EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

[1] There's quite a bit of research on this. Bretag is a key author.

Perhaps there is value in knowing someone has been able to work in a team setting and complete given tasks.

So your preferred solution would be to just stop all education for the duration of the pandemic? Although online education sucks, I'm not sure if most students would agree with you.

Or in physics (my field), I do want a student to know U=RI. Not google it. Not look it up. I also want them to be able to transform it to U/R=I.

Projects they had to demo, and they had a published rubric. While it was possible sometimes to play to the rubric, it still meant there was very little work to figure out a grade.

Tests, on the other hand, I had to dig in, understand what they were trying to do, figure out if it worked, and award partial credit. I guess the prof could have done multiple choice to make grading easy, but that has all kinds of problems with actually testing anything.

The fact that the university doesn't provide adequate staffing is not an excuse for short-changing the students still further.

So I think I actually understand the system pretty well.

Edit: teaching is part of the job, dude. It just is. If you asked the average taxpayer (you know, the ones who pay the base salary before grant money is taken into account) whether teaching is an important part of the job, what do you suppose they're going to say?

If you don't want to teach, you need to find a job that doesn't involve teaching. If you accept a job that requires teaching, you're morally obligated to provide the best teaching you can.

Or so I see it.

Not everyone does projects over time, not everyone commits all the time. I don't like committing in progress work and I usually do work in big chunks with large breaks in between, especially for solo projects where I don't have to share code regularly with others.

Based on your criteria, I'd likely be considered a "possible cheater" just for having a different style.

Question: if (when) a student hands in an assignment without the periodic commits, what happens? How do you measure & set expectations for sufficient frequency of commits? (i.e., 1 single commit is too few, I assume that once a day is enough, but where's the threshold?)

Thanks again for sharing - I'll be thinking about these for my own classes!

Every semester, students fell into the same buckets. - Those I rarely saw who nailed everything (and were getting an A or a high B because they understood the material), - Those I saw constantly who were going to get an A or a B (because they sometimes didn't understand things from class, or when they did, wanted to make sure; or for a few, understood it all, but knew the importance of showing they cared about the material to the professor and TAs) - Those I saw constantly who were going to get a C or a B (they rarely understood from class, but were willing to put in the work to try to) - Those I never saw who were going to fail (they didn't show up to anything).

It was pretty much invariably this latter group that got caught cheating. That's not to say the other groups didn't, but they at least got working code, did really well on the exams (pre-COVID, proctored in person), and in conversation were able to show they understood, so I'm a lot less concerned about them.

Sure the later can copy their assignments. But once they'll hit a non-trivial assignment or a code review in a more advance class they won't be able to fake it anymore. You are just delaying their transfer to another major. And that gives the CS department one extra course they can collect tuition from and justify hiring TAs for...

Personally, I think a degree doesn't say much about a person's ability to do what is required in the job.

Maybe we should just get better at giving skill tests in interviews.

That's basically what happened here: The school expected students to cheat and looked for solutions to address it.

I think it's very important that universities have very significant consequences when students are caught cheating. Cheaters don't generally start by hiring people to write their papers and take tests for them. They test the waters with little cheats here and there, pushing the boundaries over time.

If Universities made examples out of students who were 100% confirmed cheating beyond reasonable doubt, the amount of cheating would decline significantly. Instead, we're stuck with this game of half-baked anti-cheating systems which some students approach as game.

Completely agree. For many students their lives and futures will literally be determined by the result of a single test. Under these circumstances, not using every resource available to win is simply stupid. Why would someone not cheat if possible?

The truth is academic integrity was doomed the second degrees became necessary for employment. People who care about academic integrity are those who are there by choice, not those who are pursuing a degree to improve their chances in the job market. The only possible solution to this problem is to end the "everyone must go to college" meme. Good work opportunities that don't require decades of education would go a long way.

I can understand why it happens though. For the professor to take it further, they'd have to escalate it within the school, involving a whole load of bureaucracy, meetings, production of evidence, and likely a formal hearing with the student, etc. Unfortunately, there's often no incentive or institutional support for professors to do any of this.

Having taught at several institutes in the Anglosphere, a disproportionate amount of cheating I've witnessed has come from those who speak English as a second language. Difficulties with English and the need to 'save face' probably push otherwise honest students into doing this. Which also says something about admission tests. It's something of an open secret that administrators turn a blind eye to suspicious admission results, as enrolment and tuition money are a strong incentive.

