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Comment by low_key | Hacker News Reader

I took an online class in 2015 that used Proctorio. Even at that time the proctoring/anti-cheat software was a nightmare. I was semi-accused of cheating because of "anomalies" during one of my tests. It was quickly cleared up by talking to the professor.

The software is a privacy disaster and any computer that has had any of this spyware installed should be considered compromised. I kept a separate hard drive and would swap it in to take tests.

To fix the problem, grading measures need to be changed to accommodate the new world of online classes rather than trying to shoehorn old test proctoring into a remote space. This software only stops bad cheaters anyway.

I'm already imagining the fights I'm going to have with my daughter's schools in the future when they ask us to install this malware.

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The main problem is that receiving a credential and receiving an education are very different things that we do at the same time out of tradition and convenience. When testing was easy, it made sense to lump it in with teaching, but now that testing is impossible, I say we ditch it for the time being.

> The main problem is that receiving a credential and receiving an education are very different things that we do at the same time out of tradition and convenience

Unfortunately I think most of the world sees them as one thing :/.

The problem with that is that you're throwing out the one that is more directly valuable to your customers.

No, I'm throwing out the one that is impossible to do.

What if you only have linux computers at home and can't run their spyware?

This is precisely what I said to one of my professors this semester and thankfully they were reasonable and didn't use Respondus for either of the exams like they had planned.

I've never dealt with this software but when I did my CS degree, several of the applications we worked with throughout the course were distributed as Windows binaries. If you'd ever done homework or study at all, you don't only have Linux.

> If you'd ever done homework or study at all, you don't only have Linux.

Speak for yourself; at my school, even the class that used C# worked with mono.

> several of the applications we worked with throughout the course were distributed as Windows binaries

Because most linux users use their distribution's packages and it is normally easier than hunting for windows binaries.

Need an assembler? `sudo apt-get install nasm`, etc. I am a math/cs undergrad and have not used a windows machine in over 6 years. (In my case it would be editing either editing my home.nix or creating a shell.nix for a course rather than apt/dnf/etc)

I never need to use Windows or MacOS for any of my classes in college (although I initially did for the first few months of freshman year before I first started using Linux). For some classes, the students using MacOS or Windows actually had to jump through more hoops; one class required us to ssh into the school's Linux server for some assignments, which required Windows users to download extra software due to not having an ssh client by default (at least, not back then; I'm not sure if powershell has one now), and in another, we had to use Xilinx, a proprietary IDE for writing Verilog to design circuits for FPGAs, which only had builds for Linux and Windows, not MacOS. For the latter one, the TAs literally distributed flash drives with an Ubuntu VirtualBox instance for the Mac users (who comprised the majority of CS students at my university).

Your experience does not match mine at all. I earned a CS degree with a computer that only had Linux installed and I never missed Windows.

> If you'd ever done homework or study at all, you don't only have Linux.

If something applies to your low quality university it does not mean that it applies everywhere.

If you have a linux computer you can boot from usb or a second drive to run windows. That's what I did when I had to take exams using Proctortrack.

While I agree with you that most people who run Linux as a daily driver might be capable of running Windows as a secondary OS on occasion, this discounts the fact that he or she would be required to purchase the license (else break the law), and also ignores the fact that they should not be required to do so

That hasn't really stopped colleges before. I've had quite a few classes where the textbook cost more than a Windows license.

You’re right, but I still think it is not fair for the university to require you to run certain software if it does not directly benefit your learning

While I'm against the use of crappy anticheat software, the windows solution would be easy for institutions with volume licensing. Perhaps a fair middle ground is to force institutions to provide bootable USB drives so students avoid corrupting their own installations.

Recent versions of Windows have made it a lot harder to install through USB. A month ago I tried to install Windows 10 onto an old laptop SSD mounted in an enclosure and connected through USB so I could play a games with my brother online that was only available through the Windows store, but the installer literally refused to install to it because I was using the Home edition of Windows instead of Enterprise. I eventually found a solution through some freemium backup software that allowed copying an installation on a regular hard drive onto a USB, but weirdly the first software I tried that claimed to have this feature did not yield in the SSD being bootable, so I had to find something else that was able to do it properly. Given that Microsoft went out of their way to disable doing this directly in their installer, I wouldn't be too surprised if it the workarounds continue to become more difficult or even impossible without paying for the Enterprise version (which is not something students should ever have to pay for).

Education = Enterprise edition for all practical purposes, so they wouldn't have to pay.

step one: purchase windows

honestly, I think the question was more of "what should the educators do?" not "what should the student do?

Here’s the thing, if you want to cheat, you’ll find a way to cheat. This won’t stop anyone, it just stops casual cheating at a pretty hefty price.

Hell, just reading this article, I thought of various ways by having someone off screen listening to you read aloud and a projector mounted after the test starts, on the ceiling by another person who’s off screen.

You could have a kvm switch to a whole different computer, an AI overlaying data on the screen (reading from the video output, and injecting into the video output), or any number of ridiculously complicated setups.

It probably won’t catch any serious cheaters.

Picture in picture monitor with multiple sources. Credit to someone who mentioned this in a previous thread.

Most proctoring software that records the student would trivially root out the cheating method you mentioned about reading aloud the questions to someone else. They usually record audio as well, and if the software detects significant microphone input, will flag the test.

Just mute your mic in hardware?

A lot of proctoring software will flag you for that as well. Then when the professor reviews the footage it will be obvious that you're talking to someone off screen.

Put your mic in another room then.

Do they analyze the noise floor or something? I guess you'd have to defeat that with a noise gate.

No need to overcomplicate it. These technologies can be overcome with a phone in your lap connected to a groupchat with everyone in the class, or even a piece of paper with your cheat sheet.

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