12 ms·

For what it's worth, at the school this happened at, UBC, Proctorio is now effectively banned, along with other similar "algorithmic" proctoring tools, and exam

• soperj 6y ago
  This is silly. Make the exams open book and then the only thing you really need to worry about is the correct student taking the exam. If you're testing based on memorization of things in this day in age, then the course is useless.
  • earth_walker 6y ago
    This. Our engineering exams were all open book and tested understanding rather than rote memorization. If you didn't understand the material well there was no amount of googling that could help you.
  • samkater 6y ago
    I would add some nuance to this view. For nearly every undergraduate course I agree - the ability of knowing where to look for resources in a particular subject matter, synthesizing the available information to solve a reasonably novel problem, and presenting the information in a coherent way is a skill/art that should be one of the primary goals of the education. For advanced degrees, though, I'm not so sure. I expect someone which a masters or Ph.D. to actually be an expert in the subject matter, not just someone who is really good at figuring out how to solve problems. A big part of that is being able to internalize the information so well they you in effect become a resource that could be used by an undergraduate student. This internalization goes beyond rote memorization, but memorization is a big part of it too. Just a disclaimer, though - I do not have an advanced degree, so maybe I expect too much from those who do? A big reason why I have no interest in pursuing one is that many people with a masters degree I find have little expertise to show for it, they could have just as easily learned the same information by self-study or being fortunate enough to find interesting work. (the hiring landscape is a separate topic)
    • barefeg 6y ago
      1. PhDs don’t “do exams”. You can’t cheat your way to publishing original research (exceptions of course) and have external expert researchers review it and accepted on a reputable journal. Given that that’s a requisite for obtaining your degree, there’s no point on a final exam. Most defenses nowadays are partly ceremonial (exceptions of course). Both the material and your ability to do research has been checked months before by your advisors and graduation committee. 2. Master’s degree courses follow all kinds of schemas for examination. From oral exams, to in person no extra material allowed, to open book, and take home. Being on both sides (taking the exams and creating them) I can say that it really doesn’t matter if you allow people to take the exam home and collaborate among each other. These types of exams are designed to really test a deep understanding and ability of the material. There have been exam questions where an entire class of >20 students are not able to solve it. People that are really good are able to have a shot at it and maybe make some progress, and that differentiates the good from the exceptional. 3. Nowadays undergraduate degrees are a commodity so it feels they need to make sure only the good students get one. But in the end it doesn’t really matter, since most employers (exceptions of course) will want to see how much value the candidate add, which does not correlate with having a degree or good grades
      • lutorm 6y ago
        You can’t cheat your way to publishing original research Of course you can, making up results is a time-honored tradition! It does take a certain amount of skill to do it believably, though.... ;-)
      • snotrockets 6y ago
        I felt as if exams in my masters (in Mathematics) were different: they mostly check you understand the definitions, maybe remember some basic tactics for approaching problems. You can't really check the students can solve "real" problems, as those are too complex for the limited scope of an exam.
    • ska 6y ago
      This is why PhD's typically have comprehensive exams. It varies (a lot!) by university and even department, but panel led oral exams are pretty common. At some places they are even open to the public (no pressure). These are distinct from a thesis defence, which happens at the end of your degree; they are likely to happen about a year in and are meant to ensure you have a solid background. Overall I think an oral exam run by a skilled examiner is the best of all worlds, but it isn't practical for a section of 500 undergraduate students. It's quite doable for a seminar or manageable up to say 10-15 students, becomes difficult after that.
  • isbvhodnvemrwvn 6y ago
    Well, that's the problem. Someone can read out the question and receive results from someone else or be actively sharing their screen. It doesn't really matter what kind of test you have.
    • soperj 6y ago
      Honestly, any tests I took that were open book were long enough that if you were constantly looking things up you'd never finish. Same would occur if you were talking to someone and they were having to relay the info.
    • Green_man 6y ago
      Part of the benefit of open book tests is that it brings up the "floor" of resource access, limiting the potential differential between honest and cheating students. Obviously, this could be negatively compensated for with other factors, like having more questions or stingy grading.
  • touisteur 6y ago
    I think part of the idea is to discourage sharing of answers... But then you should build open book personnalized exams. But then the student might hire someone to answer for them. But then why bother everyone because of those cheating people...
