How to Spread Panic in Slack
miserablyemployed.com
miserablyemployed.com
Not long ago, I worked in education, grading online assignments. And it was completely asynchronous, non-interactive; students were often asked to submit multiple screenshots, and their grades would largely depend on the accuracy of the work they did according to what we could discern from the screenshots.
And in very short order, I began to be irritated by low-resolution pixelated screenshots. It seemed that many students were not good at taking legible screenshots and submitting them as-is without being downscaled or reduced in quality somehow.
And I asked a few coworkers, one of whom told me she could read it perfectly. I did not press those disputes. It was not trouble with my eyesight or anything, because I could zoom in on the graphics and the fonts could still be completely illegible and pixelated.
How difficult could it be? All students had validated their Windows 10 systems with good resolution; there was nothing stopping them from taking high-res screenshots and including them unmodified.
Well, it turned out that every single student who submitted a pixelated screenshot was cheating. Yes, the images were all recycled and copy-pasted back-and-forth from well-known cheating sites, also including GitHub.
Eventually when I found the patterns it was easy to point out how the screenshots were completely identical to the original sources, albeit some were even worse quality than before.
So I could catch a lot of cheaters just by noticing their screenshots were not original-quality. It sure was crazy out there.
I wish this didn't feel so true.