Proctorio used DMCA to take down a student’s critical tweets | Hacker News Reader

Proctorio used DMCA to take down a student’s critical tweets

techcrunch.com

328 pointsMarcScott116 comments

I've maintained for a long time that if your exam can be invalidated by the existence of a web browser, its a worthless test that prioritizes arbitrary memorization over a deeper understanding of the material. Software like Proctorio's proliferation just reinforces the blatant farce and I'm so glad to be out of it.

It's a fine balance. One one hand you want to let the students google material, consult books, use a calculator... on the other hand given free internet access what stops them from just asking (or paying) someone to solve the exam for them, or googling long enough until they found a solution someone posted online and just copy it, or cribbing from their mates?

A good balance, I found (pre covid), was having the students sit a test with textbooks of their choosing and/or their own cheatsheets and lecture notes. No bullshit cramming and memorisation (you can consult literature as you would elsewhere), but also no cheating.

> One one hand you want to let the students google material, consult books, use a calculator... on the other hand given free internet access what stops them from just asking (or paying) someone to solve the exam for them, or googling long enough until they found a solution someone posted online and just copy it, or cribbing from their mates?

DING DING DING QUESTION OF THE CENTURY!

I don't mean that sarcastically, my point is this:

There is a clear, vulgar, mismatch of values here (and there sort of always has been). Shouldn't the purpose of schooling (especially higher education) be learning things, and not maximizing your score on arbitrary measurements of "performance"? I think it obviously should be, but that's not the game, because its non-trivial to measure and counter to the raison detre of the system at large. The very phrase "Competitive School" is a perversion.

That only makes sense if the goal of college and education is pure learning but we all know it's not.

Learning is part of it for sure but Companies use college as a filter is another.

Until jobs are unnecessary there's going to be this tug between learning and performing that's never going to good for either.

All I'm saying is the answer is never so simple.

Companies use college as a filter because it's difficult to assess proficiency during an interview and they'd like some way to cull the wheat from the chaff, and avoid wasting time talking to and hiring charlatans and posers.

Meanwhile, if you ask google-style brain-teasers during interviews (which can have a legit purpose, but it's become a cliché), people complain about that.

On the third hand, if you ask candidates do actual assess-able work during an interview, the extremes are "white board coding" and "take home programming problems", people balk at whatever you do for that too.

None of these are necessarily good, nor necessarily better than the others.

HN is lousy with complaints about all the different ways to filter and assess candidates.

Sure all the systems suck currently (except hire by internal reference, that one works great). Just because all the systems suck doesn't mean that something better might be possible. And part of finding the something better is understanding what doesn't work about the current systems.

Companies use university as a filter for long-term conformity.

That's much more pronounced in non-programming jobs, of course. For many white collar jobs you just need any kind of degree, doesn't matter too much in what.

Learning how to look up someone else's solutions to problems, or what someone else thinks about something, isn't much of an education. It might well be something to add to the traditional 3Rs, but it would be what you call a mismatch of values to expect a degree for it.

This is not intended as an endorsement of Proctorio, and its use of the DMCA in this way would be ridiculous even if the criticisms were without merit.

So a formal education is supposed to meet two needs: one, to educate the student. For this goal, we don't need to worry about cheating at all.

The second purpose, however, is as a way to signal other people that the student has been educated. This is what a college degree is: a certification that the person has been educated to a particular standard.

For that, we need some way to verify that the person has learned what they were supposed to learn. Tests are a way of doing that, and cheating prevents the ability to measure the success of the education.

It goes even further than your second point, for many professions:

We don't just want to signal other people that doctors, nurses, engineers etc. have been educated. We want to validate that they've actually learned what they need to know in order to not cause uneccessary injuries and death to other people.

Some skills truly require memorization. For example, being a good doctor requires incredible amounts of memorization. A traditional test is a good way to test memorization.

I would agree that not all skills require memorization.

Assessment is a usually necessary part of education. You need to figure out what your class knows. And a fair proportion of your students won't bother to really know stuff unless it'll be formally assessed. And, yes, also there's the issue with granting credentials: you don't want to give them to people who haven't reached a minimum standard.

I'm fortunate in that the classes I teach are centered project-based learning and ... not too easy to crib on. But if I were teaching core academic sequences, it's a ridiculous amount of work to make problem sets and exercises of appropriate difficulty and develop rubric for them.

