12 ms·

The whole notion of online proctoring seems pretty whack to me also: what world are we training and testing people to live in? The real world has internet, you

The whole notion of online proctoring seems pretty whack to me also: what world are we training and testing people to live in? The real world has internet, you can search for stuff, you can work from home and take a break. I'm not good at things because I'm always able to magically materialize the right answer out of my mind inside an anechoic faraday chamber, I'm good because I get the right answer in a reasonable amount of time using all the tools available to me (the internet, my brain, books, whatever). I get that there are a few professions where you're really going to need to know the right answer quickly without looking it up under high-pressure situations, and it seems like testing and certifying doctors and lawyers is important enough to society that we can arrange to proctor those tests in person (and still maintain covid safety, disability/poverty access, etc). That level of extreme proctoring security seems pretty dumb for random exams WHERE school <= undergrad. If you elaborately cheat your way through all online classes all the way through undergrad, that seems mostly bad for you

imilk 5y ago
> I get that there are a few professions where you're really going to need to know the right answer quickly without looking it up under high-pressure situations I agree with the premise, but I think you're downplaying this quite a bit. Pretty much any job that you're not doing asynchronous work in front of a computer would apply here. > If you elaborately cheat your way through all online classes all the way through undergrad, that seems mostly bad for you Well it's more than bad for just you. It's bad for the university and everyone else with a degree from there since you are degrading the value of having that degree.
- maerF0x0 5y ago
  I'm curious about the proportion of careers which are not adaptable to asynchronous/remote work, that _is_ best tested through rote memorization (think multiple choice questions) versus active demonstration (think like having an instructor see you do CPR on a dummy)? Just a thought about how it's weird we argue about how testing should be done online, but not the fact we test online things which are not really online in their nature.
  - imilk 5y ago
    Pretty much anything that requires real time communication involving a deep base of knowledge. I'm not going to list out hundreds of possible roles that this encompasses - but I'm sure you have the imagination to think of a few.
- vlunkr 5y ago
  > Pretty much any job that you're not doing asynchronous work in front of a computer would apply here. It's lame to ask for examples, but do you have any? Because honestly I don't think it applies to many jobs, unless it's something that a) puts you in high pressure situations, and b) requires specific in-depth knowledge. There aren't that many jobs like that, and for the ones that do exist (medical, military), you don't get in just by doing a bunch of multiple choice tests.
  - profile53 5y ago
    > for the ones that do exist (medical, military), you don’t get in just by doing a bunch of multiple choice tests As someone in the medical field, I would say upwards of 80% of the graded portion of a nursing license and it’s certifications (trauma nursing, cardiac life support, etc), you’re graded entirely on multiple choice questions. People die from mistakes, yet I meet a lot of people who proudly admit to having cheated or googled their way through a much of their studies. Some of them are good and quite a few are downright dangerous at their jobs.
    - 908B64B197 5y ago
      > I would say upwards of 80% of the graded portion of a nursing license and it’s certifications (trauma nursing, cardiac life support, etc), you’re graded entirely on multiple choice questions. A lot of places won't let you take the exam without practical experience, under the supervision of clinical personnel. Harder to google your way through that.
      - profile53 5y ago
        I can’t speak to the certification exams, but for nursing school, there is a high pressure from administration to pass students as long as they can pass the standardized test, even if the teachers don’t think the student is ready or safe for clinical work. So, although they do have practical experience, it is often limited in scope and students can fake their way through it to a surprisingly large extent (they’re always paired with a licensed staff member). This is anecdotal, but consistent across what has been told to me by staff members of several nursing schools.
- julienb_sea 5y ago
  I completely disagree. Knowledge recollection of school taught concepts is irrelevant to practically every job. Yes, most jobs require you to remember various work-related things, but those are not taught in school, they are taught and reinforced on the job itself.
  - imilk 5y ago
    What this tells me is that you may not have gotten the most out of your education. Sure there are specific tasks that you learn how to complete for particular jobs, but the structure of how you approach problems should have been helped quite a bit by what you learn in school. Personally I found studying philosophy extremely helpful to solving business problems. Not because there is an exact 1 for 1 concept match. Rather it teaches you how to frame and break down problems so that you can be more adaptable and efficient when faced with various unknowns. There's always going to be domain specific learning needed for any position. But to dismiss any tangential knowledge as useless is extremely short sided.
    - rembicilious 5y ago
      You said “studying philosophy” rather than “being tested on rote memorization of philosophy text books”. I agree that “studying philosophy” is a worthwhile endeavor, but I align more closely with the parents in regards to memorizing the semi-random litany of data bits that show up in a typical exam. The information is ultimately forgotten and is usually only relevant in the context of the current textbook chapter. Nearly every useful concept that applies to my two separate careers was learned on the job. The time spent in the classroom is nearly irrelevant and could have been replaced entirely by several weeks on the job.
      - imilk 5y ago
        I just gave an personal example to flesh out my post. But if, for example, you are a structural engineer who has to consult on site with clients, you certainly need to recall a litany of data/concepts (random or non-random) pretty quickly if you don't want to look like an idiot. You cannot learn this knowledge from a few weeks on the job because the client would be able to see through your bullshit in minutes. This applies to pretty much any position that needs to communicate in real time about a base of knowledge (doctors, lawyers, logistics, any type of management position). If you believe that any career can be substituted by "a few weeks on the job", you're not really aiming that high for yourself.
