At the beginning of the school year, I noticed some strange HTTP traffic going through my home router to China and India endpoints. So, I traced the traffic to the Chromebooks my kids in public school were using. About that time, my son was unable to access his drum lessons (Steven's Drum Shed, highly recommend) because safety software provided by the school was blocking him. After analyzing the chromebook more, I discovered the traffic going to China was requesting ads and then requesting the hyperlink for the ad (ok, so ad fraud it is). I also noticed that the safety software was logging all HTTP requests to their server. So, I went to the school district and requested they remove it. They initially said, "if we remove it, your kids won't be able to access their academic work." So, I sent a letter to the Superintendent that politely asked they remove the safety software from my family's chromebook as it violated my children's and my family's rights (unreasonable search, get a warrant). I also told them I would hold them responsible for the cost of having the software removed by an expert (which my lawyer suggested would be the thing that got their attention and we'd be able to win in small claims court). The next day, they removed the "safety" software.
As a reminder, if you want to achieve anything with chools, this is how you do it. A polite letter, nonthreatening, filled with facts, and a cost to the school if they continue.
So the safety software was committing ad fraud? Were you able to pry anymore details from the requests or did you simply go to the school and ask that it be removed?
I was able to identify about 200 fraudulent ad clicks. BTW - I don't know if it was the safety software or something else that was force-installed by the software. I wasn't looking to do a deep analysis, I suspected the safety extension was doing more than it should and confirmed it. I gathered enough evidence that a competent admin would conclude the safety software was not safe and connected with the school.
I’m not sure, you basically have to do the homework for consumer hardware: one issue you’ll run into is that consumer routers often depend on binary blobs and propriety drivers for WiFi functionality like MIMO. Netgear’s firmwares are based on OpenWRT, though, and nearly every netgear device I’ve owned has had some way to get shell access (my current device is a netgear Orbi (RBR40)). It has shell access and tcpdump is included in the base image.
Not the original commenter but I've heard of people debugging smart TV's using https://www.wireshark.org to see the network requests, you would connect the device you want to inspect to a network being shared through your computer running Wireshark, and then you can analyze every request going in and out (or at least see them and be aware of the traffic)
That only works if you use a hub instead of a switch, or if the traffic is broadcast, or if you somehow convince the switch to give your port all traffic. It's easiest to just use two NICs bridged in one PC as a MITM.
You can also easily run an ARP spoofing attack, and not just to sniff but also to manipulate. Done that quite often back in my school time, oh the glorious days when web traffic was mostly plain HTTP.
There were entire command lists going around specifying what exactly one needed to replace, say, the logo of an online newspaper with a picture of a dong.
The world of school software and educational materials is a dystopian and dysfunctional nightmare. Nearly all a re badly designed, sloe, confusing and built with accidental and intentional backdoors, spyware and software sxpliciftly intended to cripple your PC (no screenshots, no copying, phone home functions)... And all of them are deeply designed for 'lock in' - nothing more profitable than a guaranteed multi year contract with tens of thousands of unwilling students. 98% of features are broken and just exist on fancy marketing documents to make sure some lying middleman can push them through a procurement process.
I remember being at an EdTech conference ~ 7 years ago and even then i was not just stunned by the amount of false claims (AI, ...) but also generally where the focus lay (anti-fraud, student control, web filters...).
The whole ecosystem is just massively broken with students and teachers at most as an afterthought. Neither the entrenched companies nor startups seem to understand concepts like PEDAGOGY, TRUST or student-teacher RELATIONSHIP and instead consider students somewhere akin to criminals to be monitored, controlled and indoctrinated and teachers as nothing more than passive vessels that need ready made solutions and no freedom whatsoever.
In the end your average functional school probably gets some of this software but most likely would fate best with its own install of Moodle (for all its flaws - reliable, lots of community support, and cheap) and then various web apps.