You want to be able to leverage other peoples' work, and your past work, in building assessments. And you want to have a time advantage in grading: a 30 minute assessment that you give to 100 students that in turn takes you 30 minutes to grade each is a recipe for no fun.

But all of these things-- these economies of scale in instruction-- open the door to cheating. A well-proctored, well-designed exam can mostly patch over the vulnerability.

> Assessment is a usually necessary part of education. You need to figure out what your class knows. And a fair proportion of your students won't bother to really know stuff unless it'll be formally assessed.

I don't think this approach is right. There is an obvious conflict of interest when the same party provides (1) education) and (2) assessment. The better approach is actually that taken by the College Board -- they do assessment, and only assessment. If you'd like to do well on their test, you're free to get whatever training you see fit. And that training is, theoretically[1], evaluated by how you eventually do on the SAT, not by how well you do on practice exams provided by the educator.

This should be the practice everywhere else: credentials are given by assessment, and the assessor doesn't do anything other than assessment. If the assessor sells training, that corrupts their assessment.

[1] In fact, the system seems to have broken down; SAT training is widely accepted to have large effects, while actual measurements of those effects have difficulty distinguishing them from zero.

Hey, I love third party and objective measurements. But we can hardly give the SAT every week.

Educators need quizzes and other assessment measures. That way, I can know how my class is doing. My students can understand where their performance falls short. And their parents want to know how the class is going along the way. These let all the involved parties adjust for better performance.

And these interim assessment steps need to count for at least something to get a reasonable level of effort from students. (My classes are "fun", but that only goes so far: there's the fraction of the material that's intrinsically less fun, and there's the fraction of students that will not do anything without a grade incentive).

In turn, these quizzes and other assessment measures that I use, let me eventually score well on the metrics of engagement and scholastic progress that are used assessing me. ;)

> Educators need quizzes and other assessment measures. That way, I can know how my class is doing. My students can understand where their performance falls short. And their parents want to know how the class is going along the way.

Cheating on exams is only a problem for that last one, the parents seeking to know how their children are performing. If the educator isn't providing credentials, it's not a problem if someone cheats. They'll get less education, but that's their problem, not the educator's.

It really is a problem if someone cheats.

It's horrific for morale of students who are trying, and it's dispiriting as an educator to have no accurate idea of how your class is doing. And it starts a race to the bottom where cheating is normalized and everyone cheats.

Why? What are the cheaters getting out of it?

My answer above has nothing to do with what cheaters get out of it, but instead the harms it causes non-cheaters in the same class...

They get higher scores relative to their honest peers, satisfy their parents of having learnt material that they haven't, and erode the culture of doing the work in the classroom. They also leave their instructor confused about how to best address the class. (And, it's dispiriting, as a teacher, to have teed up a lesson based on an assessment that shows your students have this down pat, and then to find 2/3rds of the way through that they didn't actually learn that material at all).

I realize we're talking mostly about undergraduate relative to the article, and I'm a middle school/high school teacher so it's a little different. Still...

> They get higher scores relative to their honest peers

This is predicated on the assumption that, as an educator, you provide formal assessments of your students' capability, intended for third-party consumption. I keep saying this shouldn't happen. It makes no sense to assume, in the world where it doesn't happen, that it will nevertheless happen anyway. The assessment should be done elsewhere, by someone who is not responsible for educating anyone.

Under this structure, it would be possible for cheaters to mess up the teacher's assessment of their proficiency, and by extension the overall proficiency of a group of students. But it is strange to assume that they would do this, because -- I asked this above -- what benefit would they derive from doing this? If this action had any effect, that effect would be to move the curriculum onward from material they don't understand to material they understand even less. That is a harm to the cheater. The problem just doesn't arise.

> The assessment should be done elsewhere, by someone who is not responsible for educating anyone.

There's room for both educator-offered assessments and third-party assessments. As I said before, educators need assessments anyways. We have a fair amount of effort that graded assessments from educators predict future performance better than these third-party assessments, too (of course, the best predictor is both together-- e.g. SAT plus grades).

> Under this structure, it would be possible for cheaters to mess up the teacher's assessment of their proficiency, and by extension the overall proficiency of a group of students. But it is strange to assume that they would do this, because -- I asked this above -- what benefit would they derive from doing this? If this action had any effect, that effect would be to move the curriculum onward from material they don't understand to material they understand even less. That is a harm to the cheater. The problem just doesn't arise.