- tomphoolery 5y ago
  Conan O'Brien went to Harvard, so we've already degraded the value of having a degree in general.
  - imilk 5y ago
    He seems to have had a very successful career doing something that he enjoys. I don't really understand your point.
  - aspenmayer 5y ago
    I think Conan would like this joke. Sounds like one Andy would make at his expense back in the day.
jdavis703 5y ago
I don’t want my emergency room doctor looking up a fairly common disease on the internet. And I ding interview candidates who have to look up basic syntax like a for loop (I have no problem if they need to reference random APIs or advanced syntax though). Being fluent in your professional vernacular is very important for productivity. And a closed test is the best, scalable way we have to test this.
- anaphor 5y ago
  Doctors google rare disease symptoms sometimes, however, and it's seen as a legitimate thing to try if you're truly stumped by a mysterious illness.
  - bmj 5y ago
    And in the days before the internet, they likely had a bookshelf full of reference manuals. True story: when I became a programmer in the 1990s, I used to buy the printed manuals for the Java APIs as they were released. At one of my first interviews (for a Perl job), I was given the Camel Book as reference for the (handwritten) programming test.
  - jdavis703 5y ago
    And just as often they don’t. I went to the ER for a seizure, and basically after paying $5,000 the advice I got was “well that drug has seizures as a side effect, so stopping take it and find a new one.” Absolutely no investigation in to why this happened, if there’s a class of drugs I should avoid, nothing.
    - crygin 5y ago
      Huh, sounds like you might have been better off if "[your] emergency room doctor [looked it up] on the internet".
      - jdavis703 5y ago
        Well I can’t find any information on the general internet about this, beyond what the doctor said. One would most likely have to synthesize several different areas of knowledge to come up with a plausible hypothesis.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
I don't think that is an effective life strategy because you actually solve problems more slowly if you have less knowledge. If you've learned skills and committed things to memory, your brain can synthesize information much more rapidly. If you have to google everything, its like running your 2.5GHz PC at 10 MHz, and it is highly unlikely your brain will produce new information on the spot. Edited for snark removal.
- pfortuny 5y ago
  Following your lead: Thinking is not "answering questions". In order to build a mental model of a problem, you need a rather good model of the environment in your mind, and this comes from memory and the habit of thinking (which is what drill exercises facilitate). Rote learning is an essential tool in being able to create adequate models of the environment. The problem is lots of people think it is useless because "I did not need to memorize", when the issue is that "they are sufficiently able to memorize that they do it unconsciously". But most people need to put the effort.
- grishka 5y ago
  For me personally, I just can't memorize stuff on demand like exams expect people to. My brain refuses to do that, period. But when I do use some information often and many times, I somehow end up memorizing it eventually. APIs, phone numbers, addresses and routes, even people's faces.
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    > I just can't memorize stuff on demand like exams expect people to. Unless things have changed in the 30+ years since I was in college, I seem to recall exams happen after weeks of study and not "on demand". Part of learning is memorization. There's no way around that. It sounds more like you aren't cut out for the pace of high-caliber institutions which move very quickly. I have two friends with literature degrees, one from UCONN and one from Dartmouth. The Dartmouth friend had to read 4x the number of books than the UCONN friend in the same period of time for the same degree. C-students still need jobs! Just because you aren't a straight-A doesn't mean you can't still be a serviceable employee.
pfortuny 5y ago
Life is an open-answer problem, not a sequence of questions, so the "answer" is neither unique nor necessarily easily expressible as a sequence of statements. Memory is useful because it is the very basis of reasoning. Rote learning is important because intellectual habits facilitate thinking. Google has not all the answers, but especially: it does not have any questions.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
5faulker 5y ago
It's mostly bad because it'd be you cheating yourself I guess.
robbyking 5y ago
Absolutely. I work at a well known tech company, and when we give potential candidates coding tests we give them the option to code in any language they'd like (including pseudo-code), and to use Google if they can't remember the name or syntax of something they want to use. There's not reason to fail a candidate just because they can't remember the signature of a method in a library they haven't used in a while.
filmgirlcw 5y ago
I largely agree with this. There are some careers -- firefighting is one of them -- where it is downright dangerous for the person to have a reliance on technology (technology can help firefighters but the battalion chief still needs to know the entry/exit points on a structure to direct crews, the drivers need to *know* the city they are in, backwards and forwards to get to the site quickly (they cannot rely on Google Maps)), but I'm not sure how many of those careers (air traffic control would be another) would have remote-proctored exams anyway. Having said that, I do think that many of us have become too conditioned to having access to Google/the internet/the ability to always look stuff up, that it does become a problem (I am utterly incapable of getting around the city I live in without Google Maps, as an example), and that, I think is a negative for humanity. Having access to information and reference is great, but never taking the time to actually learn/memorize/understand concepts and content so that you feel confident doing something without checking the answer is still really important in lots of roles. There should be a balance. But none of this excuses the malware/spyware that ProctorU and other systems employ. Frankly, people who are that committed to cheating will cheat anyway. I've heard of similarly dystopic sorts of bullshit even when it comes to remote job interviews, often (but not limited to) code tests. I cannot imagine any job that would be worth me installing spyware/malware on my personal machine for the interview. Even for a university exam, I would push back hard on this sort of thing (or at least the onerous requirements and access it has) or demand the school issue testing laptops or at the very least re-think how/why they proctor exams the way they do. Individually, students don't have a lot of leverage, but if enough people complain -- especially in high dollar degree programs like a MSc -- universities will rethink their behavior -- or at the very least, force the software firms they pay millions of dollars to to support a fucking Chromebook.
