20 ms·

The Surveilled Student

149 points by samclemens 5y ago

version_five 5y ago
> “When you consider the hundreds of thousands of people who have died in this pandemic, is it too much to ask to share your heart rate or temperature?” This is honestly disgusting, it's the worst kind of lazy "think of the children" style rhetoric. I'd like to think this kind of argument stands on it's own as ridiculous, I guess we'll see.
- TeeMassive 5y ago
  And young adults are among the least affected. There are no justifications for this kind of medical surveillance.
  - woofie11 5y ago
    There are perfectly good justifications: More Americans died than combat deaths in WWII at this point. Young Americans can be permanently disabled, and can share diseases with old professors. There are also perfectly good justifications for not wanting a police state. Until both sides understand that the other side has a point, we're not going to land anywhere reasonable. If we had 100% compliance with the easy things: * Social distancing of 6 feet * Universal usage of 80% or more effective masks * Vaccines * Everything that can be done outdoors is We probably wouldn't need the hard things. Reasonable measures by everyone are far more effective than part of the population throwing all precautions to the wind, and part insisting on a draconian police state. I'm concerned about economic shutdowns, closing schools, failing businesses, police state measures, and similar. Avoiding those means we all need to acknowledge the very real risk of COVID19, and while we might not agree with medical surveillance, that the people pushing for it have different values but aren't crazy.
- alert0 5y ago
  I am really sick of the word share. Share your data with us, share your heart rate with us, we just share this with a few of our partners. Sharing is caring, I guess.
  - alibarber 5y ago
    Yes I’ve struggled to take it seriously since day one - ‘the sharing economy’, like I’m paying you to rent a room in your house (Airbnb). That’s just ‘the economy’.
    - jjeaff 5y ago
      I think maybe they mean something along the lines of, you, the individual, provide the capital and the labor and take on the risk, and then you "share" some or most of the revenue with us.
      - BostonEnginerd 5y ago
        That’s my biggest issue with “sharing” economy companies. They are asking people to take on enormous risks -buying homes and cars - and then just algorithmically delist them when a problem occurs with no liability.
        blacksmith_tb 5y ago
        Yes, that's pretty much the business model right there - taking advantage of loopholes in the regulations (until they're patched), it's version 2.0 of 'privatize the profits, socialize the costs'.
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
    An appropriate response to a company asking anyone to share anything is asking for revenue share.
    - taneq 5y ago
      I mean we're sharing things, after all. It only seems fair.
- eesmith 5y ago
  Agreed. In the previous paragraph to that quote: > As he sees it, handing over health information is a relatively small price to pay if it means halting the spread of a virus that has ravaged the nation. That "if" is doing a lot of work. Does BioButton actually help? Does it help even after mass vaccinations? If it doesn't help, then why pay any price, no matter how small? Or, just after what you quoted: > He says the wearable technology seemed the least invasive way to catch symptoms early and give students tools to know if they might have early signs of, or potential exposure to, Covid-19. How many false positives will it give? If there are 100 false positives to one true positive, then the signal will be drowned out in the noise.
  - visarga 5y ago
    > How many false positives will it give? If there are 100 false positives to one true positive, then the signal will be drowned out in the noise. On the other hand the consequences of a false positive are much smaller than those of a false negative. Inconvenience vs serious health problems or death.
    - eesmith 5y ago
      Absolutely this requires a cost-benefits analysis! So, what is the false positive rate? I pulled the 100-to-1 out of my ass. Maybe it's 10K-to-1 or only 5-to-1. Maybe the false negative rate is 19-to-1, which would also make it rather useless. Dunno. Does the school know? Is that information public? Sure would be nice to have, yes? What does "inconvenience" mean? I think you're talking about inconvenience for the students. If so, I want you to consider what "inconvenience" means for the school administration. They have many policies they could enforce. They could have mandatory campus-wide testing every three days, and if someone tests positive then the campus is closed until tests are negative for three weeks, and during that time all on-campus residents are in quarantine, and classes switch to 100% remote teaching. Inconvenient, yes? But if the question is simply "Inconvenience vs serious health problems or death" then surely this inconvenience they could put up with, yes? It'll surely be more effective than this BioButton! Instead, it sounds like the administration wants something which is more convenient and cheaper to their budget. If so, shouldn't they demonstrate that this convenience isn't some sort of high-tech smoke&mirrors to avoid paying for something that is actually effective?
