Students think the College Board is running a Reddit sting
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Their online tooling has never been great–AP Classroom takes at least 3 tries for me to access, one to log in again which then redirects back to AP Central, one that just redirects back to AP Central, then finally one that takes me to my assignments page.
This certainly isn't an easy problem to solve. CollegeBoard definitely should have designed a more stable system to host their exams on, but as with anything digital, there's always an opportunity for error–even moreso since everyone takes the exam at the same time (which is an entirely different can of worms, with students in Guam taking exams at 1a, 3a, and 5a).
If I were to design these assessments, I'd have it be an untimed, synthesis-based assessment, more similar to AP Computer Science Principles[0], with their Digital Portfolio. Simply having a deadline for all students to upload to a basic tool (which already exists as CB's Digital Portfolio system). Like the current exam, have the submissions sent back to teachers for validation (there's nothing on the current system that validates your identity, simply paste in your AP ID and enter your name/dob, and you're in the system).
I think if a student can write a well-formed essay over a topic, they can get college credit. In science classes, they could design an experiment and simulate a lab report. CS classes can create a program, etc.
[0]: https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-computer-scien...
You propose a lab report, with example data, and I actually really like that idea, but I think it would fail on that last score. Looking back, AP chem is a lot of inorganic reactions (lots of memorization, some principles), acid base work, some organic chem, some lab techniques. It’s fairly scattered. A single (or several) lab reports would not capture all of it, especially given that chemistry doesn’t work perfectly predictably even with a post-graduate understanding. There’s a reason basic science lab courses do boring experiments, it’s because those work reliably.
Anyway, I like the idea, and want to hear more on how to do it, but a lab report would have to be supplemented by something else to really evaluate understanding in the sciences.
On the APCSP exam, there's actually very few points for your code itself. You get a point for identifying an abstraction and a point for identifying an algorithm, but the rest of the points (there are 8 total) are assigned based on your written responses. Analytical questions could be added to each exam–broad enough that no two students should have too much overlap, but narrow enough that it's clear what is expected of a student response.
From there, a few points could be assigned for the quality of the designed experiment, but a majority would be assigned based on the quality of the written response questions.
AP Physics follows a similar model on the regular paper exam–you have to prove some theory and design a complete experiment to do so. I believe it also included one light analysis question.
Lock someone in a room with some reagents, and expect them to produce extracted/cleaned output products of a certain testable purity and mass after N time. Make the process of getting from the reagents to the final product really involved, requiring at least one of every kind of basic reaction/setup taught in the course. (NileRed's "aspirin to tylenol" sequence might be a good example challenge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Ejuew2riA)
You know this is "the practical approach", because this is essentially how gangs qualify their chemists. "If you can really make [illegal drug], then make us some! Without doing anything that'll get the police called! In four hours!"
That sort of practicum may be a reasonable test, but could give very different results than the normal written exam.
What about 1-on-1 interviews? Ask people the questions face-to-face, ask them to talk you through their answers. That's how advanced degrees like PhDs are assessed.
What we care about is that they can demonstrate they understand the problem and solution. The code is just the starting point for that conversation.
We have hired people who submitted failing solutions because they were able to think through the problem on the spot when we told them it failed and asked why.
I don't think there is an off-the-shelf product for cheaters, but it's only a question of time. Especially now that I mentioned it.
They probably failed even by the simple arithmetic that the time required to make a minimally good faith effort at applying a grading rubric is greater than the time a teaching assistant is paid to "assist" in the grading.
Your teaching assistants almost certainly scaled back their time grading your assignments to fit their allotted hours. If any of those intro classes fulfilled a writing credit you can probably start with available undergrad writing credit requirements, figure out how many hours your TA got paid, and look back at the number of students for a given TA to figure out just how much money you and/or your parents lost on the deal.
If you consider college tuition to be the money you pay to be educated, you're definitely right. Personally I think of college as something like a licensing or certification.
I learned twice as much at my part time programming job than I did in class (but classes where instrumental in getting me through technical interviews). But, once I had my degree I instantly had multiple 100k+/yr offers in a moderate COL area. For me, that is a good deal (but still a huge hassle).