With the current ecosystem most students and teachers fare best with just nothing than with any of this. School districts/owners should invest into teacher training and maybe generic moodle instances, and to get laptops near the classrooms. But please don't buy any of this evil crap.
EdTech is "enterprise software" in the sense that the people controlling the purse strings are very removed from the actual users. In education, the decision makers are the school district leadership team, while the actual users are twice removed - students.
This scenario encourages focus on features that are important for the decision makers and less focus on the features (or usability) important for the actual users - exactly as you describe.
A bottom-up approach where students and teachers would identify what works best for them and push for it is extremely hard. Teachers try the best but are limited by their budgets (many pay out of their own purse for tools and equipment!) and students have basically no say.
This leads to the situation where most successful (profitable, largest) edtech software has no relation to what actually might be the best tool.
Even in the private sector (my school is independent, with 600 pupils, 200 staff, $20M revenue) things are as bad.
Technical decision making is by an IT department that reports through the bursar (head of all non academic staff) to the head. There’s no accountability to core competency: teaching and learning. We are merely stakeholders at an equal level on the org chart.
Contrast this to when I was a FAANG SWE, when every function at the company — including IT — was subordinate to those who built the actual tech: Engineering.
The flip side is that as a teacher I have complete autonomy over anything that does fall to me; namely the bulk of the CS curriculum and the way it is taught.
(Tools like repl.it are wonderful for completely side stepping any involvement with bureaucracy. Invite the kids to sign up and just get stuff done.)
If anyone is involved in choosing software for schools, I used to work at Firefly Learning which had an excellent attitude towards actually serving our users (students, teachers, parents, generally in that order) rather than the decision makers.
It showed. For example, an independent satisfaction survey in the UK gave them twice the user approval of the next best platform. (No current affiliation but they are a nice bunch and do a great job.)
The entire situation you described is perfectly relatable if you’ve read The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan [1]. In it, Caplan argues that the true purpose of education is not to improve students but for students to signal their worth as employees to their future employers. He backs up this argument with a bibliography of studies many pages long.
I read the book as part of a philosophy course I took in university and as a decidedly non-libertarian person (Caplan is a libertarian economist), I found it a very challenging argument to confront. What was so vexing was how much his points seemed to agree with my experiences.
My peers and fellow classmates were doing exactly as he described in the book: taking “bird courses” instead of challenging ones, only taking the minimum requirements for their degree and avoiding the optional challenging electives, memorizing / begging / borrowing / stealing / cheating their way to the best grades possible in their classes at the expense of actual learning.
In the COVID era of online classes, class averages have gone way up. The academic integrity offices of most faculties have been overwhelmed with cheating cases. If the true purpose of education is to better oneself, why are so many people taking the opportunity to cheat at a time when schools have less ability to monitor for it? This is a question that vexes me endlessly, as a student trying to get the most out of his education. I have been taking as many challenging courses as I can, and plan to continue doing so for the remainder of my degree. I don’t cheat and consequently I find myself well below the high class averages.
Ideology aside, what you describe is the behavior of your classmates, not the purpose of the system. This has always been a paradox in education: It thrives on freedom, yet freedom comes with the freedom to abuse it.
My view is that higher education comes with the flexibility to apply it towards your own use, which you have to decide. If that use is empty "signaling," so be it. If you want a real education, it's probably there for the taking.
Choosing a use for you would make education more paternalistic, and possibly not solve the problem of signaling anyway.
I did the same thing as you are doing, because I had a view of education that came from my family culture. Having no adult responsibilities and being taught higher math and physics for the same price as what my friends were paying for sociology and religion courses seemed like the ultimate cheat. What you learn will be of more lasting importance than your grades, and in any event, employers know the difference between the bird courses and the ones with real meat on the bones.
> what you describe is the behavior of your classmates, not the purpose of the system
While the GP used the word "purpose", thus prompting your is-ought comment, knowing Caplan, I suspect it was inaccurate. Economics is largely about an emergent phenomenon, thus falling squarely on the "is" side of things.