- visarga 5y ago
  Is the privacy of many more important than the life of few?
  - GeneralMayhem 5y ago
    Is giving up your privacy bringing them back to life? The problem isn't the relative weighting, it's the implication that they're in any way linked.
  - textgel 5y ago
    Yes. Obviously. There's plenty of privacy destroying actions a society could take that would "save lives" but we don't do these exactly because of the encroachment on civil liberties they would entail.
  - strken 5y ago
    That's a false dichotomy between option A), have your students sit exams in person and kill people, and option B), grossly invade your students' privacy with obnoxious spyware. Option C), just trust your students to take exams at home and slightly dilute the signal of your test scores, has always been on the table and is a totally viable alternative.
  - greatgib 5y ago
    Just consider the number of persons that died in the history fighting to earn and preserve your privacy!
  - stefan_ 5y ago
    There is no fucking connection between the two. We can have privacy and no deaths.
  - MikeUt 5y ago
    If you answer "no", the same logic can be used to strip you of all your rights. How much domestic violence and murder could be prevented if every home was required to have cameras and microphones installed?
  - meowster 5y ago
- wolverine876 5y ago
  We must make these judgments and trade-offs all the time in society. We surrender freedoms regularly: You aren't free to drive on the wrong side of the road; you have to surrender personal info for a credit card, passport, plane/train/bus ticket; if you have another deadly, highly contagious disease, you can be quarantined. I don't love the tone, but the number of deaths is an indicator of cost when considering the trade-off.
jackson1442 5y ago
I felt this. My university has been using Respondus LockDown with webcam to proctor many exams and it feels like a violation of my privacy to have to use that software. Not only does it feel wrong to have such an adversarial application on my personal computer, it has caused my laptop to kernel; I found out I could check out laptops which I now use to take exams. I feel significantly more stressed while taking an exam with webcam. I don't cheat-- I don't _need_ to cheat, and yet still feel more stressed on these exams because of how many things can go wrong. When taking math-heavy exams I would frequently get a warning from the software that my face was not in view... because I was working on my paper. I think professors caught on. Using LockDown seemed to fall out of style somewhat for my second semester. In classes where there was no monitoring software, exams felt easier just being allowed to take them in a comfortable environment. I don't have to think about keeping my eyes 100% on the screen the whole time and I don't have to worry about my laptop crashing or internet going out-- I can tether if I need to. Being able to listen to music during exams was just a cherry on top.
- havocsupreme 5y ago
  I'm sorry that happened to you and also glad you're in a better place! :) Some of my classes use LockDown browser as well and these are computer science courses so there was a lot of pushback due to privacy concerns, so I can sympathize with your viewpoint. Although a majority of students don't cheat, it's still awful that the behavior of a few dictates how the others are perceived.
  - AlexAndScripts 5y ago
    If you don't mind doing it, you can reverse engineer it to remove the VM detections / make a stealthy VM.
    - no_time 5y ago
      Some of them use state of the art obfuscation to make this a PIA, others are not that good[0] The one I've taken a look at(forgot it's name) was using VMProtect and had a competently written VM detection routine. It wasn't my exam so I recommended that they use a kvm switch instead of fumbling around with vm hiding tools. [0]: https://secret.club/2019/05/16/exam-surveillance2.html https://secret.club/2019/05/16/exam-surveillance2.html
uo21tp5hoyg 5y ago
Is it just me or is this article locking up so you can't scroll past a certain point?
- tpaidungeon 5y ago
  For me, Firefox reader view (F9) got rid of that.
- dannyw 5y ago
  Not just you. Same here. Using Chrome.
- ByteWelder 5y ago
  If your browser has a no-script extension available, this will fix the issue.
- eythian 5y ago
  This generally handy bookmarklet solved it for me: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/
sirfrankiecrisp 5y ago
Link to view the full article without login: https://web.archive.org/web/20210219112511/https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-surveilled-student https://web.archive.org/web/20210219112511/https://www.chron...