It's not an easy problem to solve, but I suspect proper admission filtering would eliminate the bulk of cheating, and the remainder could probably be dealt with by empowering professors.

If the professors or TAs are paying attention, they already know who the cheats are. It's not hard to spot when weak students suddenly start acing tests and mastering skills they didn't understand the week prior. There needs to be more leeway, institutional support, and incentives for academics to challenge suspicious students, e.g. via oral examinations.

Trying to solve this using software is just an attempt to avoid tackling the real problems.

I've had professors that did more damage by 'teaching' (I use that term loosely) than if they had just said 'learn it from the book/online and show up for labs/tests/exams'. Mostly it was because they had no idea how teaching worked.

It's a very faculty-centric view because from a student's perspective, the teaching is 99% of the school. Very few will go on to research. They come to school to learn and earn a degree. If the University cannot provide good teachers, they are not a good university. If a professor cannot teach, they are not a good professor. That isn't a moral judgement, its just the subjective judgement from the other side of the school-desk.

The two are pretty much equivalent, but with different names.

Ok, from a terminology point of view that's fair - it isn't the same everywhere by any means.

However, most if not all of the graduate programs I know if internationally have something roughly equivalent, whether they are comps or prelims or qualifying or whatever.

The basic idea is that a department (and university, generally) has an interest in maintaining the quality of their programs, and one way to do that is to make sure that your students never leave with glaring holes in their background. The best way to do this is some sort of comprehensive evaluation, and the time to do it is at or near the beginning of a program - otherwise there is no time to address deficiencies.

I lived with a orthopedic surgeon doing a specialization in pediatric orthopedia.

He was very very very good based on my understanding of the places he had worked, the offers he had to undertake his specialization, the change in operation waiting times and his model of how he worked within the hospital, and that immediately after returning to his home country he was head of the newly created orthopedic pediatrics ward.

His description of how he would approach a surgery was straight-forward:

- he would review the surgical referral, his notes from his patient intake

- he would review appropriate notes and documentation from the hospital on the allowed surgeries allowed, including reference texts on that particular surgery

- he would create a full plan for entering, performing, and exiting the operation

- (surgery)

- he would review the plan, add notes on how it actually went

So it's not like he woke up, walked into a surgical room, and ad-libbed it.

As an anecdote, he said he liked B-students for his surgical teams because they had to work hard to get there.

I also was good friends with a very nerdy emergency room doctor. He offered the anecdote that he was "called out" for using Google. His justification was that "once you throw in the appropriate medical terms, all you're getting is the latest research on treatments--and I was attempting to offer the best and latest in proven care". He also made the several changes to the shifts at the ER, including using time-sheet and patient data to show that patient outcomes suffered during longer doctor shift rotations. His anecdote on his schooling; "I was a bad student, and I'm a poor doctor, but my job is to get you stable until we can intervene properly". He funded a startup and wrote (in Java) a medical EMR system.

The examiner (one of my two instructors) had a list of questions/topics that we had to get through, but the specifics and flow were natural and spontaneous rather than artificial and forced.

What made the conversation good was that the examiner discussed points that I raised, raised points that I didn't, asked my opinion on e.g. real world implications of theories or conclusions that could be drawn if this or that were true, et cetera. This made it two-way and engaging. While he did not give me any answers, of course, when it was clear that I could bring up and sufficiently discuss a topic, then he would go into details, which would trigger even more detailed responses from me, and so forth. In this way I think he was able to probe the depths of my understanding while not needing to employ a one-sided question/answer format.

I think that it is difficult to bullshit a topic in depth with someone else who knows what they are talking about, so an oral exam probably does not need to be a hardcore opposition like a thesis defense might be.

The allotted time was maybe 30 or 45 minutes (I don't quite recall), after which the examiner would tell you what grade they would recommend. If it was a grade with distinction, then of course you would say thanks and be done. If it was less than distinction then you could request another 10 or 15 minutes of further examination to try to show your mastery. (I passed with distinction, so I didn't go through that part, but I assume it would have been a continuation? But maybe it would get a little more intense if you were trying to improve your performance at the last minute? I don't know.)

I've heard that story many decades ago in the form of a joke. It may have started from a professor who genuinely didn't care about failing students but did care about identifying the best.

Crazy stuff.

