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Comment by itishappy | Hacker News Reader

My friend took an important law school exam (GRE or BAR, not sure which) in the past 2 years that was self administered, and she described her experience as "harrowing." The kernel level malware they installed to monitor the exam crashed her device 4 times during the exam. This was after she got it running on a secondary device because it wouldn't even start on her M1 MacBook Air. The software recorded her screen and camera the entire time, and would invalidate her results if her husband entered the frame.

I can't imagine the stress this causes even on top of, y'know, having your entire career dependent on the results.

I hope they're using their savings to purchase managed devices and hire good IT support, but I'm not holding out much hope.

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That's crazy because I imagine cheating is trivial for those that want to do it. All you would need is a clean install, an HDMI splitter, and a tiny earbud stuffed in your ear. Then someone in an adjacent room can feed you answers.

Even if they start making people put their ears up to the camera, that won't help much. Bone conducting headphones built into the arms of glasses will be virtually undetectable. Do you ban glasses? That won't help. I just tried putting my bone conducting headphones against my upper jawbone inside my mouth and they work fine at 30% volume. How do you prevent that?

What's the endgame? Do we end up with everyone completely hairless, naked, and forced to expose every orifice for the digital proctor?

The education industry is becoming satire. Bring back common sense IMO.

The point isn’t to stop all cheating, it’s to catch the most blatant idiots cheating.

That’s really all that’s required.

Not good enough because the stakes are high for admissions, that is if they still choose to look at merit.

   The point isn’t to stop all cheating, it’s to catch the most blatant idiots cheating.

What? No the point is to catch all cheaters.

Catching all cheaters is impossible for any reasonable amount of cash spent (remember all the possibilities people came up for that chess thing?) - which means they want to reduce cheating to a level that is acceptable.

Things they're not doing that could allow some high-level cheating:

* DNA analysis

* Full body searches

* Faraday cages

they could record the person taking the test with a video camera at the test site and make it much harder to cheat

It will just catch the dumbest and most people will cheat successfully. Just catching the most blarant and naive is stupid when the alternative of people being supervised in a physical room means there is next to no cheating at all.

The point is to provide a meaningful metric schools can use to determine how likely a student is to succeed at their University, and how much success they are likely to achieve.

Bad or average cheaters are unlikely to find success. Maybe great cheaters are likely to find success.

oh shit that is a good idea

The problem is that the people who imagine cheating aren’t asking anyone technical how they would cheat. They mostly target imagined methods of cheating.

Cheating in online games is big business and is accessible to more than the technically inclined through purchase. There's no reason to think the same won't happen for tests that have actual monetary value.

> just tried putting my bone conducting headphones against my upper jawbone inside my mouth and they work fine at 30% volume.

Which brand.... and how drool proof are they over an hour long test?

Shokz. They are not waterproof AFAIK.

It's practically impossible to defeat cheating on a technical front with their current design. Anti-cheating methods strike me as depending on emotions: I can probably find a way to cheat successfully but, if my future depends on it, my fear will make my body language stick out like a sore thumb. I also wouldn't do it to begin with since it's unlikely to have a better EV than putting the same effort into studying, especially if I actually need the knowledge in the future, or if there are social repercussions. Some won't have this hurdle but the combination of 'needing to cheat' and 'being skilled enough to get away with it' is rare.

The big problem is when cheating is so easy and widespread that everyone knows it. Then it becomes the low friction path. This would explain what I've heard about some Indian school exams.

There are probably a lot of people doing minor cheating and a few people doing major cheating. In most cases, it's not enough to undermine the reputation of the qualification.

Oh, it's the same shape as the fraud problem that's popular here:

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

I've taken some tech certifications in the past and had the option of taking it at home (PSI) or at a test center (Pearson). The amount of intrusive demands the at home tests required and the absurd amount of monitoring made sure I never take a at home exam. Test centers I just bring my ID, leave my phone an keys in a locker and go to the assigned PC.

One memorable instance, I have a 37" 4K screen. In full screen mode the questions are in the top left and the multi choice answers are bottom right. The test proctor kept interrupting my exam because they assume I was looking away from the screen. I had to remind them repeatedly I'm using a large screen.

Ouch that seems even worse than the lockdown browser some of my classes used during covid. I ended up digging out an older laptop for it since there was no way I was going to deal with cleaning up that invasive mess off my regular computers.

