Parents demand academic publisher drop Proctorio surveillance tech
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There were entire command lists going around specifying what exactly one needed to replace, say, the logo of an online newspaper with a picture of a dong.
You can also use tcpdump to save a pcap file that can then be analyzed with wireshark.
Shady traffic with personal information of a CHILD going straight to CHINA sounds like it might get some traction on the issue.
I remember being at an EdTech conference ~ 7 years ago and even then i was not just stunned by the amount of false claims (AI, ...) but also generally where the focus lay (anti-fraud, student control, web filters...).
The whole ecosystem is just massively broken with students and teachers at most as an afterthought. Neither the entrenched companies nor startups seem to understand concepts like PEDAGOGY, TRUST or student-teacher RELATIONSHIP and instead consider students somewhere akin to criminals to be monitored, controlled and indoctrinated and teachers as nothing more than passive vessels that need ready made solutions and no freedom whatsoever.
In the end your average functional school probably gets some of this software but most likely would fate best with its own install of Moodle (for all its flaws - reliable, lots of community support, and cheap) and then various web apps.
With the current ecosystem most students and teachers fare best with just nothing than with any of this. School districts/owners should invest into teacher training and maybe generic moodle instances, and to get laptops near the classrooms. But please don't buy any of this evil crap.
This scenario encourages focus on features that are important for the decision makers and less focus on the features (or usability) important for the actual users - exactly as you describe.
A bottom-up approach where students and teachers would identify what works best for them and push for it is extremely hard. Teachers try the best but are limited by their budgets (many pay out of their own purse for tools and equipment!) and students have basically no say.
This leads to the situation where most successful (profitable, largest) edtech software has no relation to what actually might be the best tool.
Technical decision making is by an IT department that reports through the bursar (head of all non academic staff) to the head. There’s no accountability to core competency: teaching and learning. We are merely stakeholders at an equal level on the org chart.
Contrast this to when I was a FAANG SWE, when every function at the company — including IT — was subordinate to those who built the actual tech: Engineering.
The flip side is that as a teacher I have complete autonomy over anything that does fall to me; namely the bulk of the CS curriculum and the way it is taught.
(Tools like repl.it are wonderful for completely side stepping any involvement with bureaucracy. Invite the kids to sign up and just get stuff done.)
I read the book as part of a philosophy course I took in university and as a decidedly non-libertarian person (Caplan is a libertarian economist), I found it a very challenging argument to confront. What was so vexing was how much his points seemed to agree with my experiences.
My peers and fellow classmates were doing exactly as he described in the book: taking “bird courses” instead of challenging ones, only taking the minimum requirements for their degree and avoiding the optional challenging electives, memorizing / begging / borrowing / stealing / cheating their way to the best grades possible in their classes at the expense of actual learning.
In the COVID era of online classes, class averages have gone way up. The academic integrity offices of most faculties have been overwhelmed with cheating cases. If the true purpose of education is to better oneself, why are so many people taking the opportunity to cheat at a time when schools have less ability to monitor for it? This is a question that vexes me endlessly, as a student trying to get the most out of his education. I have been taking as many challenging courses as I can, and plan to continue doing so for the remainder of my degree. I don’t cheat and consequently I find myself well below the high class averages.
It leaves me wondering: am I the naïve one?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education
Which is why there aren't great answers if certifications matter (and they do) whether in regular school or professional certifications. In the latter case it's right there in the name and it has a direct bearing on employment prospects.
Should schools be reorienting evaluations in a way that isn't as cheatable? Probably. Use take home open book exams and just use ongoing take home assignments instead of proctored finals as much as possible.
Maybe universities could have made classes in the current year pass/fail. But that has its own set of problems as many would just coast and be ill-prepared for future classes.
Getting rid of most controls just isn't always possible. And as soon as you start proctoring there's going to be a tradeoff between effectiveness and invasiveness.
I was under the impression this is common knowledge. There's a reason people continue attending college as college costs skyrocket - education is a competitive signal, and being below the pack is probably the worst mistake you can make, unless you have some way to make up for it.