no_time 5y ago
This will only get worse and worse as time goes on and tech gets cheaper. Unless the people realize that the people who design,market and require these devices have names and addresses.
throw737858 5y ago
One more reason to skip uni. Remote only experience for full price with orwelian nightmare included. All documentation and lessons are online for free. You do not need human text to speech engine that costs 30k/year.
- visarga 5y ago
  > You do not need human text to speech engine that costs 30k/year. So you don't need to ask any questions, ever? Then go to the library instead.
  - throw737858 5y ago
    Did you visit public library recently? It is closed or full of homeless people. Scihub and laser printer is much better option! For $50/hour you can find experts in most fields. You could even hire underpaid postdocs who teach at unis.
  - Mediterraneo10 5y ago
    Not all lecturers welcome questions, it depends on the country and culture. Certainly my own undergraduate experience consisted of a "human text-to-speech engine" experience where the lecturer lectured mainly from a text, while students were expected to silently listen, and then answer any questions they had themselves by searching in the literature. When I moved on to graduate studies and had a weekly seminar, then questions and discussion were welcome, but I sympathize with the feeling that in-person undergraduate education is a waste of time and (in countries that charge tuition fees) money.
  - swiley 5y ago
    I really didn't ask many question during my career as a student. The whole thing really was an exercise in obtaining credentials.
- Mauricebranagh 5y ago
  Good luck getting past the gate keepers for most companies then.
Fomite 5y ago
I refuse to use proctoring software in my classes. The COVID-19 monitoring stuff is a little trickier. Universities were between a rock and a hard place - don't do enough, and you will have an outbreak on campus, and there's a lot of town-gown pressure to then blame the students for everything that subsequently happens. Do too much, and you're deep into the lives of your students.
TX0098812 5y ago
I've interviewed quite a few people in order to assess their technical skills. Here are some takeaways: 1) I look at skills, not grades. 2) I look at skills, not which university someone went to. 3) I look at skills, not weather or not they someone to university. Just read the docs and practice in order to learn relevant skills. You can done quicker than those to went to uni, have more practice in a shorter amount of time and not have any debt.
- francis-io 5y ago
  The highest education I have is secondary school (highscool) and what you say couldn't be more right in my expirence. I got some CompTIA certs while working a night shift to get into IT and prove I knew the basicis. Everything beyond that has been learning in my own time and on the job. I'm now 30, no debt, self employed (by choice), contractor working in "senior" roles, what ever that means. I do regret not having some basic comp sci theory, but I've never really needed it or had the desire to learn it on my own time. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing, but it's not stood in my way so far. This might be a controvertial view, but I feel that having to self learn a topic is a good filter to see if you actually enjoy the topic. If you don't want to sit and self learn a dense topic (assuming lives dont depend on it), then you will likely hate working on it. University for a lot of people is a free holiday for when you havn't decided on what you want to do.
  - the_only_law 5y ago
    > This might be a controvertial view, but I feel that having to self learn a topic is a good filter to see if you actually enjoy the topic. If you don't want to sit and self learn a dense topic (assuming lives dont depend on it), then you will likely hate working on it. Maybe, but I’ve felt my ability to self teach myself anything steadily collapse over the years. Particularly, while I enjoy some topics, I do not enjoy having to understand their prerequisites independent of the original topic, and any prerequisites to those, at which point I’m just is abstracted and far away from the initial thing I was interested in in the first place. One common thing for me personally is math. There are many things I’m interested in, where a solid understanding of calculus is necessary. Now I could maybe manage to maintain interest if the calculus was all I needed, but I had a terrible math education and have no interest in spending all the relearning algebra and other calculus prerequisites, far displaced from what originally caught my interest.
LockDownExposed 5y ago
What is with USA and cheating in school? Cheating is part of life imho, I remember when I commented to my US friends that I cheated my way trough university...they acted as if I was killing baby kittens.
jimhefferon 5y ago