  • davidweir 6y ago
    Exactly - assessment methods that are difficult for the sake of being difficult benefit nobody. They’re only marginally more meaningful than FAANG interview questions. Employers, students and society as a whole have all moved on; they want assessment to demonstrate that students can do what the course has taught them (known in the jargon as “alignment”), not memorise a bunch of facts that they can regurgitate on demand.
  • smiths1999 6y ago
    I teach at the university level and this is what I have done with my exams. Everything is open book and in my experience there is no difference in the average exam score between open book online and closed (or open) book in person. It is also way easier for me to not have to worry about who is cheating and where everyone is looking (I also don't like the idea of forcing students to turn on their webcams).
    • checkyoursudo 6y ago
      I finished up the coursework for my masters degree at the start of the pandemic. My university was quite flexible for how instructors would examine us, given how sudden everything had to change. One of my courses, which only had about 8 students and two instructors, decided to do an oral examination, which ended up being basically a very in-depth, one on one conversation about the course material and based on the expectations set in the syllabus (so, no surprises). While obviously not practical for large rosters, this was by far the best exam format that I have ever done in my many, many years of schooling. I'm sure not everyone would prefer it, but the students unanimously agreed to try it (wouldn't have done it that way otherwise), and it was just so great. It was not at all like an oral thesis defense, which was what I was a little worried about.
      • dariosalvi78 6y ago
        When I was an engineering student at the university of Naples, all my courses were examined both with a written exam and an oral one. No exception, no matter how many students. It was hard for us and the teachers but, boy, you had to really study that stuff! Since then I've become an academic myself and have been teaching in several countries. I have never found the same level of rigor in any place I've been.
        • robaato 6y ago
          I remember friends in the '80s studying law in Turin always having orals - as you say "they had to know their stuff"!
        • 6y ago
  • anticristi 6y ago
    Our university physics teacher allowed us to bring one-page self-made cheat sheet. By the time you compressed the essence of a whole course into a one-pager, you were pretty much done learning. :))
    • quasse 6y ago
      This was common in my engineering school too. I enjoyed creating the cheat-sheets more than any other form of studying, because what better way of learning three chapters of thermodynamics than having to distill them into 10 lines of text on a notecard.
    • cmckn 6y ago
      I still have a couple of the cheat sheets my study group compiled -- they're so fun to look back on. One for Computer Organization is almost unintelligible to me now; we were so proud of the density of that sucker.
      • mousepilot 6y ago
        did your instructor also allow a desktop microscope?
        • joatmon-snoo 6y ago
          One of the more creative tricks I remember was writing a cheatsheet in red and blue text overlaid on each other and using 3D glasses to read it, which allowed you to squeeze more on. Never actually did it, so I don't know if it was useful...
    • vincent-manis 6y ago
      I always permitted/encouraged this when I taught (I'm retired now). Every once in a while, we'd find some enterprising student selling pre-made cheat sheets, which were of course of little value to the purchaser.
      • shadowfox 6y ago
  • TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    I never understood the concept of cheating. If you don't know the answer to a question and you look it up, that's not cheating, it's research, or at least referring to reference material, which is always permitted in real life. Except for some contrived or rare circumstances someone will now point out. Even the Apollo 11 crew had support. Any professional in any industry is allowed to say: "I don't know" and "I'll get back to you" and "let me look that up".
    • tzs 6y ago
      That only works if the answer can be looked up. Real life isn't always kind enough to only give problems that someone has already solved and published somewhere you can find.
      • TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
        That's only a helpful responds if you believe exams are testing for your ability to synthesis novelty, which seems absurd to me.
        • TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
          I mean synthesize, too late to edit.
      • Xamayon 6y ago
        The class should effectively teach you how to make that distinction in a given field/topic. If you didn't pay attention at all, you won't know what to look for or how to figure something out quickly enough to pass. Cheating would be most damaging if the actual answers were shared or similar attacks on the integrity of the test itself. Knowing how to find or determine the current correct answers yourself is often more useful in the long run than memorizing what amounts to trivia. This is especially true when it comes to open ended and quickly changing fields...
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • 6y ago
  • kiba 6y ago
    Understanding always aid memories and memories are important to mastering anything. Brute force memorization, however, are subject to decays and constant forgetting. It is astonishingly difficult to memorize a bunch of meaningless numbers unless you taken the time to do a mnemonic for it.
  • alasdair_ 6y ago
    >Make the exams open book and then the only thing you really need to worry about is the correct student taking the exam This doesn't solve the problem of a student having an expert sitting off camera, feeding the student the answers.