- halostatue 5y ago
  Firefighting is actually a really awful example. The practices involved require in-person practica, and there are stages of growth expected. Additionally, for any structure of sufficient complexity, the "lead" firefighter will _absolutely_ be requesting and receiving building plans to direct the firefighters to the appropriate locations. Also, like London taxi drivers, fire truck drivers probably have to train on the streets they are protecting. (That said, I do recall stories of firefighters getting lost due to bad GPS directions.)
ModernMech 5y ago
I took the approach of just letting my students have unfettered access to the internet during the pandemic, even for exams. You may think this would lead to everyone getting an A, but it turns out the grades were normally distributed with a B- average, which was pretty typical for my courses per-pandemic. What I did was ask them to write real code. It’s a course on programming. If you can get the computer to accomplish the given task in whatever way you know, including gluing together parts and libraries from online, then that’s a demonstration other learned something! And as it turns out, C and D quality work is still submitted even when students have all the time and resources in the world. The internet is not a magic wand to solve all problems for you. For example, my final project is to write a file server. Yeah you can find tutorials for how to do this on the internet, but it’s still going to have to be customized to use my specific protocol. For someone who knows what they are doing, they can do this assignment in 10 minutes leveraging the right tools. For others, they might write it from scratch as we discussed in class. Others still will barely get past writing a makefile, even with step by step instructions and examples on how to do it. So in the end the grades worked out as they usually do, distributed normally with a B- average, and about half a letter grade stdev. That’s just the way it is. So this fear that access to the internet will lead to rampant cheating is only relevant if the questions are easily gamed: like definitions, facts, and contrived math problems. Well it turns out this is like 90% of prepared materials for the low level intro classes. I mean, if you can get through a number of semesters of college by looking up answers on Google, the problem is not with Google, it’s with the curriculum. Because what value are these courses really adding if they are just cramming facts into your brain and then you regurgitate them, and promptly forget? Take chemistry for example. All of chemistry should be in a laboratory setting. All of it. It’s a perfect hands on discipline, yet the standard sequence is just year after year of memorizing facts and definitions with very little comparable lab time. And I get why this isn’t done, it’s probably not practical and there does need to be an acquisition of fundamental knowledge, but that isn’t really done by going through prepackaged web content (that can’t be resold) with all the answers available on Chegg, as is the case for a great many 100 and 200 level courses in all major disciplines at most universities.
- ravitation 5y ago
  >Take chemistry for example. All of chemistry should be in a laboratory setting. All of it. It’s a perfect hands on discipline, yet the standard sequence is just year after year of memorizing facts and definitions with very little comparable lab time. I mean this is just... Incorrect. High school chemistry (generally the first time it's called chemistry and not science) is often taught in a lab (I assume mainly a function of whether lab facilities are available). Undergraduate general chemistry and organic chemistry generally have a required lab component that is required to be taken concurrently (this is even true at community colleges). Using general chemistry as an example, the lab portion is usually 1 three hour (at least) class per week, while lecture is 3 one hour classes per week (organic chemistry is essentially the same). More advanced chemistry might not have lab components (e.g. physical chemistry), but the foundations are almost always at least combined with a lab.
ravitation 5y ago
It's somewhat amusing to see someone write a lengthy rant against testing because memorizing information is archaic, when the ability to write, at least at the start, is learned this way. The most obvious example why you're wrong is learning a second language. Even learning a language outside of a classroom generally requires memorization of fundamental vocabulary (and sometimes a writing system); it therefore makes sense that a class teaching a second language would test students on this memorization. Now, other fields might not be so obvious, but they require many things to be quickly accessible, much in the same way that one might need quick access to a word or a character with a second language. A biologist needs to know and understand the central dogma, an engineer needs to understand mechanical stress, and a chemist needs to be able to read a structural formula; they need to be able to do these things essentially instantly (and understand them intuitively) to be able to even discuss more complex topics, because complex information builds on simple information. Hence it makes sense to make sure those pieces of information are understood and readily available before sending a student off to a more advanced topic.
- TomSwirly 5y ago
  > t's somewhat amusing to see someone write a lengthy rant against testing because memorizing information is archaic, when the ability to write, at least at the start, is learned this way. Writing is a skill. It is NOT memorization. It is not taught or learned that way, even at the beginning, unless you are talking about handwriting. No one says, "Memorize this phrase, and now write it out again."
  - lmkg 5y ago
