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Comment by kyleee | Hacker News Reader

This is also the type of thing that plants the seed of interest for a career or hobby of computing, which is another reason it's stupid. Reward people's curiousity instead of punishing it, especially in a schooling situation!

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I got a crash course in running proxy servers and various VPNs when I was in school, due to the school blocking stuff. I don't recall what sites I was even trying to get to (pre-facebook) nor do I remember really caring about them, but just working around the blocks was particularly fun.

I had a similar experience, but in my case it was less that the school was blocking particular sites I wanted to visit, and more that there was a single very-slow proxy server for the entire state's educational system. So I ssh tunneled to my home instead.

I remember I had to learn how to evade the school proxy in order to get to the Sun Java documentation.

Precisely!

I wonder what chain of events lead this PR being filed.

How did the kid(s) get caught? Did a teacher decide to tell the IT department head? Did the head of department then tell the IT maintenance team? Then the IT maintenance team told the test vendor?

Very odd chain of events to lead to such a dangerous change.

These types of "hacks" spread very quickly in school. Once the flaw is discovered, the entire class likely "aced" the test. From there, it's pretty obvious how the vendor found out: the school could no longer use the testing software and demanded an answer.

Students will not get by in life by viewing the source code when confronted with any problem.

Students will not learn to experiment with technology if they are blocked on every attempt.

Time and place. Taking a math quiz is the wrong time to experiment with bypassing quizzes.

Like any organisation would turn this on for a quiz and off again afterwards. This would be a blanket and permanent change for the entire school.

Why is that?

Because the goal of the quiz is to test math knowledge, not software bypassing knowledge.

And the goal of the student taking that quiz is to get the highest grade by any means necessary. Learning is entirely irrelevant.

And since the student taking the quiz very frequently has no choice over whether or not they have to be there or take the quiz, their desires and goals are entirely irrelevant.

Edit: are you intentionally or unintentionally trying to justify any and all cheating as a means to get the highest grade possible?

Since the student has no choice over whether or not they take the quiz, what incentive do they have to maintain testing integrity?

ok so you are trying to justify cheating, thanks for clarifying

But perhaps they will get by in life by finding clever solutions that circumvent common expectations through curiosity and familiarity with technology.

Is this a euphemistic way of saying cheating?

If solving a problem in an unconventional or novel way (assuming legal) has a business value, that will absolutely get someone by in life.

I don't understand what the term "cheating" means in a post-school context.

I think it’s easy to imagine cheating in a post-school context: copying code from a project your employer doesn’t own into one it does. And that has huge legal ramifications. So students do need to learn about those kinds of restrictions via analogues.

Which is why I accounted for that scenario. Breaking the law is applicable post-school, "cheating" outside of illegality is just thinking outside the box.

No, this is a way of saying "hacking", in the old sense of the word.

As a DevOps engineer, I had multiple encounters with undocumented software just in the past month. Viewing the source code certainly helped.

I was trying to speak figuratively, not literally. Any programmer will need to look at source code to solve problems, but that's not what I was getting at.

When you're taking a math quiz, the goal is to learn how to solve math problems, not bypassing the quiz.

What I really should have said is that in life, shortcuts aren't always appropriate. If you're an engineer confronted with the task of calculating the load the bridge can take, you're supposed to do the hard slog of calculating how much the bridge will take. Let's suppose that engineer didn't understand math, but simply cheated their way through University and took a guess - will you be stepping foot on the bridge?

Teaching kids it's okay to take inappropriate shortcuts is bad, because in the real world, inappropriate shortcuts can have nasty consequences.

Yeah. There's bizarre situations where 'view source' shouldn't really be necessary/beneficial and yet somehow it's a handy life skill. I remember doing it while booking a flight on RyanAir (Very bad website. I knew the option to not pay for extra insurance had to be on the page somewhere!)

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