This entirely depends upon your life view. If you believe the most important thing in life is the accumulation of wealth and material possessions, then your argument may well be valid.
If you believe there are other things to strive for in life and that happiness can be obtained through other measures, then being 'below the pack' matters almost not at all.
My view is that higher education comes with the flexibility to apply it towards your own use, which you have to decide. If that use is empty "signaling," so be it. If you want a real education, it's probably there for the taking.
Choosing a use for you would make education more paternalistic, and possibly not solve the problem of signaling anyway.
I did the same thing as you are doing, because I had a view of education that came from my family culture. Having no adult responsibilities and being taught higher math and physics for the same price as what my friends were paying for sociology and religion courses seemed like the ultimate cheat. What you learn will be of more lasting importance than your grades, and in any event, employers know the difference between the bird courses and the ones with real meat on the bones.
While the GP used the word "purpose", thus prompting your is-ought comment, knowing Caplan, I suspect it was inaccurate. Economics is largely about an emergent phenomenon, thus falling squarely on the "is" side of things.
Emergence is a relatively recent concept in the linguistic timeline. For most of human history, everything seemed to be either of human action and human intention (turning on a light), or neither of human action nor of human intention (the weather). As such, languages did not emerge (ha!) that easily expressed emergent behaviors, things that were of human action but not of human intention (traffic jams).
Similarly, one can see this with the subject of biological evolution (another emergent phenomenon). It's been nearly two centuries since Darwin got that ball rolling, and still almost any discussion about evolution is rife with inaccurately implied intention.
One other consequence of this linguistic difficulty is that it leads people to propose solutions to perceived problems as if they were just about human action/human intention...
In the same terms, one could say that higher education has emerged to produce empty signaling as a widespread outcome, while allowing itself to be hackable enough to produce other desired outcomes as well. Empty signaling is the prevailing hack, but not the only hack.
To be clear, that's distinct from actively attempting to broadly change what emerges, e.g., trying to "fix" the education system to no longer be structured for "signaling". To do that requires affecting the trillions of choices made by billions of people, and one way or another, that often requires violence or threats thereof.
I’ve never been asked my GPA or what courses I took. Most of my interviews have been focused on my professional experience (internships, full time work, programming projects, etc.)
I've heard that Epic Systems has a hard GPA threshold for their programming jobs.
The problem is that your grades (the signal) depend on your success at the stretch-goal courses, not the signaling courses, meaning that the best strategy is to not take anything hard. If only the base classes counted to your grades you'd be free to stretch your mind without risking your expensive credential.
> and in any event, employers know the difference between the bird courses and the ones with real meat on the bones.
Some interviewers do, but I feel companies hire more blindly based on your GPA than that HR people actually dive in and weight your courses against other candidates.
> being taught higher math and physics for the same price as what my friends were paying for sociology and religion courses seemed like the ultimate cheat
Good attitude.
I find "freedom" to be a very wrong term to describe our education system, the only thing I seem free to do is spend money and accrue debt, everything else is pure marketing speak and information assymetry.
While those two goals are not antithetical to each other, it is not at all a secret. I would say engineering/STEM schools are openly designed to get students good jobs. But good engineering schools don not have "bird courses", the number of mandatory classes to electives is really high.
If you are at a school where students are doing the behavior you say, perhaps you are at the wrong institution or degree program. For example, I have heard rumors that business-area degrees tend to attract people who just want to buy their way to a credential.
I’m a pure math student though. Math students tend to have way more flexibility in what they study. You can take extremely rigorous courses like functional analysis and algebraic topology. Or you can do a math-based accounting program and pretty much stop taking hard math courses after first year.
Engineering programs are a bit different, and more interested in making sure the floor is high. More like medicine in that they are concerned that a certified professional should be competent.
In other words, you're at a school that cheats on the rankings. (As the saying goes, when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a measure.)
1. The art of listening to music
2. Geographic Information Systems
Both courses were pretty much impossible to fail.
The first course expanded my musical horizons and led to me enjoying almost any genre of music, whereas before I had listened to only a few select genres. Huge QoL improvement.
The 2nd course had proven useful whenever the topic of mapping has come up, which includes understanding property lines and real estate.