Emergence is a relatively recent concept in the linguistic timeline. For most of human history, everything seemed to be either of human action and human intention (turning on a light), or neither of human action nor of human intention (the weather). As such, languages did not emerge (ha!) that easily expressed emergent behaviors, things that were of human action but not of human intention (traffic jams).
Similarly, one can see this with the subject of biological evolution (another emergent phenomenon). It's been nearly two centuries since Darwin got that ball rolling, and still almost any discussion about evolution is rife with inaccurately implied intention.
One other consequence of this linguistic difficulty is that it leads people to propose solutions to perceived problems as if they were just about human action/human intention...
That's fair, and perhaps I could have described it in a different way, which is that purpose aside, the education system is eminently hackable. One such hack is to let your friends take bird courses while you take meaty courses. Another is to find a way to learn from the bird courses while your classmates sleep through them.
In the same terms, one could say that higher education has emerged to produce empty signaling as a widespread outcome, while allowing itself to be hackable enough to produce other desired outcomes as well. Empty signaling is the prevailing hack, but not the only hack.
Indeed, individually your preferences can lead you to make choices that are different from the aggregate, and in so doing your choices marginally contribute to what emerges. Sort of like considering a market price too high, thus not buying.
To be clear, that's distinct from actively attempting to broadly change what emerges, e.g., trying to "fix" the education system to no longer be structured for "signaling". To do that requires affecting the trillions of choices made by billions of people, and one way or another, that often requires violence or threats thereof.
University is founded on the idea that the professor are your future peers. That is a laughable thought in the age of mass tertiary education. I always tell my children to learn what they have to for school but if they feel they only need to know what school demands they have already failed at becoming educated.
> My view is that higher education comes with the flexibility to apply it towards your own use
The problem is that your grades (the signal) depend on your success at the stretch-goal courses, not the signaling courses, meaning that the best strategy is to not take anything hard. If only the base classes counted to your grades you'd be free to stretch your mind without risking your expensive credential.
> and in any event, employers know the difference between the bird courses and the ones with real meat on the bones.
Some interviewers do, but I feel companies hire more blindly based on your GPA than that HR people actually dive in and weight your courses against other candidates.
> being taught higher math and physics for the same price as what my friends were paying for sociology and religion courses seemed like the ultimate cheat
I can't begin to imagine the politics that would erupt if a school had to classify easy and hard classes. I suppose it can be done at the K-12 level because there are already pre defined definitions such as "advanced placement."
”employers know the difference between the bird courses and the ones with real meat on the bones.”
I’ve never been asked my GPA or what courses I took. Most of my interviews have been focused on my professional experience (internships, full time work, programming projects, etc.)
GPA (and major of course) can matter right out of school. It's hard for me to imagine in most circumstances though someone scouring a transcript, if they even ask for one, to see if someone took some easier classes as electives.
no one is going to bother looking at a transcript, but fresh graduates should definitely list any challenging/relevant electives they took on their resume (and be prepared to answer some basic questions). if you don't list anything challenging that wasn't a core requirement, it kinda implies you took the softball approach.
> This has always been a paradox in education: It thrives on freedom, yet freedom comes with the freedom to abuse it.
I find "freedom" to be a very wrong term to describe our education system, the only thing I seem free to do is spend money and accrue debt, everything else is pure marketing speak and information assymetry.
> In it, Caplan argues that the true purpose of education is not to improve students but for students to signal their worth as employees to their future employers.
While those two goals are not antithetical to each other, it is not at all a secret. I would say engineering/STEM schools are openly designed to get students good jobs. But good engineering schools don not have "bird courses", the number of mandatory classes to electives is really high.
If you are at a school where students are doing the behavior you say, perhaps you are at the wrong institution or degree program. For example, I have heard rumors that business-area degrees tend to attract people who just want to buy their way to a credential.