    Not everything IS memorization, but lots of things HAVE memorization. You don't write by regurgitating exact phrases, but your ability to write will be significantly impeded if you need to constantly look up word definitions, spellings, word order, syntax rules, and orthographies. There are certain fundamentals that need to be automatic, and it's fair to require internalization as part of acquiring mastery.
  - ravitation 5y ago
    I mean you are just wrong. You memorize what sound (well sounds) the letter "a" makes, which is of course fundamental to being able to write because English uses an alphabet. You might argue that reading isn't writing, but the two are interdependent (or at least writing generally dependent on reading). Not to mention memorizing how to physically write (i.e. what you're talking about with handwriting)... I assume you think I mean composition or something, which is of course extremely obviously not what I meant... But to develop that skill of "writing" that you're talking about requires memorization of the fundamentals... Which applies quite broadly to other disciplines...
Siira 5y ago
Doctors and lawyers frequently consult their references.
advael 5y ago
Having been through a lot of school and gotten a lot out of it, I am strongly convinced that the current society-wide policy of treating university education as expensive vocational training is a horrible and costly mistake whose main function for the overwhelming majority of students right now is to saddle people with debt. Universities primarily exist to train and employ researchers, and serve a secondary purpose of providing a broad-based education to members of the public. Anything that is useful vocational training in this process is basically an accident, and useful vocational training can be done in a much more time- and cost-efficient way. I also think the way we test people is set up to be measurable rather than effective, and all this hand-wringing about cheating is an attempt to prop up a premise about pedagogical techniques that simply do not accomplish their goal (and a way to scam universities out of a lot of money for tools like this one). Most of the market for standardized tests is a racket built on market dominance and irrational beliefs about its value built on a (pervasive, policy-level) misunderstanding and subsequent cargo-cult style blind worship of metrics per se On top of all this, the sheer level of security and privacy violations the school system seems to tolerate for this dubious purpose is ridiculous, and speaks to a deep gap in knowledge about, or devaluation of these things that causes far more problems in our information-driven world than cheating on a dumb test possibly could I've gotten advanced degrees and consider them to have been overall a valuable experience, but even then most of the education system as we have it was pointless torture, and I probably would have quit school if this nonsense were around when I was in it
- romwell 5y ago
  As a former educator, the only thing I can add on top of this is that training compliance, obedience, and mindless rule-following is a feature, not a bug of the education system. And I feel like it's drilled into instructors too.
  - advael 5y ago
    I strongly agree. I think this has been the case for all versions of the public education system in living memory, and the main ways this has changed over the last few decades are twofold: -More oversight and efficiency in this process is breaking down the unofficial means through which anyone got anything else out of it (e.g. real mentorship from educators who care that is not encouraged so much as tolerated by education policy, opportunities to engage with new ideas in a meaningful way, good reading recommendations, an incidental avenue into a social life) -The structure and function of public education is increasingly infecting university curricula, structure, and priorities I think this likely has the effect in broader society of creating less fluid competency and more blank-faced compliance, and this disproportionately affects people in key leadership roles as schooling becomes more of a selection pressure on people's career paths
908B64B197 5y ago
> and it seems like testing and certifying doctors and lawyers is important enough to society Lawyers spend most of their (billable) time researching. And the great majority of lawyers never see a court room. No quick reaction time needed. Doctors... The average doctor follows a script to triage the easy 80% of problems. And the average doctor stops at that.
kevincox 5y ago
In my mind (I know nothing about the universities' threat models) the biggest concern is not looking up some reference online, but paying someone for a couple of hours to take the test for you. I agree, if you can look at available resources and competently perform the task that is likely not an issue in the field. However paying someone to tell you all the answers to a test is cost effective for an exam that takes a couple of hours but will not get you by in the field. The university doesn't want to be known to give out degrees to incompetent workers so they need to prevent this case.
JadeNB 5y ago
> If you elaborately cheat your way through all online classes all the way through undergrad, that seems mostly bad for you. As a teacher, I would love to be able to dispense with tests except as informative diagnostic tools. Unfortunately, I am required to give at least a final exam by my university, and that and other grade-based requirements come from the confounding of what the university's mission should be, which is education of the interested, with what most (at least US) universities' missions have become, which is credentialling (of the often unwilling—and who can blame them, when the requirement is artificially foisted upon them?). Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any way to get away from that drift towards credentialling that doesn't involve a shrinking student body, and administrators are addicted to the idea that we so badly need an ever-increasing student body to prop up … well, salaries for administrators, for example, whom we clearly need because without them we might not do so well on this endless treadmill of pointless dedication to growth.
raxxorrax 5y ago
I remember the tests in university where everything was allowed (books, notes and sometimes even internet). They were feared because it meant the topic probably would be a difficult edge problem. It was only the good and engaged profs that did these tests though, guess it is a lot of work to come up with new questions. Everything allowed Math I + II ate the dreams of students like candy. Still, even if you are good at math and have all the tools at hand, you still had to develop a general understanding of the topic since otherwise you would just be way too slow to work through the assignments.

