as such, for choosing it, or for continuing to use it knowing the issues, there's no incentive for anyone to do better. 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-racist-algorithms-to-detect-faces https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5gxg3/proctorio-is-using-ra... https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/28/22254631/university-of-illinois-urbana-champaign-proctorio-online-test-proctoring-privacy https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/28/22254631/university-of-il... https://twitter.com/uhreeb/status/1303139738065481728 https://twitter.com/uhreeb/status/1303139738065481728 https://twitter.com/cmg/status/1304593597338185730 https://twitter.com/cmg/status/1304593597338185730
• mkl 6y ago
  When you've seen exam-sitting-for-hire in action, you believe it. Most students are honest and genuinely want to learn, and the few that are dishonest cause everyone to be subjected to this. It sucks for everyone, students and staff.
  • necovek 6y ago
    Which does not make tracking everyone a solution to the problem of cheating in exams. 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?
    • jasonjayr 6y ago
      While I despise software like this and how high-stakes and petty it can be, keep in mind that it's in the institution's interests to not only provide a quality education, but to defend the value of their brand. 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.
      • Angostura 6y ago
        It's not even the value of their brand - it's the value of all students' diplomas
        • hhjinks 6y ago
          Universities don't give a shit about that. And they shouldn't. A lot of diplomas are worthless, but that doesn't make the education worthless.
      • christophilus 6y ago
        Requiring distopian spyware doesn’t weaken your brand. It destroys it. For most of history, reputable universities built their brand just fine without any software at all.
        • devenblake 6y ago
          Totally agree. I personally chose not to go to college (I'm graduating HS this year) because of things like Proctorio and Zoom becoming more common.
          • distances 6y ago
            Honestly, it's fine to not choose higher education but IMHO use of surveillance methods should affect where you apply, not whether you apply.
  • warlog 6y ago
    It doesn't seem to suck for higher admin types...they treat the student like a customer and therefore never expel them for cheating. System is broken because of incentives (of course).
  • xoudini 6y ago
    I'm not familiar with the software in question, but I'm quite sure it'd still be possible to have someone else to sit your exam. For instance, you could have an external webcam pointed at yourself, and have someone else in front of your computer writing the actual exam. Maybe even mirror the display so that you can see what your accomplice is doing.
    • splix 6y ago
      I had experience having an exam with the proctorio. And I see many ways how it can be cheated, at least technically. They also say they monitor your head and eyes movements, which is supposed to show something unnatural if you're cheating. Though I'm not sure it's really possible, and maybe just a security theater.
  • lstepnio 6y ago
    I think you would be surprised on the high percentage of students that will cheat, given the opportunity with as low risk profile such as remote learning.
    • m-ee 6y ago
      My university had an honor system, proctors were explicitly not allowed in the room during the test except to make announcements. Worked well enough as far as I know. Cheating was dealt with harshly when reported.
  • Turing_Machine 6y ago
    Most people don't smuggle drugs in their rectums, but the few that do cause everyone to be subjected to random rectal cavity searches?
• vanviegen 6y ago
  I don't like proctorio, but in situations where it is really necessary for students to demonstrate a certain level of knowledge (think: medicine), I just don't see a reasonable alternative to online proctoring, given the circumstances. Why would you say that this is evidence of a 'screwed' system?
  • DocTomoe 6y ago
    In the past, we solved this problem by not having online proctoring, we had exams in front of a board. Maybe if the necessity of such demonstrations is paramount, doing them online is not the correct answer.
    • koonsolo 6y ago
      I guess this is a consequence of the Covid pandemic, where such a thing is not allowed at the moment.
      • DocTomoe 6y ago
        The software - problematic as it is - is older than the pandemic. Also, maybe if you cannot reliably proctor exams, the solution should not be to use a highly-invasive, potentially problem-causing software, but to cancel the exams and the academic year until the pandemic is over. After all, if you cannot give exams, students also were not able to take part in studies to the same extend as before (e.g. library and/or lab access would probably be limited)
        • vanviegen 6y ago
          The software is indeed older than Covid, but its common usage by widely respected schools is not. 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.
          • DocTomoe 6y ago
• leetcrew 6y ago
  cheating was absolutely rampant when I was in college getting my CS degree. and that was with tests taken in person with the professor in the room! I'm sure students are even more brazen when all assignments are done at home. 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?
  • lostcolony 6y ago
    With a CS degree a better solution is make it project based. Even if someone uses code found somewhere, just changing it up to not be obvious, that's not that different than actual industry, AND means they had to understand it at some level. And that's for stuff they -can- search for (such as 'implement a data structure/algorithm').
    • Turing_Machine 6y ago
      This is the answer. 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.
      • professoretc 6y ago
        > actual work for the teaching staff 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.
        • lostcolony 6y ago
          Speaking as someone who TAed a couple years: I much preferred grading projects to tests. 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.
• mschuster91 6y ago
  > How screwed is the system that anyone one would believe this level of intrusion should be part of the education process. 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.