An AI-supervised remote exam went so badly that 58,000 students must retake it

arstechnica.com

25 points·sbulaev··7 comments

Online exams are a pointless waste of time and invasion of privacy, designed to make money without measuring anything. It encourages good people to cheat. If you don't have in-person proctored exams, you are wasting your time.

Excessive automation is terrible, yes, but also people choose their actions and the accountability stays on them.

Is it really a failure of automation? This is just improperly validated automation.

It's a failure of the mindset that now that almost anything can be automated, it will be automated. Often as cheaply and carelessly as possible.

Nothing and no one forces you to cheat, it's a choice; an admittedly common choice, but then so are a lot of immoral acts like lying and stealing. I'm not saying that online tests are a good idea because we have to live with the sort of people who cheat, but lets not pretend that this turns "good people bad".

Good people don't need excuses to be good, and don't respond to excuses to be bad... if you want to simplify to that extent.

I remember a lot of horror stories of 2020 about false positives. Your cat walked into the room? Flagged! Your little brother come from school? Flagged! Your take a glass of water? Flagged! Your look at the ceiling to concentrate? Flagged!

On the other hand, it's too easy to cheat that it's not even fun. Many students cheat anyway.

Too bad these universities have no guts, when it comes to punishing cheaters. Too much money in keeping them around.

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