imilk 5y ago

> I get that there are a few professions where you're really going to need to know the right answer quickly without looking it up under high-pressure situations I agree with the premise, but I think you're downplaying this quite a bit. Pretty much any job that you're not doing asynchronous work in front of a computer would apply here. > If you elaborately cheat your way through all online classes all the way through undergrad, that seems mostly bad for you Well it's more than bad for just you. It's bad for the university and everyone else with a degree from there since you are degrading the value of having that degree.

maerF0x0 5y ago
I'm curious about the proportion of careers which are not adaptable to asynchronous/remote work, that _is_ best tested through rote memorization (think multiple choice questions) versus active demonstration (think like having an instructor see you do CPR on a dummy)? Just a thought about how it's weird we argue about how testing should be done online, but not the fact we test online things which are not really online in their nature.
- imilk 5y ago
  Pretty much anything that requires real time communication involving a deep base of knowledge. I'm not going to list out hundreds of possible roles that this encompasses - but I'm sure you have the imagination to think of a few.
vlunkr 5y ago
> Pretty much any job that you're not doing asynchronous work in front of a computer would apply here. It's lame to ask for examples, but do you have any? Because honestly I don't think it applies to many jobs, unless it's something that a) puts you in high pressure situations, and b) requires specific in-depth knowledge. There aren't that many jobs like that, and for the ones that do exist (medical, military), you don't get in just by doing a bunch of multiple choice tests.
- profile53 5y ago
  > for the ones that do exist (medical, military), you don’t get in just by doing a bunch of multiple choice tests As someone in the medical field, I would say upwards of 80% of the graded portion of a nursing license and it’s certifications (trauma nursing, cardiac life support, etc), you’re graded entirely on multiple choice questions. People die from mistakes, yet I meet a lot of people who proudly admit to having cheated or googled their way through a much of their studies. Some of them are good and quite a few are downright dangerous at their jobs.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    > I would say upwards of 80% of the graded portion of a nursing license and it’s certifications (trauma nursing, cardiac life support, etc), you’re graded entirely on multiple choice questions. A lot of places won't let you take the exam without practical experience, under the supervision of clinical personnel. Harder to google your way through that.
    - profile53 5y ago
      I can’t speak to the certification exams, but for nursing school, there is a high pressure from administration to pass students as long as they can pass the standardized test, even if the teachers don’t think the student is ready or safe for clinical work. So, although they do have practical experience, it is often limited in scope and students can fake their way through it to a surprisingly large extent (they’re always paired with a licensed staff member). This is anecdotal, but consistent across what has been told to me by staff members of several nursing schools.
julienb_sea 5y ago
I completely disagree. Knowledge recollection of school taught concepts is irrelevant to practically every job. Yes, most jobs require you to remember various work-related things, but those are not taught in school, they are taught and reinforced on the job itself.
- imilk 5y ago
  What this tells me is that you may not have gotten the most out of your education. Sure there are specific tasks that you learn how to complete for particular jobs, but the structure of how you approach problems should have been helped quite a bit by what you learn in school. Personally I found studying philosophy extremely helpful to solving business problems. Not because there is an exact 1 for 1 concept match. Rather it teaches you how to frame and break down problems so that you can be more adaptable and efficient when faced with various unknowns. There's always going to be domain specific learning needed for any position. But to dismiss any tangential knowledge as useless is extremely short sided.
  - rembicilious 5y ago
    You said “studying philosophy” rather than “being tested on rote memorization of philosophy text books”. I agree that “studying philosophy” is a worthwhile endeavor, but I align more closely with the parents in regards to memorizing the semi-random litany of data bits that show up in a typical exam. The information is ultimately forgotten and is usually only relevant in the context of the current textbook chapter. Nearly every useful concept that applies to my two separate careers was learned on the job. The time spent in the classroom is nearly irrelevant and could have been replaced entirely by several weeks on the job.
    - imilk 5y ago
      I just gave an personal example to flesh out my post. But if, for example, you are a structural engineer who has to consult on site with clients, you certainly need to recall a litany of data/concepts (random or non-random) pretty quickly if you don't want to look like an idiot. You cannot learn this knowledge from a few weeks on the job because the client would be able to see through your bullshit in minutes. This applies to pretty much any position that needs to communicate in real time about a base of knowledge (doctors, lawyers, logistics, any type of management position). If you believe that any career can be substituted by "a few weeks on the job", you're not really aiming that high for yourself.
tomphoolery 5y ago
Conan O'Brien went to Harvard, so we've already degraded the value of having a degree in general.
- imilk 5y ago
  He seems to have had a very successful career doing something that he enjoys. I don't really understand your point.
- aspenmayer 5y ago
  I think Conan would like this joke. Sounds like one Andy would make at his expense back in the day.