And I can't do that without proper assessments!
If I think of class theater in an education that led me to 100k+/yr, that is a good deal.
If I think of class theater in a certification that led me to 100k+/yr, that is a good deal.
That it is a good deal doesn't change the the fact that class theater is a shady practice.
It's also detrimental. But since we don't have the tech to do speed runs against the versions of ourselves who took non-shady intro classes it can be easy to shrug.
Dijkstra exclusively gave oral final exams on a board. Allegedly, he stopped one of his former students after the first question and told him something to the effect of "you clearly know what you are doing by how you answered that, so you'll get an A, but your handwriting is atrocious." He spent the rest of the exam time making the student practice penmanship.
I'm unconvinced that oral exams provide the most secure and consistent form of assessment. I'm not even sure how to evaluate such a claim, though, so it may have to stand as an opinion.
All that said, it's an awful system and I ragequit the take-home midway through. It's buggy, slow, lacks useful hotkeys, and basically requires you to become accustomed to a wiped Linux box without any of the tools you would typically use. Sure, you can install them - but it's a timed assessment, for crying out loud.
Finally, I suppose nothing stops you from logging in with your credentials on your authorized machine and then physically handing that machine to a paid agent.
Who said anything about overseas? Hire your classmate to sit down at your own PC to do it. That's the Hard Problem.
If you can pre-record stuff like that without knowing what the sequence of requested events will be, I'm impressed.
Just the knowledge that another human being was proctoring the exam made the idea of attempting to cheat pretty far fetched. My body language would have given it away, and it wouldn't be easy to transition smoothly from the interactive setup to some kind of pre-recorded loop without it being easily detected. The kind of person who could successfully pull that off... well, could also probably pass the test on their own merits.
So, the first step is just to actually take the test. The cheating bit would be having someone monitoring what your doing via a reasonably hi-res hidden camera/etc pointed at your screen/etc. Then all you need is a channel for that person to communicate with you. Be that a tiny bluetooth hearing aid in one ear, a phone/screen taped hidden on your leg/etc or to your existing screen. Basically somewhere not visible to any camera's monitoring you.
So, when the person monitoring you detects you have answered something incorrectly they send you something to the effect "question #5's correct answer is Y because A,B,C". Then later you get a moment of insight and go back and fix the problem. In theory, unless your completely clueless the difference between a 2 and a 4 is just a couple questions so this would only have to happen a couple times during the whole test. Again, unless your completely clueless, if the proctor notices you fixing an incorrect answer and asks "why did you just change your answer" you give them something reasonable sounding. Heck for some of them, it might not even have to be the right answer, its completely possible for someone to get the right answer the wrong way in a multiple choice section. AKA, "I guessed on that one the first time and A & B seemed far fetched so I just picked C over D, but then later I questioned my assumption and decided it was B & C that seemed far fetched so I picked the remaining answer which was D rather than A".
Anyway, I'm not sure the screen is needed. For a test that is 100% multiple choice, a buzzer in your shoe would be enough if it went off whenever you selected a wrong answer, and then pulsed a code to indicate the right answer.
Not everyone opts for that (maybe their local environment is messy, or they only have a locked down work device, etc), but I always make it an option.
I've learned many things over the years watching other experts in their local environments as an interviewer. New packages, new shortcuts, new helper apps, ...
I'm a Spacemacs user and I had to do the remote interview for my current gig in Google Docs. That was a bit frustrating.
While some might argue my approach is too aggressive, I report every account that messages me asking to cheat to Wyzant as well as the appropriate organization. My goal is to make it simply not worth the attempt to cheat (obviously only if they explicitly ask; I don't report when it's a possible miscommunication). Just about all of them have had their accounts deactivated.
If technology access could be assumed, I don't think it would be unreasonable to ask students to upload a picture of themselves with their photo ID, as well as some sort of validity check, like a unique code only provided to the device they're taking the exam on. Obviously, that can't be implemented because of equity issues. Ideally, a secured assessment would be done on something similar to Pearson Vue, ProctorU, or the multitude of other online proctoring services. Unfortunately, that's not an option due to both scale and technology access (not everyone has a compatible device, I'm sure many students are taking the exam on their phones).