No, I’m at a school that is highly ranked for engineering. The engineering students have barely any electives at all. They’re always working their butts off and super stressed out all the time. For the few electives they do have they tend to choose bird courses.
I’m a pure math student though. Math students tend to have way more flexibility in what they study. You can take extremely rigorous courses like functional analysis and algebraic topology. Or you can do a math-based accounting program and pretty much stop taking hard math courses after first year.
I thought this was true of math almost anywhere. Those who are serious will take hard courses and learn a lot, there is no ceiling. The reward isn't a high GPA, but if something formal is needed, a transcript naming what you took ought to be fairly readable. Perfect scores on soft math-accounting courses won't open any doors.
Engineering programs are a bit different, and more interested in making sure the floor is high. More like medicine in that they are concerned that a certified professional should be competent.
Math is also a bit of an outlier in that, to a greater degree than most STEM majors, what's relatively easy for some is "I could just as soon flap my arms and fly as graduate with a math degree" for others. My math was OK enough to graduate with an engineering degree. I could never have contemplated getting a math degree. (Probably uniquely among degrees where I went. Well, maybe physics, but same thing.)
Two of the best courses I took in college outside my major:
1. The art of listening to music
2. Geographic Information Systems
Both courses were pretty much impossible to fail.
The first course expanded my musical horizons and led to me enjoying almost any genre of music, whereas before I had listened to only a few select genres. Huge QoL improvement.
The 2nd course had proven useful whenever the topic of mapping has come up, which includes understanding property lines and real estate.
A bunch of smart people work at universities who are there to teach students stuff. It is up to the students to learn.
That’s fine. I’m taking philosophy courses toward my minor and they tend to be impossible to fail. Having said that, I spend huge amounts of time doing the readings and writing the papers. I don’t need to, but I do anyway.
When I talk about students taking bird courses, I mean the kind where they never show up to class and just memorize a bunch of stuff before the midterm. They walk away with an 80, completely satisfied, having learned nothing.
At least at the grad level, the difficulty of MBA programs tended to vary enormously depending upon how good your math, computer, etc. skills were.
And, to be clear, I'm not talking about hard math. I tutored some first year students at one point and, with no exaggeration, they mostly couldn't do high school algebra or really grok a supply demand curve in microeconomics. There were a few business school memoirs written around that time and it was invariably about the struggles of someone who couldn't handle math.
Other than that, it was a fair bit of work but it wasn't really hard.
> In it, Caplan argues that the true purpose of education is not to improve students but for students to signal their worth as employees to their future employers
I was under the impression this is common knowledge. There's a reason people continue attending college as college costs skyrocket - education is a competitive signal, and being below the pack is probably the worst mistake you can make, unless you have some way to make up for it.
> being below the pack is probably the worst mistake you can make
This entirely depends upon your life view. If you believe the most important thing in life is the accumulation of wealth and material possessions, then your argument may well be valid.
If you believe there are other things to strive for in life and that happiness can be obtained through other measures, then being 'below the pack' matters almost not at all.
Rising housing costs mean that being a bit below the pack becomes a compounding disadvantage, to the point that the other measures of happiness are unattainable because you can't afford food, shelter, or medical care.
a lot of employers will set arbitrary GPA cutoffs (3.0 or even 3.5 sometimes) for straight-out-of-college positions. so if you let your GPA fall too far in pursuit of challenging/interesting courses, you are unfortunately shooting yourself in the foot.
as long as you maintain a reasonable GPA, I think you will find that the joke will eventually be on your less scrupulous classmates. the "relevant coursework" section of a resume can make or break an application for an intern/entry-level role if the applicant is light on work experience. people that do hiring are not stupid. they understand that every CS major is required to take data structures, OS, etc. if you took a risk with a challenging elective that happens to be relevant to the business, your resume will stand out.
>In the COVID era of online classes, class averages have gone way up.