jdavis703 5y ago

I don’t want my emergency room doctor looking up a fairly common disease on the internet. And I ding interview candidates who have to look up basic syntax like a for loop (I have no problem if they need to reference random APIs or advanced syntax though). Being fluent in your professional vernacular is very important for productivity. And a closed test is the best, scalable way we have to test this.

anaphor 5y ago
Doctors google rare disease symptoms sometimes, however, and it's seen as a legitimate thing to try if you're truly stumped by a mysterious illness.
- bmj 5y ago
  And in the days before the internet, they likely had a bookshelf full of reference manuals. True story: when I became a programmer in the 1990s, I used to buy the printed manuals for the Java APIs as they were released. At one of my first interviews (for a Perl job), I was given the Camel Book as reference for the (handwritten) programming test.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  And just as often they don’t. I went to the ER for a seizure, and basically after paying $5,000 the advice I got was “well that drug has seizures as a side effect, so stopping take it and find a new one.” Absolutely no investigation in to why this happened, if there’s a class of drugs I should avoid, nothing.
  - crygin 5y ago
    Huh, sounds like you might have been better off if "[your] emergency room doctor [looked it up] on the internet".
    - jdavis703 5y ago
      Well I can’t find any information on the general internet about this, beyond what the doctor said. One would most likely have to synthesize several different areas of knowledge to come up with a plausible hypothesis.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

I don't think that is an effective life strategy because you actually solve problems more slowly if you have less knowledge. If you've learned skills and committed things to memory, your brain can synthesize information much more rapidly. If you have to google everything, its like running your 2.5GHz PC at 10 MHz, and it is highly unlikely your brain will produce new information on the spot. Edited for snark removal.

pfortuny 5y ago
Following your lead: Thinking is not "answering questions". In order to build a mental model of a problem, you need a rather good model of the environment in your mind, and this comes from memory and the habit of thinking (which is what drill exercises facilitate). Rote learning is an essential tool in being able to create adequate models of the environment. The problem is lots of people think it is useless because "I did not need to memorize", when the issue is that "they are sufficiently able to memorize that they do it unconsciously". But most people need to put the effort.
grishka 5y ago
For me personally, I just can't memorize stuff on demand like exams expect people to. My brain refuses to do that, period. But when I do use some information often and many times, I somehow end up memorizing it eventually. APIs, phone numbers, addresses and routes, even people's faces.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  > I just can't memorize stuff on demand like exams expect people to. Unless things have changed in the 30+ years since I was in college, I seem to recall exams happen after weeks of study and not "on demand". Part of learning is memorization. There's no way around that. It sounds more like you aren't cut out for the pace of high-caliber institutions which move very quickly. I have two friends with literature degrees, one from UCONN and one from Dartmouth. The Dartmouth friend had to read 4x the number of books than the UCONN friend in the same period of time for the same degree. C-students still need jobs! Just because you aren't a straight-A doesn't mean you can't still be a serviceable employee.

pfortuny 5y ago

Life is an open-answer problem, not a sequence of questions, so the "answer" is neither unique nor necessarily easily expressible as a sequence of statements. Memory is useful because it is the very basis of reasoning. Rote learning is important because intellectual habits facilitate thinking. Google has not all the answers, but especially: it does not have any questions.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

5faulker 5y ago

It's mostly bad because it'd be you cheating yourself I guess.

robbyking 5y ago

Absolutely. I work at a well known tech company, and when we give potential candidates coding tests we give them the option to code in any language they'd like (including pseudo-code), and to use Google if they can't remember the name or syntax of something they want to use. There's not reason to fail a candidate just because they can't remember the signature of a method in a library they haven't used in a while.

filmgirlcw 5y ago

I largely agree with this. There are some careers -- firefighting is one of them -- where it is downright dangerous for the person to have a reliance on technology (technology can help firefighters but the battalion chief still needs to know the entry/exit points on a structure to direct crews, the drivers need to *know* the city they are in, backwards and forwards to get to the site quickly (they cannot rely on Google Maps)), but I'm not sure how many of those careers (air traffic control would be another) would have remote-proctored exams anyway. Having said that, I do think that many of us have become too conditioned to having access to Google/the internet/the ability to always look stuff up, that it does become a problem (I am utterly incapable of getting around the city I live in without Google Maps, as an example), and that, I think is a negative for humanity. Having access to information and reference is great, but never taking the time to actually learn/memorize/understand concepts and content so that you feel confident doing something without checking the answer is still really important in lots of roles. There should be a balance. But none of this excuses the malware/spyware that ProctorU and other systems employ. Frankly, people who are that committed to cheating will cheat anyway. I've heard of similarly dystopic sorts of bullshit even when it comes to remote job interviews, often (but not limited to) code tests. I cannot imagine any job that would be worth me installing spyware/malware on my personal machine for the interview. Even for a university exam, I would push back hard on this sort of thing (or at least the onerous requirements and access it has) or demand the school issue testing laptops or at the very least re-think how/why they proctor exams the way they do. Individually, students don't have a lot of leverage, but if enough people complain -- especially in high dollar degree programs like a MSc -- universities will rethink their behavior -- or at the very least, force the software firms they pay millions of dollars to to support a fucking Chromebook.