Luckily by the end most professors just switched to Zoom with cameras on, and instead modified the tests (eg making them harder, but open book, or multiple versions of the exam distributed randomly - similar to how some in-person exams will alternate between two question sets so no one can cheat off their neighbor)

The amount of surveillance/security needed when students take tests at home (like your friend, and many others during COVID) is awful. But it sounds like the SAT won't be administered at home, only in high schools and test centers.

Students will use either school-owned or student-owned devices, which is not great. I would certainly opt for the former, since I wouldn't want to install this crap on my own computer. We'll find out in the next couple years how smoothly this goes. They've been doing the SAT online for a while outside the US, so hopefully the ironed out some of the bugs already.

But they won't have to worry about someone entering the frame, since testing will happen exclusively at proctored centers.

I suspect the Bar exam. My wife went through that twice in two different states, and it's an insane amount of stress, because the consequences of failure rest entirely on the test taker.

Can't her husband just stand in front of her, behind the laptop webcam? There's often ridiculously simple real-world workarounds these complex device security process

They want to see your face and will disqualify you if you glance away from the monitor too often.

That sounds terrible; I often look away to the side when I am thinking..

I often stare into space (some have said it looks like a thousand-yard stare), I wonder if that would be an issue?

Will they disqualify me if I am naked during the exam?

Yes - they have standards

They don't actually disqualify you (most of these places like https://www.proctoru.com or similar) just report to the exam administrator what they saw/noticed.

Some are even using AI flagging now - https://assess.com/remote-proctoring/

They make you wave the webcam around the room before starting the exam.

There is no one else supposed to be in the same room as the test taker - for obvious reasons that they should receive no help on the test in any way.

Some households -- especially if you have small children, or live in a small house without the luxury of separate rooms, noisy neighborhood, etc. -- may pose a challenge.

But outside those scenarios the candidate should know to dedicate one room to themselves for the duration of the test and preferably keep it locked from inside and inform others in the house not to disturb them for those 2 or 3 hours.

I am surprised to see this simple requirement -- that there should be no other person in the video frame (which will be audited for it, both manually and through automatic processing) -- is considered draconian? How? Are test takers expecting to take tests in rooms where anyone else can casually walk in, move around, etc?

To be sure there are other quirks like no bathroom breaks, no glancing away from scree, no mouthing the words as you read, no covering your face or sometimes no resting your chin on your hand as you think etc that all can become very tedious and stressful sure.

And that same (or similar) test software doesn’t have any accessibility features for those with limited vision. And if you mention it to the company, they brush you off. They have the contract to gate-keep certain careers, what’re you going to do? Fucking slimeballs.

This sounds like a class action ADA lawsuit waiting to happen.

I don't know if there was a remote LSAT option, but I could see this being the bar exam. It's pretty common to have to use crummy testing lockdown software for actual law school exams: they want you to write a bunch and nobody can handwrite anymore, nor does anyone want to read it, but they also don't have the capacity or inclination to provide computers for this purpose, so it's all BYOD. That's just for regular in-person exams, and the remote context only amps things up with the surveillance aspects.

A friend just recently described to me a similarly stressful experience of taking an AWS certification exam remotely and worrying about accumulating too many "strikes" in the eyes of the remote proctor and not being allowed to finish. So they actually preferred going to a testing center.

Ive taken a few online tests and they have never failed to have some issues that add a ton of stress and waste time.

Even online ides have had significant issues for me in the past which have eaten up 5-15 minutes of interview time. It sucks because I don't know how much cheating any of these measures actually prevent and anyone determined to cheat will be able to bypass them.

Damn it, I just realized AWS online exams for certification are pretty much the same if you read the TOS, I just might book a exam in a physical exam center. Too many unknown ifs and I don't have to expose my machine.

Doesn't stop an industry of cheating by having crib sheets or entire whiteboards with accessory equations, information, or potentially gasp answers on the other side of the screen. Without a 360 camera recording the entire room for the entire duration of the exam, proctor-based exams at a public venue or off-site corporate testing center should be the gold standard. (A few institutions like Stanford continue an absurd tradition of proctor-less exams.)

And for all that nothing can stop anybody from just googling the answers on another device.

Except for the eye tracking that some of this software uses

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