Prof here. I don't use proctoring software, nor does anyone at my college. But there is an issue. If I have someone who did the homework, learned the material, and can demonstrate it on the exams, and they find out that someone else in class got the same grade by cheating, aren't they justified in being angry? And am I not justified in being distressed to find that I am certifying someone as knowledgable (say,as part of an undergraduate program to become a person who designs bridges), when they are not? My point is that there are for-real issues. That is, sober analysis needs to balance a lot of things, including people's genuine right to privacy and the effectiveness of the software, but also including the missions of the institutions and the wider needs of society. > institutions have looked for a technological fix where there isn’t one. Yes, the killer slam is that the proctoring software doesn't work. But what if it did? Finger wagging warning: I'm approaching retirement. But you, that is, lots of folks now reading HN, will need to, over the course of their careers, work these issues through. There isn't a simple fix, IMHO. I hope people will try to give it serious attention.
- arpa 5y ago
  Hm. If exam is not measuring competence adequately, the exams validity is lacking, ergo, exam should be redesigned for better validity. Open-book exams with good validity exist, as do tests allowing scientific calculators and formula sheets. Admittedly, that is harder, but... what is "cheating" in the age of information anyway?
  - bo1024 5y ago
    Cheating is posting the question to Chegg and then copying the answer someone posts into your exam. For example.
    - kradroy 5y ago
      To be tongue-in-cheek - that person will make a great dev, because I copy answers from stackoverflow all the time and get paid 6 figures to do it.
  - amalcon 5y ago
m463 5y ago
Can this sort of thing be refused? If you're paying for your education - in some cases very dearly - you're a customer aren't you?
- zamadatix 5y ago
  Not sure where being a "customer" or not comes into it. You sign quite a bit of contractual agreement when entering a university, that takes precedence over whether or not you give them money. Either it's enforceable according to that or it's not but you don't get to retroactively red-line things just because you were the one paying for the service. Of course "refusal" could simply mean you will go elsewhere, whether you get your money back is up to the agreements you signed when you gave the money though (you won't, at least not all of it).
- applecrazy 5y ago
  > Can this sort of thing be refused? As a student at a US public university, the student body has tried everything from basic dissent, to petitioning, to introducing formal proposals to remove proctoring to the university's academic senate. Nothing has worked, and refusing to take proctored exams would simply cause us to fail the course. > you're a customer aren't you? You're a captive consumer. There are very clearly defined windows for transfers, so it's not like you can switch immediately if a university doesn't meet your expectations, and there are implications for your graduation date too (meaning you're more than likely going to need to take courses again that don't transfer over, costing even more money)
SamuelAdams 5y ago
Ed Snowden warned us about long-lasting surveillance in March 2020[1]. [1]: https://theintercept.com/2020/04/08/watch-are-we-vesting-too-much-power-in-governments-and-corporations-in-the-name-of-covid-19-with-edward-snowden/ https://theintercept.com/2020/04/08/watch-are-we-vesting-too...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Shaddox 5y ago
When I went to university, a great deal of exams were oral. You would draw a few tickets from a pool and have 10-15 minutes to prepare your answers. I'm sure there are alternative ways to examine students that don't require such draconian surveillance.
einpoklum 5y ago
> handing over health information is a relatively small price to pay if it means halting the spread of a virus that has ravaged the nation. It doesn't mean that. > “When you consider the hundreds of thousands of people who have died in this pandemic, is it too much to ask to share your heart rate or temperature?” he asks. Monitored all the time? Hell yeah it's too much. But then, so is the monitoring of smartphones and the search histories stored by Google and the NSA going through people's GMail and Yahoo mail. etc.
ausbah 5y ago
from my personal experience as a student, what seemed to help reduce cheating was 1.) honeycombs on cheggso if you use the answers there it's obvious, 2.) hard time limits so it's harder to coordinate cheating, 3.) large question pools
jrm4 5y ago
Prof here. Oooh, don't get me started. Look, EVERYBODY WHO TEACHES ANYTHING. I can think of VERY few cases in which a valuable learning exercise involves "a tight-time pressure situation in which you can't talk to people or use the internet." If anything, we're reinforcing the false idea of "value in memorization." Unfortunately, I think all too many of my colleagues haven't really thought about this and are just "doing things like we've always done."