halostatue 5y ago
Firefighting is actually a really awful example. The practices involved require in-person practica, and there are stages of growth expected. Additionally, for any structure of sufficient complexity, the "lead" firefighter will _absolutely_ be requesting and receiving building plans to direct the firefighters to the appropriate locations. Also, like London taxi drivers, fire truck drivers probably have to train on the streets they are protecting. (That said, I do recall stories of firefighters getting lost due to bad GPS directions.)

ModernMech 5y ago

I took the approach of just letting my students have unfettered access to the internet during the pandemic, even for exams. You may think this would lead to everyone getting an A, but it turns out the grades were normally distributed with a B- average, which was pretty typical for my courses per-pandemic. What I did was ask them to write real code. It’s a course on programming. If you can get the computer to accomplish the given task in whatever way you know, including gluing together parts and libraries from online, then that’s a demonstration other learned something! And as it turns out, C and D quality work is still submitted even when students have all the time and resources in the world. The internet is not a magic wand to solve all problems for you. For example, my final project is to write a file server. Yeah you can find tutorials for how to do this on the internet, but it’s still going to have to be customized to use my specific protocol. For someone who knows what they are doing, they can do this assignment in 10 minutes leveraging the right tools. For others, they might write it from scratch as we discussed in class. Others still will barely get past writing a makefile, even with step by step instructions and examples on how to do it. So in the end the grades worked out as they usually do, distributed normally with a B- average, and about half a letter grade stdev. That’s just the way it is. So this fear that access to the internet will lead to rampant cheating is only relevant if the questions are easily gamed: like definitions, facts, and contrived math problems. Well it turns out this is like 90% of prepared materials for the low level intro classes. I mean, if you can get through a number of semesters of college by looking up answers on Google, the problem is not with Google, it’s with the curriculum. Because what value are these courses really adding if they are just cramming facts into your brain and then you regurgitate them, and promptly forget? Take chemistry for example. All of chemistry should be in a laboratory setting. All of it. It’s a perfect hands on discipline, yet the standard sequence is just year after year of memorizing facts and definitions with very little comparable lab time. And I get why this isn’t done, it’s probably not practical and there does need to be an acquisition of fundamental knowledge, but that isn’t really done by going through prepackaged web content (that can’t be resold) with all the answers available on Chegg, as is the case for a great many 100 and 200 level courses in all major disciplines at most universities.

ravitation 5y ago
>Take chemistry for example. All of chemistry should be in a laboratory setting. All of it. It’s a perfect hands on discipline, yet the standard sequence is just year after year of memorizing facts and definitions with very little comparable lab time. I mean this is just... Incorrect. High school chemistry (generally the first time it's called chemistry and not science) is often taught in a lab (I assume mainly a function of whether lab facilities are available). Undergraduate general chemistry and organic chemistry generally have a required lab component that is required to be taken concurrently (this is even true at community colleges). Using general chemistry as an example, the lab portion is usually 1 three hour (at least) class per week, while lecture is 3 one hour classes per week (organic chemistry is essentially the same). More advanced chemistry might not have lab components (e.g. physical chemistry), but the foundations are almost always at least combined with a lab.

ravitation 5y ago

It's somewhat amusing to see someone write a lengthy rant against testing because memorizing information is archaic, when the ability to write, at least at the start, is learned this way. The most obvious example why you're wrong is learning a second language. Even learning a language outside of a classroom generally requires memorization of fundamental vocabulary (and sometimes a writing system); it therefore makes sense that a class teaching a second language would test students on this memorization. Now, other fields might not be so obvious, but they require many things to be quickly accessible, much in the same way that one might need quick access to a word or a character with a second language. A biologist needs to know and understand the central dogma, an engineer needs to understand mechanical stress, and a chemist needs to be able to read a structural formula; they need to be able to do these things essentially instantly (and understand them intuitively) to be able to even discuss more complex topics, because complex information builds on simple information. Hence it makes sense to make sure those pieces of information are understood and readily available before sending a student off to a more advanced topic.

