5 ms·

It is terrible, but what is the alternative to prevent cheating? I had quite a few on-line exams by now and I've seen very creative attempts at cheating so far.

Teever 4y ago
Take home tests are a thing. I've never had one, but from what I've heard they're the kind of thing that if done properly ends up being a better way to test people, but they're harder for instructors to implement.
- Claude_Shannon 4y ago
  I guess so. Most of the tests I;ve taken at college were the same tasks as in previous years, just with changed numbers. ... or not. That also happened.
  - blitzar 4y ago
    Exam questions have to be approved, re-use the old one and it sails through. Write a new one from scratch ... takes time. Typically you just use the questions from ~5 years ago and rotate them through.
smabie 4y ago
You've been able to take online classes for decades, why is this suddenly a problem? Moreover, if people want to cheat they can find some way to cheat regardless of any countermeasures you deploy.
- thrdbndndn 4y ago
  >which [why?] is this suddenly a problem? Because most of teachers didn't teach online class before. They are not used to design exams that would not be way too easy it suddenly becomes open book. I won't even say they're "lazy", coming up good take-home exams is super hard, especially when you spend your entire career not need to do that. > if people want to cheat they can find some way to cheat regardless of any countermeasures you deploy. I agree if it's online exam, it's kinda doomed either way. But it's more to act as a deterrent than total solution. And it does work to some "less-adventurous" students. Note: above is just directly replying to your questions. I don't support scanning student's room.
  - titoCA321 4y ago
    Come on now, some of the college instructors weren't even teaching the offline classes. 200 students in a lecture hall and some random TA grading and assigning the tests. Do you honesty believe the TA knows each and ever student and that someone else didn't show up on exam day?!
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - PeterStuer 4y ago
      At every university that l took exams photo id was required to sit the exam.
      - swores 4y ago
        I'd guess that people who are willing and able to afford hiring someone to cheat for them in an exam, can probably also order a fake ID with their name and the photo of their exam-taker. Though maybe an extra step of storing a copy of the ID with the exam entry and having a professor who knows them verify that it matches the real student would catch most of that...
      - cguess 4y ago
        Where? In the US I've never had to do so.
        PeterStuer 4y ago
        Not in the US. EU.
- geek_at 4y ago
  > if people want to cheat they can find some way to cheat regardless of any countermeasures you deploy I was a Academic highschool teacher for 8 years and I agree with your statement but also don't think that we should make it too easy for them. At minimum a screen recorder so the students know even if they were not caught during the exam, they could later be caught Bonus anecdote When the first bluetooth phones hit the market we had students use their (pseudo) smart phones (that looked like expensive calculators with greyscale displays back then) to send each other the solutions during the physics exam. No teacher at the time had this as a threat model
  - trashtester 4y ago
    At some point, when a student find a truly novel way to gain an advantage, that can be seen as a kind of creativity, and may point to a strong career (hopefully within the law). However, if lots of students cheat in the same way semester after semester, the school has a credibility problem.
yoro46 4y ago
Take home tests that are difficult enough for the questions to not be easily answered on Stack Exchange or paid sites. This is fairly easy to do in upper-division undergraduate courses as well as graduate courses. Not so easy for lower-division courses. The closest I've seen for a lower-division class was a professor who made as much of the exam content based off examples from lecture material, but I always saw that as a way to punish students who ditched lectures.
titoCA321 4y ago
Students and teachers have been cheating before pencil and paper. Do you ever wonder why some college students have near-perfect SAT scores yet can barely rub two English words together?
systemvoltage 4y ago
No, it is not acceptable that we have to give up privacy for some stupid exam cheating problem. There are going to be lots of problems and inconveniences like this. We have a legacy of 250 years of constitutional protection of privacy. Solve the fucking problem without violating privacy. If it doesn't get solved, fine, let it be. Accept those consequences and live with it.
sh4rks 4y ago
The best way to prevent cheating in an online test is to set a strict time limit. That way its harder for them to look up the answers on Google etc. The problem then is that a student may experience technical difficulties out of their control. For cases like that, students should be able to appeal for extra time.
- PeterStuer 4y ago
  But this introduces a stronger bias for being fast regardless of wether you cheat or not. That is not always what you want.
- jamesrr39 4y ago
  This might work for things you have to remember off the top of your head, where you have e.g. 10 seconds to write answer, but it doesn't really work when you have longer questions requiring some kind of working which take more than a minute to work out. I also think that the "extra time for technical difficulties" is going to be very hard to prove or disprove and would lead to very arbitrary decisions.
- Broken_Hippo 4y ago
  They already do this with some tests, both online and in person. If it isn't generous enough, it generally harms folks that are being careful with answers while cheaters can cheat. The cheaters just have to be prepared.
p1necone 4y ago
Design better tests. If you can "cheat" on a test by just googling things/looking at notes then the test isn't testing anything but rote memorization anyway.
- KingOfCoders 4y ago
  A math professor (granted easier with math) at university always said, you can bring anything you want to the exam, if you can answer it with help he made a mistake designing the test. I see the same when I interview people online and I hear them frantically click their keyboard - but no help, I know before what Google returns.
  - PeterStuer 4y ago
    Did any student show up with a 5G tablet and an earpiece?
    - KingOfCoders 4y ago
      No but there were some were I suspected someone was listening in and answering questions.
  - p1necone 4y ago
    Trying to evaluate a software engineer without letting them use google strikes me as being similar to trying to evaluate a construction worker by making them dig holes with their bare hands.
    - KingOfCoders 4y ago
      I'm not asking things that can be solved by Google [1], because they can be solved by Google, and I only gain the knowledge "Candidate can Google", I see this as given. It doesn't mean that not a lot of work at the job involves googling Stackoverflow - I do it myself all the time. [1] I don't ask API knowledge, if someone doesn't know some API I tell them just to invent the call they need.
pabs3 4y ago
Another question is; what is the alternative to tests, grades and credentials?