149 points by samclemens 5y ago

> “When you consider the hundreds of thousands of people who have died in this pandemic, is it too much to ask to share your heart rate or temperature?” This is honestly disgusting, it's the worst kind of lazy "think of the children" style rhetoric. I'd like to think this kind of argument stands on it's own as ridiculous, I guess we'll see.

TeeMassive 5y ago
And young adults are among the least affected. There are no justifications for this kind of medical surveillance.
- woofie11 5y ago
  There are perfectly good justifications: More Americans died than combat deaths in WWII at this point. Young Americans can be permanently disabled, and can share diseases with old professors. There are also perfectly good justifications for not wanting a police state. Until both sides understand that the other side has a point, we're not going to land anywhere reasonable. If we had 100% compliance with the easy things: * Social distancing of 6 feet * Universal usage of 80% or more effective masks * Vaccines * Everything that can be done outdoors is We probably wouldn't need the hard things. Reasonable measures by everyone are far more effective than part of the population throwing all precautions to the wind, and part insisting on a draconian police state. I'm concerned about economic shutdowns, closing schools, failing businesses, police state measures, and similar. Avoiding those means we all need to acknowledge the very real risk of COVID19, and while we might not agree with medical surveillance, that the people pushing for it have different values but aren't crazy.
alert0 5y ago
I am really sick of the word share. Share your data with us, share your heart rate with us, we just share this with a few of our partners. Sharing is caring, I guess.
- alibarber 5y ago
  Yes I’ve struggled to take it seriously since day one - ‘the sharing economy’, like I’m paying you to rent a room in your house (Airbnb). That’s just ‘the economy’.
  - jjeaff 5y ago
    I think maybe they mean something along the lines of, you, the individual, provide the capital and the labor and take on the risk, and then you "share" some or most of the revenue with us.
    - BostonEnginerd 5y ago
      That’s my biggest issue with “sharing” economy companies. They are asking people to take on enormous risks -buying homes and cars - and then just algorithmically delist them when a problem occurs with no liability.
      - blacksmith_tb 5y ago
        Yes, that's pretty much the business model right there - taking advantage of loopholes in the regulations (until they're patched), it's version 2.0 of 'privatize the profits, socialize the costs'.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
  An appropriate response to a company asking anyone to share anything is asking for revenue share.
  - taneq 5y ago
    I mean we're sharing things, after all. It only seems fair.
eesmith 5y ago
Agreed. In the previous paragraph to that quote: > As he sees it, handing over health information is a relatively small price to pay if it means halting the spread of a virus that has ravaged the nation. That "if" is doing a lot of work. Does BioButton actually help? Does it help even after mass vaccinations? If it doesn't help, then why pay any price, no matter how small? Or, just after what you quoted: > He says the wearable technology seemed the least invasive way to catch symptoms early and give students tools to know if they might have early signs of, or potential exposure to, Covid-19. How many false positives will it give? If there are 100 false positives to one true positive, then the signal will be drowned out in the noise.
- visarga 5y ago
  > How many false positives will it give? If there are 100 false positives to one true positive, then the signal will be drowned out in the noise. On the other hand the consequences of a false positive are much smaller than those of a false negative. Inconvenience vs serious health problems or death.
  - eesmith 5y ago
    Absolutely this requires a cost-benefits analysis! So, what is the false positive rate? I pulled the 100-to-1 out of my ass. Maybe it's 10K-to-1 or only 5-to-1. Maybe the false negative rate is 19-to-1, which would also make it rather useless. Dunno. Does the school know? Is that information public? Sure would be nice to have, yes? What does "inconvenience" mean? I think you're talking about inconvenience for the students. If so, I want you to consider what "inconvenience" means for the school administration. They have many policies they could enforce. They could have mandatory campus-wide testing every three days, and if someone tests positive then the campus is closed until tests are negative for three weeks, and during that time all on-campus residents are in quarantine, and classes switch to 100% remote teaching. Inconvenient, yes? But if the question is simply "Inconvenience vs serious health problems or death" then surely this inconvenience they could put up with, yes? It'll surely be more effective than this BioButton! Instead, it sounds like the administration wants something which is more convenient and cheaper to their budget. If so, shouldn't they demonstrate that this convenience isn't some sort of high-tech smoke&mirrors to avoid paying for something that is actually effective?
visarga 5y ago
Is the privacy of many more important than the life of few?
- GeneralMayhem 5y ago
  Is giving up your privacy bringing them back to life? The problem isn't the relative weighting, it's the implication that they're in any way linked.
- textgel 5y ago
  Yes. Obviously. There's plenty of privacy destroying actions a society could take that would "save lives" but we don't do these exactly because of the encroachment on civil liberties they would entail.
- strken 5y ago
  That's a false dichotomy between option A), have your students sit exams in person and kill people, and option B), grossly invade your students' privacy with obnoxious spyware. Option C), just trust your students to take exams at home and slightly dilute the signal of your test scores, has always been on the table and is a totally viable alternative.
- greatgib 5y ago
  Just consider the number of persons that died in the history fighting to earn and preserve your privacy!
- stefan_ 5y ago
  There is no fucking connection between the two. We can have privacy and no deaths.
- MikeUt 5y ago
  If you answer "no", the same logic can be used to strip you of all your rights. How much domestic violence and murder could be prevented if every home was required to have cameras and microphones installed?
- meowster 5y ago
wolverine876 5y ago
We must make these judgments and trade-offs all the time in society. We surrender freedoms regularly: You aren't free to drive on the wrong side of the road; you have to surrender personal info for a credit card, passport, plane/train/bus ticket; if you have another deadly, highly contagious disease, you can be quarantined. I don't love the tone, but the number of deaths is an indicator of cost when considering the trade-off.