A bunch of smart people work at universities who are there to teach students stuff. It is up to the students to learn.
When I talk about students taking bird courses, I mean the kind where they never show up to class and just memorize a bunch of stuff before the midterm. They walk away with an 80, completely satisfied, having learned nothing.
Seems to me, that is like paying for a nice steak dinner, coming in, sitting down, eating the potatoes, then leaving.
Like, why? The point of college is to learn things. Balancing course load is important, but not learning at all is just a waste of time.
And, to be clear, I'm not talking about hard math. I tutored some first year students at one point and, with no exaggeration, they mostly couldn't do high school algebra or really grok a supply demand curve in microeconomics. There were a few business school memoirs written around that time and it was invariably about the struggles of someone who couldn't handle math.
Other than that, it was a fair bit of work but it wasn't really hard.
I never cheated and it got me really nowhere. I was a top student throughout school but I only lost time I could have used for better if I had cheated. People don't even put little effort into cheating.
I complained about students who cheated blatantly and got punished by the teacher because he was chewed by the management. At graduation, the cheaters get the same certificate. There is almost no difference and most schools don't care about cheating but enrolling more students.
I was a fool for doing busy work for school while everyone copied or ignored it.
I don't see the world outside school as more honest. You can't change the world without political power and money and to have both, you need to be as bad as the person sitting on the throne. People care about party names, political slogans, etc more than actual work. They care about media shout outs, endorsed by celebrity, institution name etc more.
You realize that it's very bad if a place is known for cheating right? Like applications tossed in the bin bad.
as long as you maintain a reasonable GPA, I think you will find that the joke will eventually be on your less scrupulous classmates. the "relevant coursework" section of a resume can make or break an application for an intern/entry-level role if the applicant is light on work experience. people that do hiring are not stupid. they understand that every CS major is required to take data structures, OS, etc. if you took a risk with a challenging elective that happens to be relevant to the business, your resume will stand out.
So why didn't you share the answer with the rest of us, instead of linking to some web site that doesn't answer the question, either? It makes your comment look like spam.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I draw your attention to the following one in particular:
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
There is no transcendent “true purpose” of any broad category of human activity.
There is only the actual purpose of each individual choosing to engage in it. And, very commonly, those purposes vary considerably from individual to individual.
Any argument about what the “true purpose” of such a category of activity is, or any argument dependent on assumption about such a “true purpose”, is something beyond merely wrong.
I do agree with the general-case argument that Education (vs Learning) is largely a filter for conformity (and socioeconomic status).
However, depending on the job (and company) you're applying for, conformity may or may not be a desirable trait. I recall an after-dinner conversation with a CEO and some VC's who said their favorite (illegal) interview question was "Have you ever been arrested? If so, for what?". Answering in the negative or pleading the 5th was a hard pass (as were stupid and/or egregious crimes) - they wanted people who were direct, honest, and took (calculated) risks.
The typical college student is conditioned to avoid risk - memorizing/cheating/etc to get the highest GPA, or at least making sure they get the credits required to graduate. Pick the project idea that you know you can do in a week (okay, a weekend), pick the uncontroversial/uninteresting subject for your paper, etc. - just keep your head down and pass the class.
Often, this seems to translate into people who can't program their way out of a FOR loop (or whatever the appropriate metaphor is for their field), solve new problems, or create new products. Inside-the-box thinking is great for passing standardized tests but somewhat less great for innovation.
At that point, your four-point-whatever GPA and the two semesters you spent as the Deputy Assistant Vice Co-President of the Student Navelgazing Council are really just reasons to mock you after you've left the interview. Maybe the HR department of a dusty institution with those upload-and-re-type-your-resume-style portals will care, but I've never met a recruiter, hiring manager, or staff engineer that did.
On the other hand, I've met people without CS degrees who have clearly put in the effort and know what they're talking about. A prior CTO once remarked that he had more respect for open source contributions and Coursera courses than he did for people who only had a degree to show. All a degree indicated, he said, was that their parents could afford to send them to college.
