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They should have just ignored this guy and gone on with life. Now the they got the EFF to deal with and it serves them right. There is another HN thread on thi
by jimmySixDOF 6y ago
They should have just ignored this guy and gone on with life. Now the they got the EFF to deal with and it serves them right.
There is another HN thread on this and a lot of people in it are more upset about the line of work Proctorio is in and how they do it than the fact they sued this minor irritating student. My opinion is there is simply no easy pain free way to do fraud auditing and that's that. I just recently took a professional PeopleCert exam online with a guy watching me through my webcam in a closed room I had to display in advance etc and temp installed some invasive application. So what ? If there was a better way to deal with the unfortunate fact that some people will cheat then I would be all for it but just getting all shook up about a temporary set of specific restrictions for a singular type milestone event is a little unrealistic in my book.
But I am glad suing this kid is blowing up in their face.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- moron4hire 6y agoMaybe catching a few cheaters here and there isn't worth implementing The Panopticon for everyone else.
- fastball 6y agoThe problem is that cheating (if allowed) does not end up being a few people here and there.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- moron4hire 6y agoEven if I were to believe you, so what? So a person gets a degree they don't deserve. Now they have all this student loan debt they can't pay off because they can't get and keep a job in their field because they didn't actually study. Or they do get a job and are able to keep it down, in which case, so what if they cheated? They're clearly capable. Let them keep doing the job. My solution: get rid of degrees completely. Can't cheat if there's no test to cheat on.
- wayne-li2 6y agoI actually agree with you here, our incentive structures are flawed for sure. The problem is, hiring is expensive, hiring mistakes are expensive, and new grads are a combination of “lack of signals” and “need lots of time to pan out”. The result is companies look for any possible signal - this more or less becomes a degree, and within the degree, the GPA. Thus incentivizing the student to get the degree with a high GPA by any means necessary, and companies will still give you a year to ramp up.
- UglyToad 6y agoI'm probably just agreeing with your agreement but being pedantic but. Isn't effectively the entire problem with university/college in the current age that instead of its original purpose it's treated as a hiring filter for companies. Shouldn't we do anything we can to disincentivize use of college degrees as a signal for hiring? Like, doing the job of software development a degree is completely irrelevant. Computer science degrees shouldn't be 4(?) year long coding bootcamps, they should be about computer science for people who are interested in computer science. (disclaimer I never did a computer science degree, I did chemistry but I felt the quality of the degree was similarly afflicted). Anything we can do to make college as a hiring signal worse for companies is better for the quality of education, better for people's financial health and better for equality. The entire system is rotten and we need to bring the edifice crashing down, not make life easier for companies who are about the only entities with money. You know what costs a lot more than hiring relative to the entity's financial means? A student loan [citation needed I guess].
- fastball 6y agoI don't disagree with you, but our current system that we have in reality does not handle things well if you just allow rampant cheating. Restructuring is a good idea but you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater in the meantime.
- wayne-li2 6y agoThe cynic in me believes without any disincentive to cheating, “few cheaters” become “almost all participants”. I was a TA in a prominent CS university. We used software that would compare everyone’s submissions to see if things were copied. The penalty for getting caught was high, and we made it clear to everyone that this software was, while not perfect, capable of detecting simple tricks (like copying code and renaming variables). Nonetheless, after every project, I would go and have to manually review all the cases. There would be 10-20 severe cases, about 30 moderate cases, and then about 50 cases where some things might look suspicious but there wasn’t enough proof to act. Overall, we would penalize about 20-50 people per project (granted this is a class size of over 1000). But still, 2-5% would still cheat despite our repeated warnings that we could catch them. I shudder to think what would happen if we had no way to detect. While TAing there, I was also a student. Cheating was pretty much the norm. I was always a cynic after those experiences.
- saruken 6y agoBut isn't "cheating" the norm in real-world jobs too? It's rare that I or any of the developers I work with complete a task without looking something up or asking a question of someone more knowledgeable. Seems to me the problem is how the assignments are posed – If the goal is to create a program that does X, and I can do that by copy/pasting or tweaking something from StackOverflow, have I not completed the goal? But if what you actually want is for me to understand all of the principles behind a program that does X, well that's a very different thing. And the assignment should be set up differently. It feels like Proctorio and similar solutions are treating a symptom of the real problem, which is that the way a lot of higher learning is administered is inherently flawed. And until we fix that, won't cheating and cheating detection be the same Coast-Guard-vs-smugglers arms race it's always been?
- Lev1a 6y ago> But isn't "cheating" the norm in real-world jobs too? It's rare that I or any of the developers I work with complete a task without looking something up or asking a question of someone more knowledgeable. One part of one my math exams in a previous university was (I feel like) modeled around this idea, where you were allowed to use a non-programmable (graphical) calculator and to bring basically any written material in to help yourself solve that part of the exam. Of course there were some restrictions: none of the solutions to the various homework assignments etc. That part alone for the ~2 hours of the whole exam would've been nice if there hadn't been the other half: no calculator, no helping materials apart from those maybe provided on the exam sheet. This part (of course) was the one containing the questions about specific definitions, one or more things to write a proof on and calculating things like double and/or triple integrals, deriving complicated expressions. In other courses (Databases 1 and 2, Web Dev) at my 2nd/current uni with some specific professors there was a clause that you could bring with you help in the form of: "DIN A4 sheet paper, hand-writing on one side, non-copied" and the professor or the TA if one was present would pass through the rows during the exam to check the student ID, have the student sign a presence sheet and whether the help sheet was compliant (also if maybe there were some answers to the exam), signed that help sheet and would collect that together with the exam upon completion/timeout. Although our course was only ~80-90 people at the start of my first and ~30 at the start of my current uni, so we had to be thrown together with some other disciplines/outlines ("Studiengänge" in Germany) for exams of the same courses to have an exam that made sense for everyone.
- phildenhoff 6y agoThose are different lawsuits. The other (previous) article was for Ian Linkletter.
- varenc 6y agoThe HN post you mentioned now seems to be merged with this one. Very confusingly. This puts yours and other comments way out of context. Why do the mods/dang do this? Is it just to avoid multiple stories on the same topic on the home page? There’s got to be a better solution than this. At least providing some sort of log of changes would be helpful.