This fucking shit has to be shut down IMMEDIATELY. How can they keep using this shit? Fucking incredible.
Campus organizations should be agitating to end the contract with the vendor immediately.
As someone working for university, albeit not in the US, the only alternative to online testing is cancelling education. :(
even better, then this program is just to annoy white people and fail black people
Which is why online tests should never just be replicated paper tests. Write novel questions that require introspection beyond just googling the answers wherever possible, and check what might come up if someone tries to cheat. Sort of like an open book exam. It's not ideal, but it basically isn't possible to actually properly stop cheating with online tests.
So only use open book exams. Or time pressure so people cannot just look everything up.
Education does not require assessment, the primary goal of a university is to provide people with useful knowledge, not mere accreditation.
You're not working for the university, you're working for the industry and employers that want a piece of paper that lets them discriminate by institution; instead of investing into their own workplace aptitude tests or recruitment methodologies.Well-done assessment can still be metrically valuable as a means of making sure that every student actually absorbs the material and to make adjustments accordingly, and it can also serve as a means of artificial motivation for people who have difficulties self-motivating.
Certainly though, the scoring and credentials are for employers and are shit.
Frequent recall and testing is for many subjects the most effective teaching methodology.
If you have to get rid of lectures, books, workshops, projects, or informal testing; then testing should be the last thing to go.
This is not merely my opinion, it is one of the most reliable results in pedagogical research.Calcifying the most important teaching methodology with this type of privacy invasive crap is harmful to the pedagogical process.
Students with self-motivation issues benefit most from frequent informal testing that covers small chunks of material.
Formality and privacy invasion only heighten the perfectionism and anxiety issues that constitute much of procrastinating behavior.Formalized testing most often occurs at the end of semesters, when there is no time left for course correction by teachers or students anyway.
Informal testing can easily fulfill the role of gauging material absorption, and students cheating is then simply at their own peril.
When testing is informal, teachers can just use easy to cheat multiple choice tests, and not waste so much time with grading either.But in any case, responsibility for ensuring that material is sufficiently understood should be held by students themselves.
It is only formalized exams and accreditation that could require measures to deal with cheating.
But such exams serve no direct function in education, and are entirely about the role of schools and universities under capitalism.
Education absolutely requires assessment, it doesn't require grades that can later be used against you though. Without assessment you have absolutely no clue how well you understand the material, especially in relation to other people in the class.
Remember these are college classes, it's not rote memorization anymore, you usually have to use some type of analysis to get to the right answer on a college exam.
My argument was implicitly about formalized assessment where anti-cheating measures are required.
Even so, most researchers and independent learners are quite capable of gauging their own understanding without any external testing or assessment.
And when people attend lectures simply out of curiosity they can become educated entirely without assessment.I do not undervalue testing, if anything I would endorse all classes using brief informal testing on a weekly or even daily basis.
But I am opposed to the misuse of testing as metrics for performance. An effective test is one where people make plenty of mistakes, otherwise not much learning is happening.
Im all for this although its easier to adapt in some studies than others. but in most studies you could definitly make the tests adapt to open book setting. However this doesn't solve the problems in question.
Idk if you can find copying based on answers alone. It's pretty easy to just retranslate sentences in your own words. Just mix it up a little. Also imagine the other side, the rich kid doing an online exam with an army of private tutors on standby.
Imagine thinking the rich need to engage with school in the first place.
Im sorry, my european bias made me not see how wretched the cursed american education system really is.
lmao adjuncts (and most classes are taught by adjuncts) are too buys to schedule 1-on-1 sessions. Faculty do what's "easiest".
Absolutely, under socialism everyone could probably just do a oral or written exam in front of a group of teachers online. Capitalism just chooses not to allocate the resources in this way.
My calculator can't be wrong, it's a computer!
proceeds to mash buttons
see? 2 + 2 = 5 checkmate libs
So I teach math at the college level. This shit drives me up the fucking walls. "My calculator said the answer is 245,617.947, so that must be correct." We were looking for the area of a rectangle whose longer side is at most 8. Do you really think that answer makes sense, Bradley?
Yeah, I try to get my students to think for half a second about whether the answer they got makes sense before just believing it blindly. You'd really think students would have had someone in their life teach them that skill before like, Calc 2, but apparently not for a lot of them. As a math educator, the state of math education enrages and saddens me, but I'm glad you had at least one good math teacher!
If you need help, read the book and figure it out. College professors will not help you.”
translation: "I'm going to use the 'college professors don't give a damn about you' cliche to not have to care about you"
Literally every college professor I had was more than willing to spend even a few hours helping me learn shit I didn't understand.
I'm in a non-math class with some math and the teacher said, "sometimes my students ask me what 'tan' is and I say it's a button on the calculator."
