5 ms·
Students having records of what their score was doesn't prove to the professor / university what score they received. "FWD: Exam 1 Results" is not especially au
by e28eta 5mo ago
Students having records of what their score was doesn't prove to the professor / university what score they received. "FWD: Exam 1 Results" is not especially auditable.
- lacunary 5mo agoIf only we had some way of signing messages
- pishpash 5mo agoYou forget things can be signed, with the key owned by the school. It can be done.
- SlightlyLeftPad 5mo agoDoes signing really make this easily auditable from the professor’s perspective?
- DaSHacka 5mo agoExactly this, when was the last time a HN user had to interact with the prototypical 60-year-old set-in-their-ways professor? Extremely non-tech savvy, hates computers, and is gonna grumble "What the hell is a PGP? Better not be another one of those phone code things." as you try to pitch this highly-technological solution to a largely niche problem domain.
- Forgeties79 5mo agoThey don’t even need to not be tech savvy. This stuff just registers as “hassle” to most people so they do the bare minimum or search for ways to not deal with it at all. It’s easy to “tut tut” at them but ultimately we need to accept reality: privacy, security, these things take extra effort that isn’t strictly necessary for people to go about their daily lives even though the stakes can be super high. It’s not a problem until it is, so they aren’t really barriers that require people to do the work. It’s like convincing someone who just simply doesn’t want to go out and buy/install a lock on their door to go do it, except it’s not even a one-time thing. Their door works fine. They can come and go as they please. It’s not until something happens that they maybe change their tune (and even then!) Hell just getting people to do secure passwords is a whole thing.
- jazzyjackson 5mo agoI mean a cloud based learning management system also seems to be a very technological solution to the very old problem of checks notes grading quizzes?
- gruez 5mo agoAs opposed to a screenshot of a website? Presumably the professor has a spreadsheet of all assignment grades that is submitted to the school?
- blahedo 5mo agoNope! We're encouraged to keep all that exclusively in canvas. (As noted, I have my own spreadsheet. But I'm an outlier.)
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> Presumably the professor has a spreadsheet of all assignment grades that is submitted to the school? This would undermine Canvas's lock-in.
- doctorpangloss 5mo agoi cannot believe how much benefit of the doubt people are giving canvas ed tech is the WORST performing VC sector the ONLY game in that town is vendor lock-in! are people joking? c'mon, canvas is a huge piece of shit. the SaaSpocalypse is coming for them - it seems it is simply that LLMs will be used to exploit it first, rather than universities writing an open alternative they share with each other for free.
- freeopinion 5mo agoOn paper your idea seems obvious. You take a bunch of institutions that actually teach students how to program and have them cooperate to build an open LMS that benefits them all. In reality, universities always spin off anything that looks like it could generate revenue. It is very telling that you can't even get your college transcript from your college. You have to go to (and pay) some third party to get it. Some universities even outsource their "classes" like elderhostel to cruise lines and travel companies.
- gucci-on-fleek 5mo ago> rather than universities writing an open alternative they share with each other for free That already exists [0], and is actually reasonably popular. > the SaaSpocalypse is coming for them - it seems it is simply that LLMs will be used to exploit it first I doubt it, because enterprise sales has nothing to do with how good your product is, how expensive it is, how easy it is to administer, how secure it is, etc.; it only depends on how good you are at enterprise sales. I mean, my university is Oracle-based, and I'm pretty sure that you could get 3 random undergraduates to write something better, so I don't think that LLMs writing better/cheaper software will make any difference here. [0]: https://moodle.org/ https://moodle.org/
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> Students having records of what their score was doesn't prove to the professor / university what score they received It's better than nothing. (And good training for the real world.) Also, most universities (and many schools now) issue academic e-mail addresses to students. In those cases, the email is definitive proof.
- AmblingAvocado 5mo agoDKIM signature could be used to verify that Canvas' server sent the email with the given content
- tempaccount5050 5mo agoAnd who exactly do you think is going to verify 100s of thousands of emails this way dude?
- bravura 5mo agoA computer?
- nbernard 5mo agoGood luck having people forward an email a) with headers and b) in a way that doesn't break the signature...
- gucci-on-fleek 5mo agoPresumably the system will be back up eventually, so there's not much benefit to lying here, since at best you'll raise your grade in a few classes for a couple months, while taking on a pretty big risk of getting caught.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- hoppyhoppy2 5mo agoEmails from Canvas saying a grade is available do not currently include the actual grade in the email, so that would have to be implemented first. And it's probably not implemented quite intentionally because of FERPA.