Canvas got hacked, provost banned exams, professor responded by assigning Hayek | Hacker News Reader

Canvas got hacked, provost banned exams, professor responded by assigning Hayek

old.reddit.com

28 pointsjdcampolargo11 comments

The AnCap prof behind this email raises an extremely fine point; what good could possibly come from preventing reasonably-prepared classes from administering exams? I've never been an A student, I relied on stellar final exam grades to slingshot my course average every semester of my college career. Say what you want about me or my work ethic, but we all agree to the course syllabus at the start of the semester. Unilaterally withholding finals is detrimental to students who struggled early on and particularly cynical given how many courses were prepared to operate without Canvas.

I suspect the (perhaps misguided) goal was to avoid a scenario where an array of patchwork solutions leads to a deluge of exceptions to the patchwork solutions require even more intervention. IMO, what they should have done was issue a mandate that finals carry on as usual for any class where they can do so without tightening any access limitations: In-person can remain in-person or go online, synchronous ("the final is at 9:00am-11am") online can stay as such or go asynchronous ("take the final at your convenience today")

Two vectors of legal risk appear: one from teachers, who are now segmented into A and B, where A can test and B cannot (and take umbrage); one from students who are owed accommodations that require presenting exams in non-standard formats, and whose professors may have used Canvas to provide necessary accommodations. I’m not positioned to assess the statistical validity of either risk, but it only took a few seconds to find them in the scenario, and if nothing else I assume the university tends to promote cowardice re: legal risk.

The Canvas hack turned out to be really interesting as more details emerge. For example, a lot of people going into HN, including me, don't know that Canvas is completely OSI open source, which is a frank example of how worthless that can be from a security and product POV.

"lots of eyes on the code fixes all bugs" only works when eyes are on the code and things get fixed

I wonder if this "AnCap" professor has any criticism for the fact that their pedagogical infrastructure has been freely outsourced to a big private corporation that has "earned" massive market share in a free market, which is why they are in this crisis to begin with.

Or the fact that administrative centralization in campuses has been driven largely by the increasing financialization of higher education, which has all sorts of second-order effects like increased sensitivity to lawsuits and so on.

The whole structure depends on state money and the whole of higher ed and the relevant credentials are bound up in state. Outsourcing functions in state institutions is not necessary what AnCaps would advocate for in the absent of cutting education to begin with.

This is a common misconception. A big flagship state university typically only gets 10-20% of its funds from direct government subsidies/appropriations meant to support education.

The rest comes from tuition and other income.

Even "federal" student loans have largely been privatized.

The are around 1.7 trillion $ outstanding in government student loans and for about 90 billion $ of new loans every year. And you are wrong that these are privatized, the waste majority of the money comes directly from DoE. That said some of the administrations of the loans is privatized.

I'd say the mail makes it clear that he thinks canvas is shit and the administration that forces those that are unafected by the hack to postpone the exams is too.

Based tbh

Reply on news.ycombinator.com