No one looks at middle school students' grades except the students and their parents-- well, and for eligibility for participation in athletics. Still, there's rampant efforts to cheat, with the negative outcomes I described above.

You're attributing a whole lot of foresight to a short term selfish decision. Yes, cheating may eventually bite you, putting you into a class you're unprepared for. But it provides a lot of short term apparent benefit, so...

> Yes, cheating may eventually bite you, putting you into a class you're unprepared for. But it provides a lot of short term apparent benefit, so...

What is that short term apparent benefit?

> No one looks at middle school students' grades except the students and their parents-- well, and for eligibility for participation in athletics.

You might be forgetting about high schools.

> You might be forgetting about high schools.

Funny, given that I teach in one! The middle school example was just to refute your point. Namely to show, despite the lack of degree-granting/admissions/pecuniary incentives to cheat, students still will cheat for short term perceived gains, with negative effects for everyone in the process.

I'm a-gonna go now, because I feel like you're being willfully obtuse.

Issue is, this system prioritizes assessment even more than actual learning. So this would be better for getting 'fair' credentials, but it would lead to people 'teaching to the test' even moreso than right now.

The current situation where the teacher is also the assessor allows the teacher to chose what to teach, to react to students, to teach for improving their students. Then at the end, almost as an afterthought, the teacher comes up with an assessment. This serves a bureaucratic purpose, the administration requires it. It also serves a motivational purpose "Study the material or you will fail the test", which helps the teacher to actually get students to learn.

This does mean the test isn't really focused on assessing how well the students have learned. But do we need more focus, in studying, on assessing how well someone has learned? I'd argue we need more focus on actually teaching well. Using tests to determine the quality of teaching seems quite fraught. Certainly the adversarial model of an assessment makes things harder.

To summarize, I think your solution would fall to Goodhart's law:

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Whilst also de-emphasizing the actual goal of teaching.

> Issue is, this system prioritizes assessment even more than actual learning. So this would be better for getting 'fair' credentials, but it would lead to people 'teaching to the test' even moreso than right now.

Why would that be an issue? Isn't that the point of the test?

The purpose of school is both learning things, and providing proof that you learned those things. In other words, education and accreditation. Therefore, you need some way to assess that the students did indeed learn the material so you can issue the corresponding certification.

The University of New South Wales (UNSW) wrote some case studies on online assessment during the initial Australian lockdown back in March.

https://teaching.unsw.edu.au/academic-integrity/case-studies

Some really interesting results:

> In my course’s final online exam, students have access to a Microsoft Teams channel as they complete their exam paper. Students are allowed to ask for help from each other, post specific questions regarding how to solve the problems, post photographs of their working out and indeed their answers.

> A near perfect asymmetric Gaussian (bell-curve) distribution was achieved in the final exam with an average mark, pass and HD all being typical for the course were it to be run on face-to-face on campus. Additionally, my course achieved 100.0% satisfaction in the myExperience student survey. My students commented that this assessment approach was a very forward-thinking approach to online examination.

Thanks for this, hadn't run into this source before. Passing along to some professors!

Happened to me a while back, but with an in-person test. They had a French teacher invigilating a biology test, and he didn't care at all. In the end, "every one" was working together, the solutions were written on the blackboard, and every one passed with flying colour, most of them with the same copy since they basically straight copied the blackboard. Of course, the test was redone (with a different invigilator) since the cheating was so obvious.

I am not sure how the Australian professor managed to get students to fail in these conditions. Either most of the students were inept and couldn't even cheat properly or the good students didn't want to share their answers.

After reading the linked list, that seems to be the case, the chat was monitored and the best students didn't want to share their answers. I think it works fine until someone cross the invisible line, and then widespread cheating ensues. In my case it was also high school vs university.

By employing such systems you are teaching not only the content of the class at hand, you also teach that cheating is worthwhile as long as you can trick surveillance and don't get caught. There is also some balance here.

This is the difference between education and training. Use of Proctorio is prima facie evidence you're wasting your tuition. (100% original content, hereby placed in the public domain.)

I said it before, any education before college is training. Seems like I hit a nerve, as I was downnvoted without explanation. We all went through school and high school, we all know they only want you to memorize the answers, no critical thinking allowed The teacher almost always acts like he is Moses coming down from Mount Sinai. That was my personal experience and everyone's I know.