Someone who wrote the code themselves will know right away and someone who purchased a project won’t have enough time to sift through the code to figure out the answer.
Save the 1:1 interviews for students whose original program was great but whose modification went down in flames and you'll likely be talking to your outsourcers, plus identifying students who maybe could use some extra help even if they did everything themselves.
I am also skeptical you could find appropriate trivial changes to request. Students, and particularly beginner students, may write very unconventional code that may not be as easily modified as a well-thought-out solution.
Also, anyone remember the story of the programmer who subcontracted his work to some offshore freelancer for a fraction of his salary? He just sat at his cubicle goofing off all day while the freelancer did all the work.
If not, details in profile, College Board!
> If I were to design these assessments, I'd have it be an untimed, synthesis-based assessment...
Yes, but that takes more resources and has more variability among reviewers. It does have the advantages of being more fair for students with time zone issues or closures, and of being durable in the face of temporary website issues. Judging by their decisions, the priorities of the testing agencies seem to have been taking out the cost of the human element of reviewers (multiple choice is easy to grade, synthesis essays need expert reviewers) and the variability of the tests and reviewers to certify their results for schools.
A significant part of taking AP English when I went through was the teacher saying: "Okay, here is the question. Now, what are the likely literature references the AP reader expects you to use? Okay, what are the likely scoring points the AP reader has on their worksheet? Okay, now write to those. Writing anything else is a waste of time."
You could count the number of students out of her class who didn't score a 5 on a single hand.
The English teacher in question was an actual AP Reader as well as an assistant editor of the local newspaper.
This is absolutely hilarious. Did they not realize the concurrency limitations?
I can't remember the name of the web app for my calculus homework, but this was the only one I kind of liked, and ironically it was free. I think it might have been webwork. And in a CS class we used Perusal, which I liked as well, but the grading was an awful black box.
The others cost several hundred dollars, sometimes per semester. I remember the immense frustration of my Spanish professor, who sent an email to their support at least once a week. Their answer was always "We only support Firefox"
That did not stop dozens of students from using Chrome and Safari, myself included. I remember once getting frustrated with the homework, so I wrote a little JavaScript to brute force a question. The security was generally awful.
My fondest memory was using Github to submit assignments, and later as a TA to grade these assignments. Much less friction.
Obviously, I think college professors are looking for a way to reduce their burden of creating assignments and grading, but these education giants put out poor quality apps, knowing they'll generate revenue regardless.
Frankly, I think there needs to be a widespread effort to open source education. Both content and assignments. There is no justification to charge tens of thousands in tuition and top this off with a few more thousand in jank software.
Is it bad I did not know that was a company's name?
These days, that's better than "only support Chrome", but I get your point --- being browser-agnostic seems to be something a lot of sites, not just learning-related ones, are unfortunately not doing lately.
Lambda is part of Amazon's Cloud Computing subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is a utility like DigitalOcean or any hosting provider. It's not some kind of guaranteed success strategy.
But they also have to instill trust in the system.
Which led them to them having claims on their website that the test was "uncheatable" and had "the highest level of integrity" while on other parts of their website claiming they had deployed extreme security measures to thwart cheating.
At the end of the day I suspect the colleges will just accept the scores under the assumption that it would be poor form on their part to give the students a hard time about something they had no control over.
>But they also have to instill trust in the system.
Yes, and I have to rob a bank to demonstrate I'm rich.
What you're saying is that they're in a tough spot because they can profit from lying and chose to do so.
The first is a logical fallacy and the second is conspiratorial. What was the alternative, not offer exams?
We all know full well that they aren't in a position to run the exams correctly, and yet rather than accepting that and working on ways to move forward without the exams, we've decided a consensual hallucination that the exams were fine is the best option. Oh, and screw the kids who couldn't submit the exams. It's more important that the the college admissions board has an easy life. And as if that's not crazy enough, the examiners have decided to try and entrap the students. If you don't see how insane that is - that more time is being spent trying to entrap sutdents, than to be honest about the veracity of the test results, you've really fallen off the deep end.