  • officeplant 6y ago
    By far this is my favorite part of working in the fire & safety industry. Open book exams for certifications just show that you know how to apply the knowledge within the code books. All it requires is that I remember a handful of section numbers relevant to areas of the code.
  • t-writescode 6y ago
    My mom is a college professor, among other things, and her exams are always open book. She has every expectation of the students to have the book in front of them when taking the test. She's a fully online professor, though, so maybe that's the difference? Different dynamic from the traditional, in-person classes professors? I also don't think anything but her quizzes are multiple choice? Everything else is essay format, participation (discussion posts in class forum), and a HUGE paper, so there's really nothing to cheat on, aside from plagiarism, and ... there are ways of catching that.
  • tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
    > the only thing you really need to worry about is the correct student taking the exam Which is the hard problem these solutions try to address, because even if the correct student is sitting in front of the computer, that doesn't mean he isn't just proxying the questions and answers to someone else (possibly paid).
  • Siira 5y ago
    People can easily share the solutions to real exams, as well. (Though I agree the bar is much higher.)
  • matheusmoreira 5y ago
    I completely agree with you but good luck convincing anyone to do that. Memorization and regurgitation questions are easier to create, evaluate and grade. Asking meaningful questions, evaluating each student's answer and taking an individualized approach to each student requires a lot of time and effort which are the most scarce resources in today's mass education centers. So they'll keep asking stupid questions as if the student was a database being queried. It's no wonder that people can solve them by querying actual knowledge bases! Schools won't accept that: they are selling degrees and they don't want to make it too easy for students to pass their courses. So they come up with the absolutely ridiculous notion of cheating. The whole thing's so phony and artificial it's mindboggling. I don't think it's even possible to get a high quality education anymore. Maybe if a student is lucky enough to have a one-on-one mentorship.
• maweki 6y ago
  I think zoom proctoring in combination with some increases in communication overhead are quite practical. We recently did this. Giving students different exams (selections of slightly and subtly different tasks from a task pool), not showing task names, and mixing up the order of tasks for each student seems to work quite nicely. The increased overhead to communicate which exact answer they need, finding out which other student has the exact same task, etc., has worked really well for us. Of course, you have to have it in a way where they do not have much time left over to shoulder this overhead. Edit: So students are going from "What's the answer for 5" to sharing the topic of the task, the task description (there may be a negation hidden in there), and the constants and other students needing to compare. Maybe they aren't even at this task-type in their exam yet, as the order is mixed. Edit2: We weren't really watching the video stream. It was just to discourage students actually sitting side-by-side, which would decrease the communication overhead drastically.
• 8note 6y ago
  Harder or less student friendly for who exactly? If you'd previously be failed due to the colour of your skin, removing these tools is a major boon to student friendliness
• nomoneys 6y ago
  Currently a student where this is happening as well and can share a bit about it. In my classes (mostly CS and math), I never used Proctorio as a lot of my professors seem to share concerns ethically as well as a lot of buggy software creating false positives. This lawsuit has been happening for a few months, as well as the CEO of Proctorio leaking student chat logs and threatening the student after the student made a post complaining about the use of Proctorio, both of which were shared and highly upvoted on r/UBC (link below). Certain faculties relied on Proctorio a bit more, like in business, has shifted to more extreme measures, where the Professor requires the student to be logged into two Zoom accounts with camera on, one facing the students face/hands, and the other facing the students desk/screen from behind. As for alternative options, most my classes used open book paired with more limited time restraint, possibilities of questioning students if anything looked suspicious immediately after the exam, and making the tests harder and scaling afterwards. Although there'll always be bad apples, I'm thankful many of my profs has adapted very well to help the students learn. Student's post: https://www.reddit.com/r/UBC/comments/hgiiu1/midterm_started_proctorio_failed_hit_up_live_chat/ https://www.reddit.com/r/UBC/comments/hgiiu1/midterm_started... Proctorio CEO's comment (u/artfulhacker) got deleted back is on removeddit, Linkletter is also here defending the student as well: https://www.removeddit.com/r/UBC/comments/hgiiu1/midterm_started_proctorio_failed_hit_up_live_chat/ https://www.removeddit.com/r/UBC/comments/hgiiu1/midterm_sta... https://www.reddit.com/r/UBC/comments/hhbowl/proctorio_ceo_mike_olsen_under_fire_for_releasing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/UBC/comments/hhbowl/proctorio_ceo_m...