I don't think I'm part of "we all," because I only started attending a proper school in high school, but that wasn't my experience at all. There were a lot of teachers who behaved differently and adhered to different teaching philosophies. I find it hard to believe you attended more schools and were exposed to less variety.

Well, I'm honesty happy that my experience and the experience of the people around me is not universal. Maybe our education system was crappy when I was a kid. You gave me hope.

If you've been saying the same thing for a long time, you probably don't understand the situation or aren't listening to people's responses and adapting what you say next time. I can see this below where you're rejecting people's valid criticisms in favor of a vague ideology but without having found proven practical solutions to the practical problems. Other people aren't all idiots all the time.

> or aren't listening to people's responses

Perhaps I've heard them and remain unconvinced.

> a vague ideology but without having found proven practical solutions to the practical problems

"You can't point out a flawed system if you don't have a complete and total airtight solution to it yourself, that can be implemented with zero cost and effort by all of society, and of which none would ever dare disagree with as it's so ingenious."

> Other people aren't all idiots all the time.

When did I say that??

This is abusive behavior by Proctorio. Unfortunately they're not the only bad faith actors using DMCA inappropriately.

We need desperately something akin to an anti-slapp[1] defense to fight back against these abusers.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_pu...

Well, a DMCA takedown is an accusation of illegal conduct and Twitter is a very public place.

File a defamation suit against them, and force the C-suite and their lawyers to sit for depositions where they must justify their good-faith beliefs.

What's your upside for doing this?

The time, expense and stress is a pretty obvious downside for many if not most.

Caveat Lector - IANAL

Punitive damages. All you need to do is show the other party acted with malice or through fraud. Punitive damages are designed to be a punishment for the bad actor, you can net some nice coin that way if the judge is particularly unhappy with your opponent. Just get try to get in touch with the ACLU to see if they can give any advice before you file, the case law for this stuff is complicated last time I looked into it.

To be perfectly honest, it felt good to write. And that was enough for me.

But... I just talked to an experienced litigation lawyer about this hypothetical, and was told that success really depends on how Twitter handles the notice - how public is it, do your friends and business associates see that you were subjected to a DMCA takedown, etc.

If you have the kind of money it takes to file that suit and actually drag their C-suite into a courtroom, you aren't being inconvenienced by them throwing a DMCA takedown at you in the first place.

Maybe find a law office willing to take on the case for the chance at a cut of the penalty?

So perform hours and hours of unpaid labor on the hope that years from now you can make some lawyers a good chunk of money.

There's a certain personality type, that doesn't necessarily want to win, but just wants their opponent to lose.

And is often willing to put in a lot of effort to make sure this happens.

California anti-slapp law has been interpreted so broadly that it is an almost complete shield against defamation claims in public.

This fact has its plusses and minuses.

Twitter has now refused the takedown request and from the tweets you can see that the request truly is frivolous so they might be liable.

There's currently little recourse or penalty for abusing the DMCA. What should be done is make companies liable to the user affected for issuing a willfully abusive request. If companies faced the same $150000 penalty willfully making a false DMCA request as exists for copyright infringement they would think twice about doing this.

DMCA abusers should have their copyright for the work in question nullified; it should go straight into the public domain. Companies that ignore fair use no longer have any moral right to that work.

How would that work for companies placing DMCA requests for works that they do not own? (I agree with the sentiment, and the poetic justice of the idea, but am curious on the edge cases.)

Imprison the executives, for a crime tantamount to theft. (Though umprisonment for fraudulent DMCA takedowns regardless of whether or not they own the copyright would be justice.)

Let me tell you about a crime called perjury...

IIRC you already swear under penalty of perjury as part of filing a DMCA request, so presumably you could sue for money and include this fact as part of your argument for punitive damages (IANAL).

If they are an authorized representative of the company that does own the work, put that work in the public domain.

If they have no public work, fines or jailtime.

Wishful thinking in all cases though.

This is also happening in India.

A guy criticized a company that encourages parents to put their 11-12 year old kids into coding classes, over fake promises like jobs at google, app published to app store, etc.

They banned his Youtube, Linkedin, Twitter, for copyright infringement. The infringement was he showed their company logo in his criticism.