Teever 4y ago

Take home tests are a thing. I've never had one, but from what I've heard they're the kind of thing that if done properly ends up being a better way to test people, but they're harder for instructors to implement.

Claude_Shannon 4y ago
I guess so. Most of the tests I;ve taken at college were the same tasks as in previous years, just with changed numbers. ... or not. That also happened.
- blitzar 4y ago
  Exam questions have to be approved, re-use the old one and it sails through. Write a new one from scratch ... takes time. Typically you just use the questions from ~5 years ago and rotate them through.

smabie 4y ago

You've been able to take online classes for decades, why is this suddenly a problem? Moreover, if people want to cheat they can find some way to cheat regardless of any countermeasures you deploy.

thrdbndndn 4y ago
>which [why?] is this suddenly a problem? Because most of teachers didn't teach online class before. They are not used to design exams that would not be way too easy it suddenly becomes open book. I won't even say they're "lazy", coming up good take-home exams is super hard, especially when you spend your entire career not need to do that. > if people want to cheat they can find some way to cheat regardless of any countermeasures you deploy. I agree if it's online exam, it's kinda doomed either way. But it's more to act as a deterrent than total solution. And it does work to some "less-adventurous" students. Note: above is just directly replying to your questions. I don't support scanning student's room.
- titoCA321 4y ago
  Come on now, some of the college instructors weren't even teaching the offline classes. 200 students in a lecture hall and some random TA grading and assigning the tests. Do you honesty believe the TA knows each and ever student and that someone else didn't show up on exam day?!
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - PeterStuer 4y ago
    At every university that l took exams photo id was required to sit the exam.
    - swores 4y ago
      I'd guess that people who are willing and able to afford hiring someone to cheat for them in an exam, can probably also order a fake ID with their name and the photo of their exam-taker. Though maybe an extra step of storing a copy of the ID with the exam entry and having a professor who knows them verify that it matches the real student would catch most of that...
    - cguess 4y ago
      Where? In the US I've never had to do so.
      - PeterStuer 4y ago
        Not in the US. EU.
geek_at 4y ago
> if people want to cheat they can find some way to cheat regardless of any countermeasures you deploy I was a Academic highschool teacher for 8 years and I agree with your statement but also don't think that we should make it too easy for them. At minimum a screen recorder so the students know even if they were not caught during the exam, they could later be caught Bonus anecdote When the first bluetooth phones hit the market we had students use their (pseudo) smart phones (that looked like expensive calculators with greyscale displays back then) to send each other the solutions during the physics exam. No teacher at the time had this as a threat model
- trashtester 4y ago
  At some point, when a student find a truly novel way to gain an advantage, that can be seen as a kind of creativity, and may point to a strong career (hopefully within the law). However, if lots of students cheat in the same way semester after semester, the school has a credibility problem.