A position which the College Board has fought tooth and nail to be in for the last few decades!
And please, don't come at me with "they're a non-profit", last I looked in 2014 they had made $750 million, and I'm sure they pay their top executives _very well_ to say the least.
It's a shame the college board decided to go through all this instead of refunding the fees they collected from students, especially when the value proposition on the students' side is uncertain.
Add in behavior like "posting content to confuse and deter those who attempt to cheat" when internet research during the exam is not actually a violation of their rules, and the organization starts to look fairly predatory.
Universities will pretty have to accept them if they want a reasonable intake of students.
edit: really? respond instead of downvoting.
My local school system is guaranteeing students that their grade will not be lower than when they closed schools. Many classes had not yet had any kind of exam, so they have 95% averages.
Universities obviously believe that any grades from the semester are now worthless and some have said so. But what are they going to do? Not accept any local students?
Every metric you might use to admit students has been tainted by this COVID business.
I think it might be problematic for T2-T3 schools and state schools that are generally lenient when accepting AP credit. As for graduate and professional schools... that's going to be a mess. Harvard Medical School will only consider COVID Pass/Fail grades if colleges make those grading schemes mandatory for students; otherwise, students will have to submit letter grades. That's (1) completely heartless and (2) an arbitrary advantage for students who went to schools where P/F is mandatory.
Honestly, the bigger issue for a lot of students at the moment is the uncertainty over the degree to which schools will open up for physical classes in the fall. What makes sense under those circumstances? And, of course, a lot of the usual gap year options aren't going to be available either.
Andy Grove got his education at City College when it was open admission.
Missing a semester of grades isn’t going to ruin SUNY Stony Brook it whatever.
(12 Nobel Laureates graduated from City College before it went open admission, none since.)
...and I wouldn't worry about the top colleges. Having worked in admissions at one of them - a majority of the students are there due to family connections.
Anecdotal, but I do remember being told that every state school in Texas is required to offer credit for every AP exam score >= 3. Doesn't have to be useful credit, mind you, but it has to be credit.
If a kid can cheat, pass, get a degree and go out and not fail in the real world, what does that say about the validity of the tests? Even futher, what does that say about the world we live in?
I've known many cheaters (they tend to brag about it). The ones that do good work don't need to cheat, and the cheaters don't stop cheating once they graduate.
Who'd you rather work for / hire / trust with your money:
1. a cheater
2. not a cheater
?
If you have to cheat to design model airplanes, you have no business designing real ones.
The point is, they don't care at all about the academic problems because it's (a) not interesting to them and (b) usually professors don't motivate students with real-life examples. E.g. while microeconomics is very much relevant for everyone, the way it was taught to us, it felt insanely boring and inapplicable to real problems.
> ...absolute majority will stop playing tricks.
edit: NM, I forgot wolfram alpha. oof.
I got to skip 2 semesters of calculus based on my 5 in AP Calc BC.
But yeah I’m kind of ticked off that these virtualized exams (which are trivial to cheat on) are being counted for college credit.
Ya keep on cheating, and explain why you're justified in cheating as college doesn't mean anything anyway.
Skip calculus 1, then you can take statistics or discrete math and then maybe biology to round out your requirements.
So long as you didn’t take physics, you wouldn’t hit anything that required calculus in science.
That's why they don't let your teacher proctor your exam unless they have to.
Just disqualify anyone who copy/pastes answers from the known shared workspace.
For example, AP Calculus had two questions: A 25-minute, and a 15-minute question, each with 9 or 10 parts. There simply just isn't enough time to Google anything. If you look at Google Trends data [0] you can see hilarious spikes in related terms during the exams, but if you didn't have a good handle on the material then you would just run of out time.
[0]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&geo=...
The exams are designed with algebraic solvers in mind and typically, you don't actually find derivatives and integrals. Instead, they'll show you a graph or table instead of the equation itself. Typically students are allowed to use a TI N-spire CAS CX on their exams, which has a lot of the same capabilities as WolframAlpha.
The UX design is broken.
> Students with an unsuccessful submission will see instructions about how to email their response on the page that says, “We Did Not Receive Your Response.” The email address that appears will be unique to each student.