The company is WhiteHatJR. They advertise aggressively and with made up characters working at Google.

https://www.whitehatjr.com

https://old.reddit.com/r/india/comments/joio2u/now_whitehatj...

In case anybody else wants a (more?) primary source for this:

https://www.forbesindia.com/article/take-one-big-story-of-th...

The reddit post I linked is from the guy getting banned.

Oh please, don’t link anything from Reddit India about criticizing bans. That sub is living example of censorship and banning anything which the mods don’t like . Some examples : https://medium.com/@akasha45/my-rant-against-reddit-india-r-...

Do you not read other comments?

Mod - Submission is in hindi. OP is the only on who has provided subtitles and a transcript and hence his thread has been approved. This link was reposted multiple times yesterday and they were all removed for not following the submission language rule. Meta comments have been removed. Discuss the topic at hand now that the thread is up and running rather than meta discussions about the older submissions.

Khali peeli censorship chilla rahe ho

I used removeddit to better checkout the post in /r/ubc that they mentioned in the article. It looks like Proctorio used multiple shill accounts and completely changed the tune of their story to make it seem like CEO /u/artfulhacker was trying to help when in reality he literally posts user data and says "shame on you" https://removeddit.com/r/UBC/comments/hgiiu1/midterm_started...

Interestingly, my tweets criticizing Proctorio still remain online, despite showing their beautified source code: https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1304621579540795392 https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1304623361461547009

This tweet thread culminated in a blog post: https://soatok.blog/2020/09/12/edutech-spyware-is-still-spyw...

They'd definitely have an incentive to remove my tweet too.

Among other legally questionably things Proctorio is doing (besides their use of DMCA to silence critics) is claiming to be FIPS 140-2 compliant... but they're not listed here: https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/cryptographic-module-validati...

Self-assertions of compliance can be legitimate. To appear on that list they'd need third-party validation of their compliance, which is not the same thing.

I know: FIPS 140-2 validation is actually a meaningful thing, while FIPS 140-2 compliance is not.

But even if they're legally not doing a fraud here due to specific word choice, they're not being wholly honest with their customers. And that sucks.

The fact that DMCA is starting to be used to censor critics is definitely concerning

It has been for a while, especially on YouTube.

When you click on this link you are being tracked before you agree to tracking, my router is blocking this domain so silent redirect doesnt work for me and exposes tracking:

https: / / guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=3_cc-session_680ec19f-a1f4-4061-94cb-114bef96ed56

Every click generates new sessionId. Quite sure this isn't legal.

Imagine working for a company like this. Not only is the product you're working on super sketchy and gross, but the company itself is abusive.

Did people just forget that Netflix issued Copyright notices for takedown of tweets blasting their Cuties trailer.

Content which they plastered all of the internet & then act this way.

I was fully on their side when they did show it and thought this was just a case of a French series going US (haven't watched it). But when I read the news I thought about canceling Netflix.

It is inconceivable to me how a professional company can react this way. Honestly I think much of the criticism was very likely bullshit, but Netflix managed to top that off with this incredibly stupid reaction.

Is there anything that prevents anyone receiving a DMCA take down letter from charging a fee if that request is found to be fraudulent, illegal or otherwise unwarranted?

If I were on the receiving end of such a request, I would confirm receipt with a response stating that any invalid requests will incur a fee of $50,000 (per request) unless they wish to cancel it immediately, and provide a link to do so. Failure of them to cancel it once processed if and when it’s found invalid: they’re on the hook for the fee.

> Is there anything that prevents anyone receiving a DMCA take down letter from charging a fee if that request is found to be fraudulent, illegal or otherwise unwarranted?

Well, yes, the law. How would you enforce a contract which binds the claimant to paying a fee? What if the claimant doesn't want to enter an agreement where he has to pay? Do you refuse his takedown request? Well congrats, you just made yourself liable.

If there's no penalty for abusing the DMCA can you just abuse the DMCA right back at them?

They have expensive lawyers, you don't

If they go after you for the same thing they themselves did aren't they just handing you the means to go after them?

They're not paying for your lawyers. It's that simple. Unless you have a deep war chest any competent lawyer would tell you not to pursue it.

Microsoft has expensive lawyers on retainer, and would not challenge the takedown notice against youtube-dl.

Those lawyers protect Microsoft from liabilities.

Their users are, in this case, a liability.