yoro46 4y ago

Take home tests that are difficult enough for the questions to not be easily answered on Stack Exchange or paid sites. This is fairly easy to do in upper-division undergraduate courses as well as graduate courses. Not so easy for lower-division courses. The closest I've seen for a lower-division class was a professor who made as much of the exam content based off examples from lecture material, but I always saw that as a way to punish students who ditched lectures.

titoCA321 4y ago

Students and teachers have been cheating before pencil and paper. Do you ever wonder why some college students have near-perfect SAT scores yet can barely rub two English words together?

systemvoltage 4y ago

No, it is not acceptable that we have to give up privacy for some stupid exam cheating problem. There are going to be lots of problems and inconveniences like this. We have a legacy of 250 years of constitutional protection of privacy. Solve the fucking problem without violating privacy. If it doesn't get solved, fine, let it be. Accept those consequences and live with it.

sh4rks 4y ago

The best way to prevent cheating in an online test is to set a strict time limit. That way its harder for them to look up the answers on Google etc. The problem then is that a student may experience technical difficulties out of their control. For cases like that, students should be able to appeal for extra time.

PeterStuer 4y ago
But this introduces a stronger bias for being fast regardless of wether you cheat or not. That is not always what you want.
jamesrr39 4y ago
This might work for things you have to remember off the top of your head, where you have e.g. 10 seconds to write answer, but it doesn't really work when you have longer questions requiring some kind of working which take more than a minute to work out. I also think that the "extra time for technical difficulties" is going to be very hard to prove or disprove and would lead to very arbitrary decisions.
Broken_Hippo 4y ago
They already do this with some tests, both online and in person. If it isn't generous enough, it generally harms folks that are being careful with answers while cheaters can cheat. The cheaters just have to be prepared.

p1necone 4y ago

Design better tests. If you can "cheat" on a test by just googling things/looking at notes then the test isn't testing anything but rote memorization anyway.

KingOfCoders 4y ago
A math professor (granted easier with math) at university always said, you can bring anything you want to the exam, if you can answer it with help he made a mistake designing the test. I see the same when I interview people online and I hear them frantically click their keyboard - but no help, I know before what Google returns.
- PeterStuer 4y ago
  Did any student show up with a 5G tablet and an earpiece?
  - KingOfCoders 4y ago
    No but there were some were I suspected someone was listening in and answering questions.
- p1necone 4y ago
  Trying to evaluate a software engineer without letting them use google strikes me as being similar to trying to evaluate a construction worker by making them dig holes with their bare hands.
  - KingOfCoders 4y ago
    I'm not asking things that can be solved by Google [1], because they can be solved by Google, and I only gain the knowledge "Candidate can Google", I see this as given. It doesn't mean that not a lot of work at the job involves googling Stackoverflow - I do it myself all the time. [1] I don't ask API knowledge, if someone doesn't know some API I tell them just to invent the call they need.

pabs3 4y ago

Another question is; what is the alternative to tests, grades and credentials?