Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

Why anyone would pay these folks anything is beyond me. While cheating is certainly a thing, and easier to do online, violating people's personal space and trusting in some average behavior BS to flag things as suspicious does not seem worth the cost. Add in ridiculous behavior by the company, if I were an educational institution I'd stay far away from these people. I remember reading about something similar being used to take screening tests for programmers which watched via the camera to ensure the test taker was not cheating; I'd tell any employer who wanted such a thing to get lost.

View on HN

I'm a little more sympathetic.

I took the GRE this summer. Because of the pandemic, I used ETS's new (and temporary) at-home testing option. Someone from ProctorU watched me through my webcam the whole time, and it felt totally invasive and creepy.

But, what else was the ETS supposed to do? For a high-stakes exam like the GRE, I don't think "trust people to not cheat" is a viable option. That isn't to say these remote proctoring solutions will necessarily prevent cheating either (and having now used one of these services, I think cheating would have been relatively easy), but it at least should make test takers think twice.

I think we can all agree that an in-person exam would have been better, but the state of the world made that untenable.

>That isn't to say these remote proctoring solutions will necessarily prevent cheating either (and having now used one of these services, I think cheating would have been relatively easy), but it at least should make test takers think twice.

Sounds like security theater.

>I think we can all agree that an in-person exam would have been better, but the state of the world made that untenable.

Why not? Just rent out a large open space (stadium, convention center, school gym), and space the students 20ft apart. The risk should be negligible. Let's be honest here, the real reason is that [cost of exam surveillance software] < [cost of conducting a physically distanced exam]

> Sounds like security theater.

I think a bit of security theater is exactly what's called for in this scenario.

This isn't like hacking into a computer network, or bringing an explosive onto an airplane, where one dedicated bad actor can defeat the system for everyone. It's much closer to something like shoplifting, where your goal is to make instances of bad behavior as low as possible, given other constraints. A security camera does not need to be 100% effective to be worth installing—and doesn't even necessarily need to be turned on.

A remotely-administered multiple-choice test is like a retail store without any staff, which asks customers to kindly leave money in a basket. You're much better off with even a single cashier, and even one who spends most of their day watching Netflix.

People may not die if I cheat on my exam, but casting doubt on the accuracy of the results by eroding trust in the examination process certainly affects all who took the exam when they end up not getting a job.

Security theater doesn't apply evenly, however. I know a couple students who could pretty blatantly cheat without getting caught simply because they owned a second computer they could position in the right spot, and had a hardware disconnect on their microphone. People that aren't well-off or tech savvy are going to be at a significant "disadvantage" here.

Some SW can simply be run in a VM and you can do anything you want on the host computer and activate and deactivate passed devices.

They try to detect Virtual Machines. I don't know how easy it is to spoof since obviously I wasn't going to try it.

> the real reason

... has been discussed at length by people with direct knowledge. E.g. Dr. David Joyner. In-person proctoring works for a niche set of situations but leaves a lot of other students unable to participate.

Why is a webcam more invasive and creepy than holding your entire body hostage at a testing location?

Only because you haven't taken the time to make sure your personal testing location is prelared for public viewing, since usually you don't have to worry about that.

It's a fair point. I don't actually have an issue with the webcam so much as the monitoring software they installed—it's a giant black box with admin permissions that I don't understand at all. (And, using a virtual machine was explicitly not allowed, for understandable reasons.)

I assume it hasn't left behind a giant security hole or explicit keylogger—and I did make a time machine backup before the test which I restored afterwards...

In the new world our test fees will include delivery of a test machine.

> Why anyone would pay these folks anything is beyond me.

Because they are worried about reputational damage from cheating. Even with tools like Proctorio, ProctorTrack, HonorLock, etc, the cheating rate is pretty high in programs like OMSCS.

The solution to that is so stop investing degrees with imaginary credibility, and hire people based on the hirers own assessments.

That solution is existentially terrifying to them both in the "job depends upon not understanding it" sense and their very ideas of how they feel the world works/should work so are institutional non-starters until they are replaced one way or another (generationally or competition rendering them irrelevant).

The users don't pay. The overlords pay to inflict it on the users, like law enforcement.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com