Would Microsoft care about youtube-dl? Aside from their recent gesturing towards open source, I can't see a scenario in which they'd even say anything. Considering how often youtube-dl has to be updated and re-downloaded, they might even be happy to get that load off GitHub.

Not really. I would have to be the proper owner of content they posted that clearly violates DMCA. I'm not about to go and break the law by abusing DMCA takedowns back at them, as they likely just did to me.

Does the law specifically state you have to honour all requests, or only valid ones?

I know most will simply honour it immediately, and reinstate content if it was not found to be infringing, but I bet that’s more of a CYA measure.

To your point: I could simply have another link for them to confirm their request, with my conditions clearly stated (ie. a contract).

To the best of my non-lawyer-y knowledge, neither of those is the case. Rather, if the DMCA requests are not responded to, then the host may be liable for the infringing content as well. The sequence of events is as follows, with "host" referring to the hosting service, "user" referring to the person who uploaded material, and "lawyer" referring to the person representing the copyright holder.

- User uploads material to the host. Host did not make editorial decisions on the content, and is therefore not liable for infringement in the content (safe harbor).

- Lawyer sends DMCA takedown notice, attesting that they believe the content infringes lawyer's copyright. (Does not have to actually infringe, just need to be a statement that they believe it does.)

- Host receives notice, and now has a choice. If they take the material down, they have no legal liability to either user or lawyer. If they leave it up, lawyer can sue host along with user for infringement.

- (Assuming host takes material down), host then notifies user.

- User can respond with a counter notice, under penalty of perjury, they believe the takedown notice was mistakenly given.

- Host tells lawyer that a counter notice was given.

- Lawyer now has a choice. Option A is to file a lawsuit against user. In that case, material stays down until the lawsuit concludes. Option B is to sit in sullen silence. If no lawsuit is filed in 14 days, host can put material back up without any liability.

There are a couple major problems with this. The original DMCA request isn't under penalty of perjury, but the reply is. The original DMCA request doesn't require a copyright to be held, only a "good faith belief" that it infringes. The duration of 14 days may have made sense in 1998, with large companies being the only media producers, but now that takes a video down for several times the duration of interest, effectively killing it.

  > - The original DMCA request isn't under penalty of perjury, but the reply is.
  > - The original DMCA request doesn't require a copyright to be held, only a "good faith belief" that it infringes.
  > - The duration of 14 days may have made sense in 1998, with large companies being the only media producers, but now that takes a video down for several times the duration of interest, effectively killing it.

I'm going to remember those points, especially the first. That is the real problem, in my opinion.

Also, from wikipedia, it looks like I was slightly mistaken. The initial claim is partly until the penalty of perjury, but only that they are authorized to act for the copyright holder. The statement on it being infringement requires only a good faith belief, and is not under penalty of perjury.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_...

So the way it works is ripe for abuse - obviously written up by the industry.

If you have some time and don't mind indirectly learning about less conventional areas of the romance genre, I recommend watching Lindsay Ellis' two pieces on misuse of copyright law to harass critics: Into The Omegaverse: How a Fanfic Trope Landed in Federal Court https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhWWcWtAUoY and the follow-up that roped the EFF into a battle over ABO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3v5wFMQRqs

> Is there anything that prevents anyone receiving a DMCA take down letter from charging a fee if that request is found to be fraudulent, illegal or otherwise unwarranted

Yes, contract law. You could require affirmative consent to such terms before processing a takedown to get around that problem, but then, having presented a facially-valid takedown, you could just be sued for copyright infringement for any legitimate notice if the copyright owner didn't agree to the terms, because you'd have taken yourself outside the safe harbor.

> Olsen claimed that Miami University had accepted the company’s terms and conditions on behalf of Johnson, and that Johnson allegedly violated those terms when he tweeted about the code.

Universities have authority to bind their students to 3rd party contracts?

Are there no other solutions instead of surveillance? Like make for each student his own schedule of exams, spread them evenly over the year, add some stochastic unpredictable in advance factor to that schedule.

The most of tests could be taken online when we trust students to be honest. That tests are mostly for them, to have feedback from a system on their performance, and for the system as a kind of telemetry, also a feedback to see how good education courses work. But a few tests per student could be conducted offline, the system might want to make them more rigorous and to cover more topics than usual.