Which is why there aren't great answers if certifications matter (and they do) whether in regular school or professional certifications. In the latter case it's right there in the name and it has a direct bearing on employment prospects.
Should schools be reorienting evaluations in a way that isn't as cheatable? Probably. Use take home open book exams and just use ongoing take home assignments instead of proctored finals as much as possible.
Maybe universities could have made classes in the current year pass/fail. But that has its own set of problems as many would just coast and be ill-prepared for future classes.
Getting rid of most controls just isn't always possible. And as soon as you start proctoring there's going to be a tradeoff between effectiveness and invasiveness.
As a TA, I'm well aware that the students getting As are mostly collaborating and that the "lone wolf" students tend to do worse despite putting more effort in and possibly having a better understanding of the material. And I feel bad about it. But aside from horrible spyware, I don't see any good solution that would make exams more fair for the "lone wolf" students. My approach is to grade in a way that's disproportionately harsh when I see multiple similar-but-wrong answers and lenient when I see a unique wrong answer.
> My peers and fellow classmates were doing exactly as he described in the book: taking “bird courses” instead of challenging ones, only taking the minimum requirements for their degree and avoiding the optional challenging electives, memorizing / begging / borrowing / stealing / cheating their way to the best grades possible in their classes at the expense of actual learning.
That's why I love pass or fail.
Some places (Stanford does) let you take classes as pass or fail. That incentivize students to try something a little out of their comfort zone. If it doesn't work or they end up not liking it it's not a big deal. Same thing goes for the first semester at MIT.
> In the COVID era of online classes, class averages have gone way up. The academic integrity offices of most faculties have been overwhelmed with cheating cases. If the true purpose of education is to better oneself, why are so many people taking the opportunity to cheat at a time when schools have less ability to monitor for it? This is a question that vexes me endlessly, as a student trying to get the most out of his education. I have been taking as many challenging courses as I can, and plan to continue doing so for the remainder of my degree. I don’t cheat and consequently I find myself well below the high class averages.
Caltech had tremendous success with take home exams. They select incoming students based on their desire to learn and honor. Maybe your institution is admitting too many students?
> If the true purpose of education is to better oneself
There is no transcendent “true purpose” of any broad category of human activity.
There is only the actual purpose of each individual choosing to engage in it. And, very commonly, those purposes vary considerably from individual to individual.
Any argument about what the “true purpose” of such a category of activity is, or any argument dependent on assumption about such a “true purpose”, is something beyond merely wrong.
I didn't know what a "bird course" is so I looked it up. Now I know and I also found a platform for sharing information about bird courses in the US and Canada:
I didn't know what a "bird course" is so I looked it up.
So why didn't you share the answer with the rest of us, instead of linking to some web site that doesn't answer the question, either? It makes your comment look like spam.
IMO, most courses are shortcuts to actual experience, and there are no shortcuts to such things.
One might describe this as Education vs. Learning.
I do agree with the general-case argument that Education (vs Learning) is largely a filter for conformity (and socioeconomic status).
However, depending on the job (and company) you're applying for, conformity may or may not be a desirable trait. I recall an after-dinner conversation with a CEO and some VC's who said their favorite (illegal) interview question was "Have you ever been arrested? If so, for what?". Answering in the negative or pleading the 5th was a hard pass (as were stupid and/or egregious crimes) - they wanted people who were direct, honest, and took (calculated) risks.
The typical college student is conditioned to avoid risk - memorizing/cheating/etc to get the highest GPA, or at least making sure they get the credits required to graduate. Pick the project idea that you know you can do in a week (okay, a weekend), pick the uncontroversial/uninteresting subject for your paper, etc. - just keep your head down and pass the class.
Often, this seems to translate into people who can't program their way out of a FOR loop (or whatever the appropriate metaphor is for their field), solve new problems, or create new products. Inside-the-box thinking is great for passing standardized tests but somewhat less great for innovation.