jackson1442 5y ago

I felt this. My university has been using Respondus LockDown with webcam to proctor many exams and it feels like a violation of my privacy to have to use that software. Not only does it feel wrong to have such an adversarial application on my personal computer, it has caused my laptop to kernel; I found out I could check out laptops which I now use to take exams. I feel significantly more stressed while taking an exam with webcam. I don't cheat-- I don't _need_ to cheat, and yet still feel more stressed on these exams because of how many things can go wrong. When taking math-heavy exams I would frequently get a warning from the software that my face was not in view... because I was working on my paper. I think professors caught on. Using LockDown seemed to fall out of style somewhat for my second semester. In classes where there was no monitoring software, exams felt easier just being allowed to take them in a comfortable environment. I don't have to think about keeping my eyes 100% on the screen the whole time and I don't have to worry about my laptop crashing or internet going out-- I can tether if I need to. Being able to listen to music during exams was just a cherry on top.

havocsupreme 5y ago
I'm sorry that happened to you and also glad you're in a better place! :) Some of my classes use LockDown browser as well and these are computer science courses so there was a lot of pushback due to privacy concerns, so I can sympathize with your viewpoint. Although a majority of students don't cheat, it's still awful that the behavior of a few dictates how the others are perceived.
- AlexAndScripts 5y ago
  If you don't mind doing it, you can reverse engineer it to remove the VM detections / make a stealthy VM.
  - no_time 5y ago
    Some of them use state of the art obfuscation to make this a PIA, others are not that good[0] The one I've taken a look at(forgot it's name) was using VMProtect and had a competently written VM detection routine. It wasn't my exam so I recommended that they use a kvm switch instead of fumbling around with vm hiding tools. [0]: https://secret.club/2019/05/16/exam-surveillance2.html https://secret.club/2019/05/16/exam-surveillance2.html

uo21tp5hoyg 5y ago

Is it just me or is this article locking up so you can't scroll past a certain point?

tpaidungeon 5y ago
For me, Firefox reader view (F9) got rid of that.
dannyw 5y ago
Not just you. Same here. Using Chrome.
ByteWelder 5y ago
If your browser has a no-script extension available, this will fix the issue.
eythian 5y ago
This generally handy bookmarklet solved it for me: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/

sirfrankiecrisp 5y ago

Link to view the full article without login: https://web.archive.org/web/20210219112511/https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-surveilled-student https://web.archive.org/web/20210219112511/https://www.chron...

