Comment by grayhatter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grayhatter | Hacker News Reader

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> LOL. Teachers will never be able to prevent students from cheating. This will only help against a very easily accessible way of cheating that would otherwise render Google Forms Quiz useless for teachers.

If Google Forms Quiz embeds the test answers into the html, then is it is already worse than useless.

> They don't remove your precious feature. I would fight against this too, if they would.

I've already said this to you in another thread, but my sister is a school teacher. I do tech support for her all the time. This *is* something that *WILL* make my life harder. Now that you know it's a feature I need and use to be able to help her, will you actually argue against this with me?

> They just allow admins to restrict it on workstations they manage. Just having a shitty electron app in Windows kiosk mode is the alternative... which I thinks is definitely worse.

I think electron is worse, but if that's the only other option, then I'd rather they break the test specific electron app instead of the chromium browser that I have to use for everything. This is where I also point out that just because the feature does allow for a small list of websites to block view-source on. There's nothing preventing a stupid or lazy admin who sets it up from blocking it on every computer the school uses.

> You seem to unknowingly argue against straw men!

No, I'm not. I feel as if you're trying to insult me.. But I think it might be I'm not explaining myself well enough.

> I've already said this to you in another thread, but my sister is a school teacher. I do tech support for her all the time. This is something that WILL make my life harder. Now that you know it's a feature I need and use to be able to help her, will you actually argue against this with me?

Lol, my mom was a teacher, my wife is a teacher, my sister is a teacher, my sister in law will be a teacher. For all I did tech support. Now what?

Actually I think this is a very nice simple solution. Under the circumstances that teachers like to use Google Forms and Google seems to shit on teachers with this use case, let the admin simply deactivate view source for Google Forms URLs and no problem any more. This will only affect student accounts, maybe even only student exam accounts and the problem is solved, especially in primary education.

So you lied when you said

> They don't remove your precious feature. I would fight against this too, if they would.

They are removing a feature I use.

But you didn't answer any of my other questions. And ignored my comments about how a lazy or stupid admin will just block view source on every computer and every website. You said taking tests on computers is supposed to make things faster, and more accessible. How does giving admins the ability to disable features that kids can use to learn about computers and the web make things more accessible to students who's school computer is their only computer?

Why should school admins block view source for teacher accounts?

IMO a stupid admin you can ask to enable view source for teacher accounts is far better than a proprietary test application that you are not even able to understand nor debug in any way.

Just activate the group policy for exam workstations only and students will not encounter this on any other school computer. Or even better provide special exam accounts.

Because most people don't understand security in any way shape or form. Blocking everything is easier than trying to figure out what should be blocked, and what shouldn't. I agree that it's better to ask them to unblock it on teacher accounts. But I can't do that, perhaps a teacher could. But I suspect that the tech admin that's stupid enough to block everything by default is the same type that's stupid enough to think that it's better security, and would just ignore then request to unblock it on teacher's computers. But I also have a nephew in school. What about when he asks me for help? Is he going to be able to ask the admin to unblock his computer?

When this feature is used, they will probably also block dev tools, internet access to most websites and especially remote access. I simply don't see your concerns being of any merit.

I sincerely hope your nephew's computer is not managed by his school's admins.

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