At that point, your four-point-whatever GPA and the two semesters you spent as the Deputy Assistant Vice Co-President of the Student Navelgazing Council are really just reasons to mock you after you've left the interview. Maybe the HR department of a dusty institution with those upload-and-re-type-your-resume-style portals will care, but I've never met a recruiter, hiring manager, or staff engineer that did.
On the other hand, I've met people without CS degrees who have clearly put in the effort and know what they're talking about. A prior CTO once remarked that he had more respect for open source contributions and Coursera courses than he did for people who only had a degree to show. All a degree indicated, he said, was that their parents could afford to send them to college.
Also, I don't mean to disparage extracurriculars with my above comment, but there's a similar phenomenon there, too: people who sign up for some club or organization just to pad their resume are less impressive than people who have developed some degree of skill in non-trivial hobbies. It demonstrates that you're capable of developing yourself on multiple levels rather than simply checking as many boxes as your parents will pay for.
TL;DR I'd say you're far from naive if you're striving to learn and understand rather than recite and recall. You might get fewer wins when you punch above your weight class, but you'll be better in the end for doing it, especially when stacked up against people who never got off the metaphorical couch.
The US is a culture that has been repeating things like 'winning isn't everything, it is the only thing'
A large proportion of the students we've caught cheating in our course (I'm a full-time assistant for a first-year CS course) are international students. This is a global phenomenon, not a US-specific one.
I don't know if it is a fully global phenomenon, but it is certainly not a US-Centric one.
For every politician who is in the news for 'bragging' about not paying taxes, there's usually at least one politician finger-wagging at them that avoids taxes to the same extent, but is just 'quiet' about it.
People who are decrying cheating while cheating themselves are a far larger problem; when someone boasts they don't pay taxes, everyone else can point at them and go 'what an asshole!'. But when people discover someone doesn't pay taxes, yet goes after those who are public about not doing so, -that- is when the idea that 'everybody cheats'. becomes cemented.
What is "cheating" exactly though? Isn't that also culturally specific? Like why shouldn't the collective benefit from the work of a few, if the few are willing? That was certainly the attitude of students of many different cultures when I was in college. Many called sharing work "cheating" I'm certain they saw it as "stupid not too" and "helping their countrymen".
As other commenters have pointed out, it's generally defined in the first days of the course.
Speaking from my former job as "professor", the problem with cheating is that students are not benefitting from the work of others. They think they are, because they think the product of the class is a grade. But I taught math. This point of view is only successful if one can maintain the cheating throughout all classes and then one's job, which is an awful lot of work and in fact even harder than just learning the d(*& math.
From my point of view, I tried to use psychology to "trick" students into learning when they were inclined to cheat -- making the process of iteration into something worth points (you don't show me an imperfect MVP and then improve it? you don't get points), making acknowledgement of collaboration and outside sources into something worth points, etc. I also provided old copies of all my exams going back several years, some with answers, because I wanted all students to have an equal playing field. Last, I always included a question or two very similar to/identical to a question on a previous exam or homework. You might think this is just bad teaching, but it was actually a quite useful tool: since I telegraphed it beforehand, students actually studied the old tests/homework, thereby accidentally learning something, and then when a surprising number of students did terribly on something word-by-word from a previous test, we got to talk about effective learning techniques.
Cheating is relatively predictable in character. Use the impulses and mechanisms gently against reluctant students to trick them into learning despite themselves. It's way more fun than the alternative.
I can pretty much guarantee you that any CS department will have a clearly worded policy on what they consider "cheating", usually any sharing of code whatsoever on a take-home assignment. of course, you will likely see that policy blatantly violated every day in the computer lab.
In my university experience, the first day of every class starts with administrivia, which includes the grading policy, homework policy, and what degree of cooperation actually constitutes cheating. In CS, the usual threshold for cheating is whether or not you actually wrote the code yourself--you can (and are encouraged to!) work with other people to discuss how to solve the problem, but you have to sit down and actually write the code up yourself.