TomSwirly 5y ago
> t's somewhat amusing to see someone write a lengthy rant against testing because memorizing information is archaic, when the ability to write, at least at the start, is learned this way. Writing is a skill. It is NOT memorization. It is not taught or learned that way, even at the beginning, unless you are talking about handwriting. No one says, "Memorize this phrase, and now write it out again."
- lmkg 5y ago
  Not everything IS memorization, but lots of things HAVE memorization. You don't write by regurgitating exact phrases, but your ability to write will be significantly impeded if you need to constantly look up word definitions, spellings, word order, syntax rules, and orthographies. There are certain fundamentals that need to be automatic, and it's fair to require internalization as part of acquiring mastery.
- ravitation 5y ago
  I mean you are just wrong. You memorize what sound (well sounds) the letter "a" makes, which is of course fundamental to being able to write because English uses an alphabet. You might argue that reading isn't writing, but the two are interdependent (or at least writing generally dependent on reading). Not to mention memorizing how to physically write (i.e. what you're talking about with handwriting)... I assume you think I mean composition or something, which is of course extremely obviously not what I meant... But to develop that skill of "writing" that you're talking about requires memorization of the fundamentals... Which applies quite broadly to other disciplines...

Siira 5y ago

Doctors and lawyers frequently consult their references.

advael 5y ago

Having been through a lot of school and gotten a lot out of it, I am strongly convinced that the current society-wide policy of treating university education as expensive vocational training is a horrible and costly mistake whose main function for the overwhelming majority of students right now is to saddle people with debt. Universities primarily exist to train and employ researchers, and serve a secondary purpose of providing a broad-based education to members of the public. Anything that is useful vocational training in this process is basically an accident, and useful vocational training can be done in a much more time- and cost-efficient way. I also think the way we test people is set up to be measurable rather than effective, and all this hand-wringing about cheating is an attempt to prop up a premise about pedagogical techniques that simply do not accomplish their goal (and a way to scam universities out of a lot of money for tools like this one). Most of the market for standardized tests is a racket built on market dominance and irrational beliefs about its value built on a (pervasive, policy-level) misunderstanding and subsequent cargo-cult style blind worship of metrics per se On top of all this, the sheer level of security and privacy violations the school system seems to tolerate for this dubious purpose is ridiculous, and speaks to a deep gap in knowledge about, or devaluation of these things that causes far more problems in our information-driven world than cheating on a dumb test possibly could I've gotten advanced degrees and consider them to have been overall a valuable experience, but even then most of the education system as we have it was pointless torture, and I probably would have quit school if this nonsense were around when I was in it

romwell 5y ago
As a former educator, the only thing I can add on top of this is that training compliance, obedience, and mindless rule-following is a feature, not a bug of the education system. And I feel like it's drilled into instructors too.
- advael 5y ago
  I strongly agree. I think this has been the case for all versions of the public education system in living memory, and the main ways this has changed over the last few decades are twofold: -More oversight and efficiency in this process is breaking down the unofficial means through which anyone got anything else out of it (e.g. real mentorship from educators who care that is not encouraged so much as tolerated by education policy, opportunities to engage with new ideas in a meaningful way, good reading recommendations, an incidental avenue into a social life) -The structure and function of public education is increasingly infecting university curricula, structure, and priorities I think this likely has the effect in broader society of creating less fluid competency and more blank-faced compliance, and this disproportionately affects people in key leadership roles as schooling becomes more of a selection pressure on people's career paths

908B64B197 5y ago

> and it seems like testing and certifying doctors and lawyers is important enough to society Lawyers spend most of their (billable) time researching. And the great majority of lawyers never see a court room. No quick reaction time needed. Doctors... The average doctor follows a script to triage the easy 80% of problems. And the average doctor stops at that.

kevincox 5y ago

In my mind (I know nothing about the universities' threat models) the biggest concern is not looking up some reference online, but paying someone for a couple of hours to take the test for you. I agree, if you can look at available resources and competently perform the task that is likely not an issue in the field. However paying someone to tell you all the answers to a test is cost effective for an exam that takes a couple of hours but will not get you by in the field. The university doesn't want to be known to give out degrees to incompetent workers so they need to prevent this case.

JadeNB 5y ago

> If you elaborately cheat your way through all online classes all the way through undergrad, that seems mostly bad for you. As a teacher, I would love to be able to dispense with tests except as informative diagnostic tools. Unfortunately, I am required to give at least a final exam by my university, and that and other grade-based requirements come from the confounding of what the university's mission should be, which is education of the interested, with what most (at least US) universities' missions have become, which is credentialling (of the often unwilling—and who can blame them, when the requirement is artificially foisted upon them?). Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any way to get away from that drift towards credentialling that doesn't involve a shrinking student body, and administrators are addicted to the idea that we so badly need an ever-increasing student body to prop up … well, salaries for administrators, for example, whom we clearly need because without them we might not do so well on this endless treadmill of pointless dedication to growth.

raxxorrax 5y ago

I remember the tests in university where everything was allowed (books, notes and sometimes even internet). They were feared because it meant the topic probably would be a difficult edge problem. It was only the good and engaged profs that did these tests though, guess it is a lot of work to come up with new questions. Everything allowed Math I + II ate the dreams of students like candy. Still, even if you are good at math and have all the tools at hand, you still had to develop a general understanding of the topic since otherwise you would just be way too slow to work through the assignments.