Also, I don't mean to disparage extracurriculars with my above comment, but there's a similar phenomenon there, too: people who sign up for some club or organization just to pad their resume are less impressive than people who have developed some degree of skill in non-trivial hobbies. It demonstrates that you're capable of developing yourself on multiple levels rather than simply checking as many boxes as your parents will pay for.
TL;DR I'd say you're far from naive if you're striving to learn and understand rather than recite and recall. You might get fewer wins when you punch above your weight class, but you'll be better in the end for doing it, especially when stacked up against people who never got off the metaphorical couch.
That's why I love pass or fail.
Some places (Stanford does) let you take classes as pass or fail. That incentivize students to try something a little out of their comfort zone. If it doesn't work or they end up not liking it it's not a big deal. Same thing goes for the first semester at MIT.
> In the COVID era of online classes, class averages have gone way up. The academic integrity offices of most faculties have been overwhelmed with cheating cases. If the true purpose of education is to better oneself, why are so many people taking the opportunity to cheat at a time when schools have less ability to monitor for it? This is a question that vexes me endlessly, as a student trying to get the most out of his education. I have been taking as many challenging courses as I can, and plan to continue doing so for the remainder of my degree. I don’t cheat and consequently I find myself well below the high class averages.
Caltech had tremendous success with take home exams. They select incoming students based on their desire to learn and honor. Maybe your institution is admitting too many students?
https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776
For everyone else, their problem is that they have to integrate with the big players.
It showed. For example, an independent satisfaction survey in the UK gave them twice the user approval of the next best platform. (No current affiliation but they are a nice bunch and do a great job.)
Want to install your special snowflake driver to take screenshots and do some tampering monitoring? Not allowed!
You just detected a VM? Of course you did, every app runs in a sandbox now!
I am glad I graduated before they started monitoring us. Most of my major classes were open book but there's no way you had enough time to look everything up or understand the complex subject.
McGraw-Hill is looking for any way to squeeze more money out of the school and students.
The court case is particularly disgusting. He should win and get treble his court fees, though dunno if Canada has that.
But having said that, I feel for schools as they have to do SOMETHING and there is just nothing good. Can’t have just the honor system cuz that’s worked so well. But if these systems are over the top (and they are) what do you do?
I’m glad I’m not having to take tests using this kind of software. I tend to look around at other things when deep thinking. Even if no music on, I use N/C headphones to keep sounds out. Hell, if it’s particular hard problem I might start sub vocalizing as I work it through. All habits that would get me dinged left and right.
Absolutely. The legal world even has a term for this already, "Vexatious Litigant" [0]. We need to start applying this to DMCA requests.
I say that as a teacher.
But that's a ton of work, hard to do uniformly, depends a lot on the teacher's training and the number of students, depends a lot on institutional support for teachers....
Only tricky part is that the students themselves shouldn't be able to collaborate since that can lead to one student taking the entire exam and sharing the answers, or many splitting the questions. I guess that could be remedied with question pooling, just requires a bit more effort.
DMCA safe harbor rules are a protection for users/hosts, not content owners. Anyone who gets a takedown notice can ignore it if they think the source is dishonest, and be at no greater risk than they would be without the safe harbor.
Private interests have long tried to use the unique power of the state to shield themselves from market forces. Unfortunately, the people have not only abetted that, but often demanded it; see the recent demands to enshrine extant ISPs as government-chartered monopolies (i.e., utilities) rather than remove the anti-competitive regulations that have fomented high costs and poor service.
As for bailouts, there too the people have long been convinced that the government needs to "fix" the market. Unsurprisingly, the means by which these "fixes" occur happens to benefit the ruling class (politicians and corporate executives) and big firms, giving them a competitive advantage over would-be competitors, and thereby growing ever bigger.
More interesting is their exam protection part. It records the screen, limits the software you can run, disables copy-paste, disables external monitor and keyboard on a laptop, etc. All to avoid leaking of the exam questions. And it's super annoying for the student.
But I don't think they protect from custom browser scripts like with Greasemonkey, and there is just no way to detect a proxy server that makes copies of the requested pages with the exam content. So it's only a Security Theater, nothing more.