That said, as a TA, I found that I really didn't want to put any effort to identify if students were cheating. I did catch a few cheaters, but largely because they inadvertently broke my grading setup in ways that made me suspicious that they were getting their code from something other than the homework assignment.
In our course (first year intro CS), we run a tool called moss against thousands of submissions (it's a big class). Inevitably, we catch a few dozen cheaters on every assignment. Some of them are so brazen as to submit their friend's assignment as though it were their own, without even changing the name at the top of the file!
I also found a few likely cheaters in my stint as a TA. they sat together in labs and turned in nearly identical code for every assignment (down to some truly bizarre formatting choices). I didn't have the heart to turn them in since they were failing most of the assignments anyway.
Some cheaters make it impossible not to catch them. We had a guy using his phone during a math class. The professor came by and the kid had covered up his phone with a piece of paper. The phone is obviously not flat and the screen was up and still active, shining right through.
I'd wager a big part of it is that they don't think it's cheating and don't bother to hide it. If you're looking for the percentage of first year CS students that cheat in some way or another I'd say around 30-40%, anecdotally, purely among non-international students.
Are those really the only messages you've gotten from American culture? You must live in some strange bubble.
For every person boasting about greed and "winning," there are tens or hundreds more talking about peace, love, charity, and helping others. It's in TV sitcoms, it's in books, web sites, music, it's everywhere. Have you tuned it out?
I'm not sure American cultural messaging is so monolithic. Some is like that, but plenty of people argue something like the reverse (e.g., parents infantilizing their children, participation awards).
You are the naive one. I don't live in US but almost everyone cheats where I am from. I thought integrity mattered but it doesn't for people. It doesn't even register to students that cheating is wrong.
I never cheated and it got me really nowhere. I was a top student throughout school but I only lost time I could have used for better if I had cheated. People don't even put little effort into cheating.
I complained about students who cheated blatantly and got punished by the teacher because he was chewed by the management. At graduation, the cheaters get the same certificate. There is almost no difference and most schools don't care about cheating but enrolling more students.
I was a fool for doing busy work for school while everyone copied or ignored it.
I don't see the world outside school as more honest. You can't change the world without political power and money and to have both, you need to be as bad as the person sitting on the throne. People care about party names, political slogans, etc more than actual work. They care about media shout outs, endorsed by celebrity, institution name etc more.
McGraw-Hill was pushing PDFs when I was starting to get into my major classes. One class's PDF was so bad our teacher got into direct contact with the McGraw-Hill rep. The PDF cost more than the physical book and the text was completely unreadable. They ended up giving us some kind of Xerox copy of the book because they were unable to supply a pdf you could read. The resolution of the text was absolutely terrible.
I am glad I graduated before they started monitoring us. Most of my major classes were open book but there's no way you had enough time to look everything up or understand the complex subject.
McGraw-Hill is looking for any way to squeeze more money out of the school and students.
Proctorio’s behavior is certainly appalling. There should be restrictions on how much DMCA abuse is tolerated before sticking them into “timeout”. And if a legitimate need arises while in timeout, too bad so sad.
The court case is particularly disgusting. He should win and get treble his court fees, though dunno if Canada has that.
But having said that, I feel for schools as they have to do SOMETHING and there is just nothing good. Can’t have just the honor system cuz that’s worked so well. But if these systems are over the top (and they are) what do you do?
I’m glad I’m not having to take tests using this kind of software. I tend to look around at other things when deep thinking. Even if no music on, I use N/C headphones to keep sounds out. Hell, if it’s particular hard problem I might start sub vocalizing as I work it through. All habits that would get me dinged left and right.
> There should be restrictions on how much DMCA abuse is tolerated before sticking them into “timeout”. And if a legitimate need arises while in timeout, too bad so sad.