It seems to me that the system is afraid of changing and tries to buy a solution of a problem instead of devising it. How to measure academic performance is the area of expertise of an academic organization, so why to outsource solution to an external software company with no expertise in academic measurements?

I wrote it and got an idea that it is an ideological shift in a collective unconscious. Software engineer is a magician, an artisan of unsolved problems. Each new problem should be delegated to her with a trunk full of bucks, and a magical solution will come back shortly. So maybe we should think instead of removing 'magic' component from the description? How to make people think of software as of technology, not as of magic?

This kind of circle jerk by tech companies is both awkward and dangerous.

Shame on Twitter for making this student go through these efforts. It’s clear the company is abusing the DMCA to avoid criticism.

Twitter is just taking the easy way out as a platform. It's the CYA approach.

Folks are doing take-home exam wrong.

Caltech had tremendous success with a culture of honesty and take-home exams.

As a current student, I can maybe offer a bit of perspective on this. There are a few different options I've seen tried:

1. Project-based assignments. These work well. In certain cases a tool to check for plagiarism may be helpful, provided that a human review is used to double-check flagged assignments.

2. Essays. These can be given as take-home assignments, in which case they are similar to 1. They can also be given in an exam format, which is generally difficult to cheat and does a good job of testing understanding.

3. Traditional exams. These work poorly in a take-home format. They typically require invasive solutions. The least-bad that I've seen are those in which teachers require students to get on zoom with a camera pointing at the student's face, workspace, and screen. The other big downside is that they generally make students more nervous about the test.

To any profs that read this: please use options one or two if possible. Your students will thank you and may even do better for it.

3. favors rote. But is cheaper and easier to grade.

I think you're missing the point completely.

Start by supposing, for the sake of argument, that you think that grades matter. Like for example for determining access to scholarships or graduate programs. Also suppose, for the sake of argument, that some percentage of the students are going to cheat, and suppose that it matters to the aforementioned grades.

Also I'm assuming a distance-learning option, perhaps due to quarantine, but the question generalizes to other reasons.

How do options 1 and 2 do anything at all to fight the alleged cheating problem? Remote essays are very easy to cheat, just as easy as any other kind of remote exam. Anything take-home is even easier to cheat.

The parent commenter is simply claiming that cheating just doesn't happen enough to matter (at least not at Caltech, they claim). That's possible, I have no idea. But it's quite different from saying "remote exams are bad".

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As for why professors administer exams, btw... a professor is going to spend such-and-such an amount of time on you and your class. Maybe it's 5 hours per week, maybe it's 20. Would you rather they invest that time into teaching, or marking? Speaking as a former student and a current teacher, I tend to prefer it be spent on teaching. If you agree that the teaching is more valuable then the marking, teachers should choose the least labour-demanding form of assessment, so they can get back to investing energy in teaching (and/or get back to other responsibilities). Exams are easier to grade than projects and essays. A professor who chooses exams is usually saying "marking is not a good use of my time". (A professor who chooses essays or projects is usually saying "marking is a teaching opportunity so I hate this but oh well").

> Remote essays are very easy to cheat

Automated plagiarism detection tools should be good enough these days.

Of course, there's always the possibility one could buy an essay but then there's always the risk the seller sold the same essay to several students!

I used to TA and have seen several of these essay farms in the most amusing ways.

- Embedded metadata in the PDF of a long, foreign name that was not the student's (as Author:)

- An email to several TAs + prof for the course with the student's personal information sent by the essay farm because the student was harassing the essay farm over payment/cost/speed, including live chat logs of the student calling them "pakis" (the essay farm was based in the Philippines)

- Two students purchased and turned in an identical essay except the words were re-spun (bullshit synonym replacement, automated) to the point that both were unreadable to a native English speaker. It was clear neither of them had even read through it before submitting it at 23:59

A fair chunk of bought essays (under $100-150, probably, not the truly bespoke "pay2win" type) are nearly just the Wikipedia article regurgitated with irrelevant citations or sources that just vaguely match the keywords.

> An email to several TAs + prof for the course with the student's personal information sent by the essay farm because the student was harassing the essay farm over payment/cost/speed, including live chat logs of the student calling them "pakis" (the essay farm was based in the Philippines)

Wow. What ended up happening?

The truly bespoke "pay2win" (love the name!) will always work sadly. But the price point means you don't have to be worried about 99% of the student population. It's an acceptable risk I suppose.