no_time 5y ago

This will only get worse and worse as time goes on and tech gets cheaper. Unless the people realize that the people who design,market and require these devices have names and addresses.

throw737858 5y ago

One more reason to skip uni. Remote only experience for full price with orwelian nightmare included. All documentation and lessons are online for free. You do not need human text to speech engine that costs 30k/year.

visarga 5y ago
> You do not need human text to speech engine that costs 30k/year. So you don't need to ask any questions, ever? Then go to the library instead.
- throw737858 5y ago
  Did you visit public library recently? It is closed or full of homeless people. Scihub and laser printer is much better option! For $50/hour you can find experts in most fields. You could even hire underpaid postdocs who teach at unis.
- Mediterraneo10 5y ago
  Not all lecturers welcome questions, it depends on the country and culture. Certainly my own undergraduate experience consisted of a "human text-to-speech engine" experience where the lecturer lectured mainly from a text, while students were expected to silently listen, and then answer any questions they had themselves by searching in the literature. When I moved on to graduate studies and had a weekly seminar, then questions and discussion were welcome, but I sympathize with the feeling that in-person undergraduate education is a waste of time and (in countries that charge tuition fees) money.
- swiley 5y ago
  I really didn't ask many question during my career as a student. The whole thing really was an exercise in obtaining credentials.
Mauricebranagh 5y ago
Good luck getting past the gate keepers for most companies then.

Fomite 5y ago

I refuse to use proctoring software in my classes. The COVID-19 monitoring stuff is a little trickier. Universities were between a rock and a hard place - don't do enough, and you will have an outbreak on campus, and there's a lot of town-gown pressure to then blame the students for everything that subsequently happens. Do too much, and you're deep into the lives of your students.

TX0098812 5y ago

I've interviewed quite a few people in order to assess their technical skills. Here are some takeaways: 1) I look at skills, not grades. 2) I look at skills, not which university someone went to. 3) I look at skills, not weather or not they someone to university. Just read the docs and practice in order to learn relevant skills. You can done quicker than those to went to uni, have more practice in a shorter amount of time and not have any debt.

francis-io 5y ago
The highest education I have is secondary school (highscool) and what you say couldn't be more right in my expirence. I got some CompTIA certs while working a night shift to get into IT and prove I knew the basicis. Everything beyond that has been learning in my own time and on the job. I'm now 30, no debt, self employed (by choice), contractor working in "senior" roles, what ever that means. I do regret not having some basic comp sci theory, but I've never really needed it or had the desire to learn it on my own time. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing, but it's not stood in my way so far. This might be a controvertial view, but I feel that having to self learn a topic is a good filter to see if you actually enjoy the topic. If you don't want to sit and self learn a dense topic (assuming lives dont depend on it), then you will likely hate working on it. University for a lot of people is a free holiday for when you havn't decided on what you want to do.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  > This might be a controvertial view, but I feel that having to self learn a topic is a good filter to see if you actually enjoy the topic. If you don't want to sit and self learn a dense topic (assuming lives dont depend on it), then you will likely hate working on it. Maybe, but I’ve felt my ability to self teach myself anything steadily collapse over the years. Particularly, while I enjoy some topics, I do not enjoy having to understand their prerequisites independent of the original topic, and any prerequisites to those, at which point I’m just is abstracted and far away from the initial thing I was interested in in the first place. One common thing for me personally is math. There are many things I’m interested in, where a solid understanding of calculus is necessary. Now I could maybe manage to maintain interest if the calculus was all I needed, but I had a terrible math education and have no interest in spending all the relearning algebra and other calculus prerequisites, far displaced from what originally caught my interest.