Absolutely. The legal world even has a term for this already, "Vexatious Litigant" [0]. We need to start applying this to DMCA requests.
Change teaching so that they don't need proctoring.
I say that as a teacher.
But that's a ton of work, hard to do uniformly, depends a lot on the teacher's training and the number of students, depends a lot on institutional support for teachers....
As a college student, I think the only important "anti-cheat" on exams should be ensuring that the registered student is the one taking the exams. Beyond that, if they want to use the internet or their notes, that is absolutely allowed. That _is_ how the world works, after all.
Only tricky part is that the students themselves shouldn't be able to collaborate since that can lead to one student taking the entire exam and sharing the answers, or many splitting the questions. I guess that could be remedied with question pooling, just requires a bit more effort.
> There should be restrictions on how much DMCA abuse is tolerated before sticking them into “timeout”.
DMCA safe harbor rules are a protection for users/hosts, not content owners. Anyone who gets a takedown notice can ignore it if they think the source is dishonest, and be at no greater risk than they would be without the safe harbor.
I hope the good that comes from this (and the pandemic) is that people are more aware, and perhaps care more, about their digital privacy, and companies relentless attack against it.
I find it quite interesting you say that in the present time where we are staring down the barrel of global tyranny and most people don’t even have a clue what they’re looking at, let alone that this isn’t all actually fine the way things are as this virus is used to totally upend things through psychological warfare on the whole world, but mostly on the west. For example, we have long had what us communism in the form of subsidies, but now governments are literally running mentally planned economies with trillion dollar “bailout” after “bailout” that is literally deciding on where resources are allocated and which companies survive. What’s even worse, it’s even international communism as hundreds of millions of Americana’s wealth is being given to foreign countries like Sudan, Israel, etc. why exactly does Israel, a very advanced country, get $500 million of Americans’ wealth on top of what has already been given them just in the last year?
The phenomenon you describe isn't "communism", nor is it recent.
Private interests have long tried to use the unique power of the state to shield themselves from market forces. Unfortunately, the people have not only abetted that, but often demanded it; see the recent demands to enshrine extant ISPs as government-chartered monopolies (i.e., utilities) rather than remove the anti-competitive regulations that have fomented high costs and poor service.
As for bailouts, there too the people have long been convinced that the government needs to "fix" the market. Unsurprisingly, the means by which these "fixes" occur happens to benefit the ruling class (politicians and corporate executives) and big firms, giving them a competitive advantage over would-be competitors, and thereby growing ever bigger.
I've got a recent experience with similar software (and still having PTSD from it), and I don't even think it really provides any real protection against cheaters. Ok, maybe all those AI-things to track head and eyes movements even work, though I find it a stupid idea.
More interesting is their exam protection part. It records the screen, limits the software you can run, disables copy-paste, disables external monitor and keyboard on a laptop, etc. All to avoid leaking of the exam questions. And it's super annoying for the student.
But I don't think they protect from custom browser scripts like with Greasemonkey, and there is just no way to detect a proxy server that makes copies of the requested pages with the exam content. So it's only a Security Theater, nothing more.
The kids learn more than ten times as much (not that that's a high bar), but can't 'prove' it on useless^Wstandardized tests, so the bean counters ax it.
Because in the education sector, the dominant ideology is some vague form of antiracism, and rhetorical appeals to the interests of blacks etc are the only way (or at least a prerequisite) to get anything done.
A wise man once said, "Cheating is another way of being prepared. Basically, memorizing something is cheating. You knew the answer before the test was given. And so, by taking the test and saying you learned that stuff, that's cheating."
That said it's pretty absurd you can't use a search engine to find an answer nowadays. Is being able to ace a test really going to prove you "learned" something? No it's not. It's just the system devised for accredited institutions to say "it sure is!" This is why technical colleges focus on internships, apprenticeships, and employer advised programs so that you get skills employers want upon graduating. Not worthless head knowledge.