I agree 100%. I also don't see the value in forcing people to memorize googleable facts. It's frustrating to see schools implement curricula like that. However, I disagree with your implication here. You're implying that because schools make you learn stupid things, everybody should just cheat. What's the point of that, exactly? You think the curricula is not optimized well, so you would rather reduce the entire institution to a diploma mill, instead of simply learning with the unoptimized programme?

> Isn't the purpose of school to train you to where you can do X for a company?

That may be true for a vocational school, but for a computer science programme at a university, it is not true at all. If you look up the stated purpose of computer science programmes, they are about educating people for the sake of knowledge itself, not to achieve an ulterior purpose like producing a useful workforce.

> Learning how to implement on optimized bubble sort? That's kind of dumb; in the real world you just use an existing one.

If you memorize a bubble sort algorithm without understanding, just to be able to repeat it back verbatim in the exam, I agree that's dumb (and it's also dumb on the school's part to create a programme that incentivizes such behavior). However, that's not the only way to learn bubble sort. You can also approach it from an "algorithm design" perspective, and strive to develop the skills needed to design and work with algorithms. That's not dumb at all. In fact, I would argue that's one of the core skills that a computer science education should provide.

> in the real world you just use an existing one.

No, you wouldn't. You would never use a bubble sort in the real world, because it has O(n^2) time complexity and it has no redeeming qualities when compared to other algorithms.

So let me get this straight: if someone at work asks you to "implement sorting for these results", you might just google "bubble sort java", copypaste code, test that it works, and ship it? And you don't think there's any value in learning what properties these algorithms have or how they work? Don't care, don't wanna learn, cheat through school, end up using bubble sort in production. Great. That's exactly the type of attitude that causes 5 minute startup load times in GTA.

According to the EFF [1], he might be able to recover his legal costs: “ But Proctorio’s bad behavior has inspired a broad community of people to fight for better student privacy rights, and hundreds of people donated to Linkletter’s defense fund, which raised more than $50,000. And the PPPA gives him a greater chance of getting his fees back.”

1: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/student-surveillance-v...

> I see it as a currently-necessary annoyance, as the least bad option. The alternatives have greater deficiencies: human invigilators using Zoom etc. don't scale (institution experience); oral exams don't scale (my experience moderating such assessments); no invigilation leads to cheating (by few students but enough to be a real problem, especially for professional qualifications - my direct experience and institution experience); shutting down education until the pandemic's over is unfeasible.

Last year, we tried not monitoring, we tried Zoom invigilation, we tried orals. Lockdown rules prevented us from sending in-person invigilators in one semester (and we couldn't have hired even 10% of what that would take) and the other we invigilated in person like normal. We are spending more than ever before, so there are no savings. All of these methods failed. This year, grudgingly, we have moved to proctoring software.

Not convinced you have much space to declare some global idea of "reasonable interviewer" although you're more than welcome to complain about you personally not getting an offer from a company that clearly doesn't share your values. Your words say "badmouth" but that's just a way of hyperbolizing the ability to be vocally self-critical, which is necessary to learn lessons and achieve actual growth as a company.

Most startups have to do this, in my experience. You can't experiment without it. If you can't identify one weakness in your prior employer's model (whether ethically or functionally) or you'll get huffy about talking about that in an interview setting, why would I trust you with the responsibility of being in my organization? I'm going to get to those answers eventually. Why waste your time?

Looking back at history, do you think they called them the "traitorous eight" [1] because they were "reasonable interviewers" who would never "cast aspersions on a previous employer?" No. The history of this industry in the USA is based on vocal critique, competition and paper chasing in the pursuit of out-executing your competition.

If you don't have that culture of critique and open communication, it will be very hard to become #1 in whatever you're trying to do. Maybe that will never matter to you and the companies you join. Okay. If that works for you, great. But I'm a career startup person, so it does matter to me. I would literally /never/ have gotten anywhere without being able to earnestly note what my previous employers did right and wrong, and use those learnings in my next opportunity -- often very vocally.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

I feel like I must be taking crazy pills, but this thread is definitely derailed at this point, so...

I don't hesitate to take a hard stance on this. If you don't know off the top of your head how to write a value to a sequence of bytes, you are an incompetent programmer and are unfit for the profession. That is indeed a VERY strong signal to a hiring committee.

It's like interviewing to be an IP lawyer and now knowing what the types of intellectual property are, or interviewing for a copy editor and now knowing basic sentence structure. There's a baseline of knowledge that anyone ordinarily skilled in the art needs to have, and trivial operations on sequences of values is without question one of them.