Also code can easily be racist. Laws can easily be racist. Books can easily be racist. Anything man made can be racist
True, but in the case I don't think its the code, but the data. Probably the people involved in the development of this didnt even think about it, and just used whatever dataset was available, and most facial recognition datasets are heavily skewed white. Or if they knew and tried to bring it up to the decision-makers it got ignored.
Racism is not measured by intent, but by effect. If the output of the code is racist, then it’s racist. It doesn’t matter if the coders weren’t racist.
Yeah, but what I mean is that the deciding thing here is the data. Same piece of code could create very different models, based on what you feed it with. Very often this is what happens cause the engineers involved forget about the data part and think that because the code itself can't be racist the outcome also isn't
I am using honorlock for a lot of my classes currently. I am white so I can't speak to any problems to do with skin color but anecdotally I can say that it's awful to use lol. Even ignoring the obvious violation of privacy (we have to share our screen, record our face and in some cases do a full 360 degree "scan" of our room), it's super super buggy. I heard of someone who pressed tab and got their exam instantly ended because honorlock thought they were trying to cheat. I was doing a math exam and was looking down at my notebook, and the exam was paused because it couldn't detect any face. I also heard of a recent security breach they had and some people at my university got their information stolen. I didn't know that it was racist as well, but I'm not really surprised; the software barely works. So many people are complaining about it but none of the professors seem willing to budge. One of the more egregious examples I've seen of my University focusing less on teaching the material and more on making us jump through hoops for no fucking reason.
Wow facial recognition to make sure you stare at the screen that's definitely not a feature straight from Black Mirror
Oh yeah, some people's employers require something very similar to make sure employees are "working" https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/pwc-facial-recognition-tool-criticised-for-home-working-privacy-invasion/
All those fun face filters had trouble with black people too and probably still do. It wouldn't surprise me if tech lord programmers literally never had black people in their training data for whatever machine learning actually does these algorithms.
So I know some people who worked closely on this stuff at Snapchat and what not, including a couple of black guys, and the reason for some of this stuff has a lot more to do with cameras and broader shadowing type stuff than anything training data related.
This said, the fact that cameras tend to not work as well for darker skin tones is definitely a real problem that needs to be worked on.
this is why i am against giving my students online tests, especially during covid, quality control is impossible and enforcing it is oppression.
It reminds me of the fucking moron of a professor who made us write code on paper and would then fucking detract points because you forgot, like, one semicolon, or forgot to close a parenthesis like it ever fucking matters in real life.
Any coding program is going to easily highlight it with like a color code or indicator
If you miss a parenthesis the lint is gonna tell you "bruh, you messed up" and then you're gonna fix it. Even if you're a boomer who uses notepad or some shit 90% of the time if the issue is just a missing semicolon it will be pretty clear what the issue is or at least where it is (after all compilers often tell you what line shat the bed). And my school is fucking Applied Math and Physics, not even coding.
Eh linters are pretty good these days so thats not really an issue so much as a stale meme.
Online tests are fine, just have it be open book or something.
In virtually any upper level class, there's absolutely no point in demanding rote memorization from your students, it's about combining complex underlying techniques to solve problems.
well right, i think the problem lies in that a lot of test and assessment manufacturers want to have some sort of panopticon anti-cheating system
that or they are designed in a way that penalizes students for having crappy internet/not being able to afford good internet (and public broadband is outlawed in many states thanks to Comcast's lobbyists) and sets restrictive time limits on the tests that will time them out if they take too long to upload their responses (this happened to my AP Physics students last spring, also no refunds for AP despite required early registration in pre-covid November)
anyway, you're completely right about complex techniques with problem solving, that's why I just make all of my assignments homework that the students can complete on their own time and discuss together in remote classes/discord.
See I think that's where the difference lies between a test of value vs just normal homework. I think you need to be assessed independently of your peers, with online testing it can be difficult to make sure no one is communicating with each other.
Problems with the delivery of online education is very real, but there's not much that can be done about that. Even with decent internet I've had it to out on me at critical moments like during a job interview quiz or somethingm
No you're definitely right, it's just very difficult to implement something like that when you can't just look over a room and keep an eye on all them in real time. Solving the problem with software doesn't really cut it, probably better to remove stressors that would lead to someone cheat (like open book tests as you said) or allowing cheating but asking questions that can't just be looked up
its been known for like a decade that facial recognition software is racist against black people and here we are still. not surprising in the least.
Good book recs: Algorithms of Oppression & the New Jim Code.
Wow this guys got a girlfriend... and a walk-in closet. Look at this bourgie
This problem isn't just black people to be fair, these systems fail students if they are reading the test questions outloud to themselves. The whole thing is fucked from top to bottom.
so we are really just not fixing this shit ever huh just keep going on this like this was no problem
There a problem as a whole with facial recognition/AI for people of color. https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-recognize-black-faces-equally/