LockDownExposed 5y ago

What is with USA and cheating in school? Cheating is part of life imho, I remember when I commented to my US friends that I cheated my way trough university...they acted as if I was killing baby kittens.

jimhefferon 5y ago

Prof here. I don't use proctoring software, nor does anyone at my college. But there is an issue. If I have someone who did the homework, learned the material, and can demonstrate it on the exams, and they find out that someone else in class got the same grade by cheating, aren't they justified in being angry? And am I not justified in being distressed to find that I am certifying someone as knowledgable (say,as part of an undergraduate program to become a person who designs bridges), when they are not? My point is that there are for-real issues. That is, sober analysis needs to balance a lot of things, including people's genuine right to privacy and the effectiveness of the software, but also including the missions of the institutions and the wider needs of society. > institutions have looked for a technological fix where there isn’t one. Yes, the killer slam is that the proctoring software doesn't work. But what if it did? Finger wagging warning: I'm approaching retirement. But you, that is, lots of folks now reading HN, will need to, over the course of their careers, work these issues through. There isn't a simple fix, IMHO. I hope people will try to give it serious attention.

arpa 5y ago
Hm. If exam is not measuring competence adequately, the exams validity is lacking, ergo, exam should be redesigned for better validity. Open-book exams with good validity exist, as do tests allowing scientific calculators and formula sheets. Admittedly, that is harder, but... what is "cheating" in the age of information anyway?
- bo1024 5y ago
  Cheating is posting the question to Chegg and then copying the answer someone posts into your exam. For example.
  - kradroy 5y ago
    To be tongue-in-cheek - that person will make a great dev, because I copy answers from stackoverflow all the time and get paid 6 figures to do it.
- amalcon 5y ago

m463 5y ago

Can this sort of thing be refused? If you're paying for your education - in some cases very dearly - you're a customer aren't you?

zamadatix 5y ago
Not sure where being a "customer" or not comes into it. You sign quite a bit of contractual agreement when entering a university, that takes precedence over whether or not you give them money. Either it's enforceable according to that or it's not but you don't get to retroactively red-line things just because you were the one paying for the service. Of course "refusal" could simply mean you will go elsewhere, whether you get your money back is up to the agreements you signed when you gave the money though (you won't, at least not all of it).
applecrazy 5y ago
> Can this sort of thing be refused? As a student at a US public university, the student body has tried everything from basic dissent, to petitioning, to introducing formal proposals to remove proctoring to the university's academic senate. Nothing has worked, and refusing to take proctored exams would simply cause us to fail the course. > you're a customer aren't you? You're a captive consumer. There are very clearly defined windows for transfers, so it's not like you can switch immediately if a university doesn't meet your expectations, and there are implications for your graduation date too (meaning you're more than likely going to need to take courses again that don't transfer over, costing even more money)

SamuelAdams 5y ago

Ed Snowden warned us about long-lasting surveillance in March 2020[1]. [1]: https://theintercept.com/2020/04/08/watch-are-we-vesting-too-much-power-in-governments-and-corporations-in-the-name-of-covid-19-with-edward-snowden/ https://theintercept.com/2020/04/08/watch-are-we-vesting-too...

deleted 5y ago

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Shaddox 5y ago

When I went to university, a great deal of exams were oral. You would draw a few tickets from a pool and have 10-15 minutes to prepare your answers. I'm sure there are alternative ways to examine students that don't require such draconian surveillance.

einpoklum 5y ago

> handing over health information is a relatively small price to pay if it means halting the spread of a virus that has ravaged the nation. It doesn't mean that. > “When you consider the hundreds of thousands of people who have died in this pandemic, is it too much to ask to share your heart rate or temperature?” he asks. Monitored all the time? Hell yeah it's too much. But then, so is the monitoring of smartphones and the search histories stored by Google and the NSA going through people's GMail and Yahoo mail. etc.

ausbah 5y ago

from my personal experience as a student, what seemed to help reduce cheating was 1.) honeycombs on cheggso if you use the answers there it's obvious, 2.) hard time limits so it's harder to coordinate cheating, 3.) large question pools

jrm4 5y ago

Prof here. Oooh, don't get me started. Look, EVERYBODY WHO TEACHES ANYTHING. I can think of VERY few cases in which a valuable learning exercise involves "a tight-time pressure situation in which you can't talk to people or use the internet." If anything, we're reinforcing the false idea of "value in memorization." Unfortunately, I think all too many of my colleagues haven't really thought about this and are just "doing things like we've always done."