Nothing major unfortunately, on paper that should have been expulsion/suspension but in reality he got a zero and had to retake, and since it was a prerequisite for other courses it pretty much had the side effect of adding an extra year of tuition.

Here in Australia it's not uncommon for Tutors to do the assignment and exam marking (usually these are post graduate students, I think they call these people Teaching Assistants or similar in US).

So from the Professors point of view it doesn't make much difference which method they use, the grading will get palmed off anyway.

An Oral exam similar to what you have to go through with a Thesis defense is an interesting option, I don't think has been considered. Instead of giving out a take home test. Why not give each student a 10 minute skype call with the professor while he grills them. Would make it easy to see who really understands the topic and prevent rote memorizations etc.

Oral exams are popular in Europe (France at least).

They are high stress however.

Options 1 and 2 pretend there's no "Assignment as a service" market. In reality there's not just a market, there are Ubers on the market, making it easy to match cheaty students with industrious graduates.

> Caltech had tremendous success with a culture of honesty and take-home exams.

Could you be a little more specific?

Most exams at Caltech are take home. Typically the exam is made available sometime near the end of the term, with instructions that tell you when it is due, how long you are allowed to work on it, and what you can use during it (ranging from nothing to your own notes to full open book).

Due dates are typically a week or two from when it becomes available.

There is no one watching, in person or remotely, when you take an exam unless you happen to take it somewhere there are other people.

I had engineering tests as take-home before. It wasn't super common, but some professors did do that for seniors on occasion for small classes where cheating wouldn't be a problem. They were so stupidly hard that even with multiple text books and the internet, the best I could often do was a "B". There's simply no way to google an answer for something that requires multiple pages of analysis and so forth per problem. I think this was a fairer representation of the real world too.

I think a take home test would be harder for those subjects that are more about rote memorization.

My university had an interesting solution for a couple of modules for computer science - there were six programming assignments spread throughout the term, and you do them at home and submitted online. It'd be (obviously) very easy to cheat, and being programming a certain degree of similarity would be expected. However, for the final assignment, you had to go for a viva. You had to explain how it worked and why you'd chosen to do things in a certain way, and that formed the bulk of your assessment.

For some math problems that works, but the set of possible questions is shrinking every time such questions are posed.

But for programming? I think having to explain the solution is the best was to determine possible cheating.

Most tests that I took in college were essentially open-book. Not all of them, but definitely more than half. They could have been take-home if(f) the professors trusted students not to use the internet during an exam.

In the math and computing classes, professors structured the questions in layers that tested different concepts. You could always have a double-sided "cheat sheet", and some professors let students bring in the whole textbook for time-constrained exams. It took far too long to "brute-force" more than one or two questions.

In the liberal arts classes, you were tested more on critical thinking and contextual questions. You needed to understand concepts at more than a surface level to make compelling arguments about how they related to each other, and you wouldn't be able to develop that understanding for many topics over the course of an hour, even if you have the primary material in front of you.

We weren't allowed to bring anything with a radio, but forcing students to take exams in complete isolation always felt odd to me. It's pretty rare to need to do actual work in a "clean-room" environment.

My P Chem professor let us use whatever notes/books on our exams. Of course the exam was very long and hard, so you really didn’t have enough time to go through your notes quickly enough to help.

My uni uses similar, but slightly less invasive software.

I completely broke a lot of its reporting by writing afew lines of javascript in userscripts which break the page visibility API, fullscreen detection, etc.

And somehow some sites can detect if something you are copy pasting was written in the browser in their own text field or pasted from somewhere else. There is a flag in firefox which disables the onpaste events, etc but on chromium I have to use tools like xdotool.

This gives me an idea for a dongle with a button, and when you press the button it sends the contents of the clipboard as keystrokes. No browser hacks needed!

xdotool on linux does exactly this, but instead of a button you can set a timer to send keystrokes in for example 5 seconds.

This site, TechCrunch, is an absolute privacy abomination. With content blockers, PiHole, and other privacy protections this site will barely load.

The "update" at the end of the article indicates the posts have been restored, but if you go look at the thread, the posts in question link to pastebin, and those pastebins have been taken down.

So actually there was no infringing content in the thread at all, and the actual content on pastebin is still missing.

https://archive.is/m7cHZ

Thank you. Techcrunch is the worst. Should be banned from HN.

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