This software isn't ideal but there's no good solutions here short of major rethink of how these classes, and possible all of the college, is structured.
So one solution is to switch to open book take home exams as much as possible. The other frankly is to have an honor code and, at some point, recognize that some people will cheat but they're mostly hurting themselves.
Students who cheat can secure a higher GPA with less effort. That effort can be redirected towards looking for internships and improving grad school applications.
So I fail to see how cheaters are only “hurting themselves”. Morality aside, if you pursue a cheating strategy your pay-off will be much higher when we consider the scarcity of resources available to students.
This is definitely not the reason why most people cheat.
> Morality aside, if you pursue a cheating strategy your pay-off will be much higher
As with any kind of lie, you will have to cheat more and more to compensate for previous cheating, and eventually your little web of lies will come back and bite you in the ass.
> As with any kind of lie, you will have to cheat more and more to compensate for previous cheating, and eventually your little web of lies will come back and bite you in the ass.
Completely disagree. People cheat to climb the ladder of life without having to put in the work or having the resources required to do bypass that ladder. However, once you climb the ladder high enough, it is much harder to fall back down.
Sure you're not going to be a good doctor if you cheat your way through med school but if you cheat your way through undergrad and get into a better program with better resources, more driven peers and better professors, you are better off regardless.
> if you cheat your way through undergrad and get into a better program with better resources, more driven peers and better professors, you are better off regardless.
Until you end up doing a surgery. You can’t cheat the real world. Your lack of knowledge will show eventually, and then it’ll limit your opportunities.
This assumes that what you learn in university is the useful part, not the grade or the allocation of time that could be used for hackathons, projects, clubs, or internships.
- oral exams via video call
- written exams where students are distributed over a larger area (e.g. the university rents a warehouse for the examination time) so that the COVID-19 spreading risk is nevertheless kept very small.
The desks were so far apart that the current "social distancing" standards would be met. I remember that many courses had multiple variations of the same exam given to students to further reduce cheating.
I'm taking an online masters right now and have taken a few (pre-pandemic) proctored exams. The nearby university offers to proctor any exam for $10. They have a bunch of rooms with desks, and it's no big deal at all.
This proctoring technology thing has gone too far and too fast. It was a knee-jerk reaction, and with a lot of complaints I bet that a lot of it gets dropped.
If so, who cares if cheating numbers / grades have been inflating?
In my professional experience, GPA has little correlation with how well someone can do a job. GPA going up or down by 0.3 points really doesn't mean that much to me.
That way the viewer / reader will be able to compare your results to your class.
Obviously if 80% of your class got A, that A is not going to look as impressive.
On the other hand, if you're the only student that got A, while the class distribution is monotonically increasing towards Failure, that's going to be a good thing for you.