Here's my shitlist:
* Children should attempt hard problems that they can make progress on, but probably cannot solve. It is wrong that schools give nearly zero exposure to truly hard problems, and plenty of exposure to trivilally solvable problems. And no, making them tease out the meaning of a word-problem doesn't qualify as difficulty. I mean give them a problem that makes them find a wikipedia page and learn on their own.
* Computers are here to stay. I remember when I was little, I was told that I wouldn't always have a calculator on me. That is demonstrably false, I literally do not go anywhere without a computer in my pocket. Furthermore, that computer has a WolframAlpha app that can interface with server clusters running the most advanced computer algebra systems in existence. Why did I learn stoichiometry? There is something deeply wrong with education if students could easily pass an AP Physics exam with access to WolframAlpha, and will (probably) have access to WolframAlpha in every practical application of their AP physics education, but are artificially prevented from having access during the exam. Why don't the tests correspond to real-world application of the subject? Oh, it's more convenient for you to evaluate it this way? That's tough shit, figure it out.
* Students should have an entire day dedicated to math, and then they should have an entire day dedicated to English, etc. Some students might get bored and tired, sure, because sometimes learning isn't pleasant. But over and over on this site we hear that successful developers are the people who are able to maintain focus for long periods of time on difficult problems. Why do students waste 35 minutes a day switching classrooms?
* There is not enough differentiation of students. Advanced students have so much of their time wasted. The advanced 3rd graders should be hanging out with advanced 6th graders.
The way that the education system is collapsing from cheating and going online-only is nothing short of exciting to me. A lot had to go wrong for us to get to this point -- answer banks exist because everyone uses the same textbook and the same curriculum. Cheating with other students exists because group-work is the natural state of humans. Students aren't excited about the work they do because they sense that there's a magical oracle on the internet with the solution to the simple problems they're solving.
It's all going to fall apart and that's something to celebrate. The thing that I'm most afraid of is that Americans have lost the ability to take risks at aggregate and think radically about redesigning institutions. All of these problems that I'm talking about are just as bad in every other country in the world. Some country is going to figure it out and they're going to reap the rewards, and I'm afraid that America isn't brave enough anymore to be the first.
This turned out to be false, but being able to do mental arithmetic is still an extremely valuable skill. The usability of your pocket calculator is really bad in comparison, and what the mental arithmetic gives you is a general automatic numeracy where you can ballpark the answer to numerical problems much faster than using a tool.
This becomes a qualitative difference because you'll do more of those mental checks as a matter of course that you would never pull out a calculator for. Kind of like how git made merges so painless that they're now a standard part of most people's development flow. That's the kind of qualitative impact that mental arithmetic can give you.
I admit that this is a point that's difficult to get across, and schools generally don't do a great job of it...
I guess what I'm trying to say is it's useful to be able to calculate a tip without a calculator or tally a grocery bill. But more importantly, it'll be a big hurdle to learning slightly more advanced math concepts if you can't do some of the basics in your head.
If you do not learn things manually, you'll never develop a feel for answers that are right and answers that are wrong. I've seen too many people accept Garbage Out from a computer as The Word From God, never realizing that they'd put Garbage In, the computer program was buggy, or the computer program was not the right model for their particular problem.
It didn't look quite right. I finally measured the major and minor axis, and computed the area. Turns out it was 30% smaller than the square footage quoted. The bricks were stacked up, and a little math gave me the square footage of the bricks. It was also 30% less than the quoted square footage.
I brought it up with the contractor that the size seemed less than the quoted size. He said he'd made a mistake staking it out. Obviously, he had not, else he'd have had too many bricks.
He did a good job anyway, and I paid him 30% less than the quoted amount.
I suspect he had realized long ago that his customers were math challenged, and weren't noticing his oversized quotes. So he kept increasing the gap until it got to a ridiculous 30% overage.
My advice to people who feel that math is a pointless imposition on your time, you're going to pay for not learning it. And you'll never realize you're being rooked.
I really hope that's not what you took away from my comment.
It's relevant to why learn the mechanics when a computer can do it for you.