Comment by olyjohn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by olyjohn | Hacker News Reader

I feel so bad for the students that have to deal with this. I worked at a Community College in IT for a while. Students would come into a lab that was specifically set up for testing. The anti-cheating software was such total trash, it would crash, crash the browser, crash the whole system. Students would have to start testing over...

At least twice a month, their systems would be down, and nobody could take tests at all. We'd have to send home 30-60 students at a time, and reschedule their tests for another day. These were students who were also working jobs, and took time off of work, likely unpaid, to come in and take the test. So we wasted their time, and lost them money. Not to mention the constant waste of IT's time dealing with this trash software.

It's totally fucking criminal that these companies sell such garbage to our schools and get away with it. It doesn't matter how bad it is, it checks a box on some requirements sheet so we will never switch to something else... Not that the other options are any better.

Just last week I had to help my sister reinstall windows because she used respondus and now her computer blue screens every time she turns on her webcam. It runs as root and appears to mess with the kernel, so a clean reinstall seemed like the only solution. It’s really so much worse than I imagined at this point I’d classify this software as straight up malware.

This is one of the reasons I'm happy closed platforms like iOS and Windows 10S are getting more and more mainstream. They'll simply prevent these poorly written drivers from getting written in the first place.

In my uni they d just give stuff unique and almost impossible and just let us try and survive. They d read every code and ask for comment, sitting next to each student for 30 minutes of explanation.

Once they gave one of their research subjet on dictionary optimization and "the best they could do themselves" compiled to show it was possible. I went far enough (we had to also be constrained to 16-bit memory addressing) and decompiled their stuff with IDA to find a few more tricks and got a little bonus for telling them and reimplementing them.

Another time they told us "do whatever with OpenGL and we ll grade you relatively", ensued an enormous competition between students to beat each other with my team ending up implementing a counter strike map renderer with skybox, full texture, fast enough to walk around, and we got the best grade.

The last project, on the 5th year, was a semantic web video search engine a la youtube, with fetching, indexing, auto translation, knowledge graph, for a team of 40 students who had to split in various department with one team acting as product owners, for a few months.

I think there are ways to do exams that are meaningful and actually make you interesting in job interviews.

This could be describing plenty of enterprise software too. Boxticking crapware.

Sounds like we just need to push for an "uptime" checkbox, where uptime means tests can be taken.

What kind of cheat does it prevent?

I imagine it wouldn't be terribly hard to run the machines so that only one full-screen window is shown, or a user for whom the internet is disabled. Is that not enough?

> I imagine it wouldn't be terribly hard to run the machines so that only one full-screen window is shown, or a user for whom the internet is disabled. Is that not enough?

Many of the anti-cheating software will also run the webcam and yell at you if it thinks you aren't paying attention to only the screen, while recording everything on your screen.

And students are being forced to install this on their home machines.

> And students are being forced to install this on their home machines.

Wait, what if I work from home and my kid is sitting in the living room as well. I get recorded then? WTF???

Who owns these machines? Is it the parents or the school or the government or who? What if they decline? Can someone explain why a child has to accept that they are being watched on a webcam without their consent? Without the consent of their parent? And, "either accept it or don't get allowed at exam" isn't a choice. They ain't going to high school yet, but I don't envision I would allow my children to be scrutinized by this. Then again, who expected COVID-19. I can only hope this is temporary, but perhaps its part of 'the new normal'.

> Wait, what if I work from home and my kid is sitting in the living room as well. I get recorded then? WTF???

If the software detects that you're in the room your kid fails.

Then my kid would fail, or they'd have to use their bedroom. Which is, IMO, a very private space.

Too bad your opinion doesn’t matter. That is how this stuff works, you are not the first to complain, they’ve heard every argument you can come up with before and they don’t care.

While I am not from USA, supposedly in USA people also care about privacy. My opinion as a parent matters in the context of my child (as I am legally responsible), and in the end what matters is the law (which is above "don't care"). I'm very curious if this is even legal, and if so, in which jurisdictions. If I don't give my child permission to have a camera active in my private space, what is going to happen?

> If I don't give my child permission to have a camera active in my private space, what is going to happen?

Your child will not be allowed to take the exam.

I am curious about people like you. We know the outcome answer they want, but someone like you chimes in an claims it can't be been done.

Can you explain this defeatist attitude to me and what purpose it does providing the already known negative outcome?

To me, the language you used suggested that you are already bought, sold, and controlled.

Unless you have enough money/lawyers to fight it in court, there really isn't much option.

You take the tests, with the software, or you fail.

What would you do in that situation if it were you. I would personally choose to fail and not be apart of a system that does this, but it sounds like you embrace it?

To call it "embrace" is unfair to the parent comment. People get coerced to accept things all the time, especially when it concerns the future of their children. Very few people have an "all or nothing" kind of mentality when it comes to resisting establishment, especially when the cost of accepting is relatively minor. In this case, accepting the anti-cheat has a very low cost: enduring a crapware and spyware for a little while.

It's simply a compromise.

I actually have gone out of my way to, and have mostly successfully avoided that situations, and have gone out of my way to point out to schools the damage they are doing.

However, not everyone has that option, is willing to take that option, or understands the ramifications of not taking that option.

I hate the current system. I also understand why people choose to follow it.

Edit 0: It looks like maybe this conversation has hit the maximum depth for HN? If you'd like to continue talking, please feel free to email me.

Edit 1: Turns out I was wrong. The reply timer just hadn't passed. Still feel free to email me if you like.

Nobody is suggesting the system is good.

Your question is about the current process though, and the answer is if you really do not have access to a room with internet that you can use for a couple of hours, the best thing you can do is to contact your school and see what arrangements can be made to accommodate you.

> What kind of cheat does it prevent?

Not much. When lockdowns first started I remember seeing _tons_ of first and second hand accounts of all the ways anti-cheating software failed when exposed to the real world.

> I imagine it wouldn't be terribly hard to run the machines so that only one full-screen window is shown, or a user for whom the internet is disabled. Is that not enough?

It can be a little tricky. We put the test in a single full-screen window on top of any other windows, and...the students alter the transparency to view their notes behind it, or they notice that we only check windows in the current desktop or for the current active user. Maybe "full-screen" on the system in question only fills a single monitor and leaves another open for research.

All of that assumes that the student is only using a single device and doesn't have a hi-def pet silicon rock in their pockets at all times, hence the webcam monitoring and whatnot to check that a student is actively staring at the screen the whole time.

Next step: Webcam device which simulates student watching the screen :)

This already exists for anyone sufficiently motivated. It's a video input playing back a prerecorded video showing absolute attention, with the device IDs coded to pretend that it's a video camera rather than a generic video input (e.g. HDMI input)

Taking the test with shades is legal is it not?

I'd fail if I had to go through this. When thinking hard about a problem, I like to clear my mind of visual distractions by looking out at the sky and if I'm not near a window, simply close my eyes.

Now I come to think of it... Reminds of when I was in middle school, we used a bug in Chinese IME to crash the software used to control our machines.

The webcam solution also seems entirely bypassable if the student is determined. (Speaking from my experience as a TA, students who cheat are usually pretty determined) Just put a phone to the level of the monitor, and there's nothing a webcam can do.

At my university in Russia, we had a special testing classroom with these weird Sun thin clients that only ran Firefox in a very minimalistic window manager in a unix system of some sort. Said Firefox would only open the website of the testing system.

So, obviously, everyone just used their phones for cheating lol.

Can't they have a KVM switch connected to a second computer that could cheat while seemingly appearing like one is still using the test computer?

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