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Students Looking For Easy A Target Online Courses, Where Cheating Is Easier
An anonymous reader writes "As online courses become mainstream, some students are finding they are often easy to game. A group of clever students at one public university describe how they used a Google Doc during on open-book test for a new kind of 'cloud cheating.'" Instead of "cloud" all the time, can't we switch it up with "on the internet"?
When I started university we had Calculus, among other things, during our first year. You were allowed to bring anything you wanted into the exam room: books, notes, a computer. This was because, unless you had studied hard and done lots of exercises, there was no way you would pass the exam. That's how you test people, not with tech bingo or a/b/c/d answer questions.
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Sundar Pichai is the utter asshole whose incompetence has resulted in the shutdown of Google's Atlanta office.
ha ha ha ha ha
I know you are being sarcastic, but two of the best motivated people in my lab have on degree. One has a HS diploma, the other a GED. The one w/ the diploma is a senior technician, worked up from the bottom over 12 years and outperforms the recent grad engineers at most of the work (similar job profiles between Sr. tech and Jr. engineer). The GED tech has been with the company for about a year and is starting the working from the bottom up. Both of these guys are way better at their jobs and motivated compared to the average BS degree holder.
Realistically this is a rare trait in people, but I'll take one of these guys any day over the average degreed person.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
I see where the GP was going. It's better to ask more complex questions where it tests the person understands concepts than that they can memorize. Problem is that it means the grader has to do more work when grading
If they can pass the test using only google, then they're certainly what in the eyes of that test passes for a good programmer. Of course, one might question the reliability and usefulness of a test that can be passed using only google, but the test was as useless before as it would pass 'crammers' who may have as little understanding of the subject as the 'googler'.
I suspect that a lot of complaints about 'internet assisted' cheating are partly due to the educators getting caught with easy but low value methods of testing and assessment.
right... if you cannot even discuss basic flags or basic concepts, but can google, that's all that's needed to be a good competent programmer, right? Because good enough is good enough.
no wonder USA is losing its edge, with this kind of thinking.
Done properly, an open book test is a lot harder than a closed book test. On most of the ones I've taken, you needed a good grasp of the material or you were doomed.
right... if you cannot even discuss basic flags or basic concepts, but can google, that's all that's needed to be a good competent programmer, right? Because good enough is good enough.
no wonder USA is losing its edge, with this kind of thinking.
Open book tests are terribly difficult. When I took my legal courses they were all open book, my POA(provincial offences) tests? All open book, same with traffic law, again all open book. The very best of all these tests are written by instructors who know their material and write their own questions based on the material that they've taught through the year.
That means you not only need the book, but you need to understand it, and have attended the classes to make it through the exam. People think they sweat bullets on a 80 page exam? Hah. Try 13 pages, where it's all open book and you're required to break down a full construct question that's worth 10% of the exam mark.
Om, nomnomnom...
An example, ok.
One standard question I use a lot when filling programmer positions for our bug hunting crew is to take a few common entries from our bug report list and ask them "where'd you look for the bug". That usually already gives me a pretty good idea what kind of "thinking" I have in front of me. What I do NOT want to hear is some kind of apology (like "I don't know the code, so I can't say anything specific..."), I know he doesn't know, and that's sadly often exactly the problem he will face, but I still want an answer. You get tossed into this bug, how do you handle it?
Here I like to hear that he is checking the headers so he gets an idea what libraries are used, checks if the libraries are outdated, checks the lib known bugs... or whatever else he'd do, hell, nearly anything is fine. I want to know if he has some kind of general approach to bug hunting. What I don't like to hear is useless ass-covering tactics, some kind of apology or trying to find someone to blame, like finding out who wrote the code 3 years ago. Even if he finds him, that guy certainly won't remember a thing about it.
It's worse when I hire someone for my department directly, we get to face very unique situations daily. Security can be tricky at times, because your problems are not only technology but also very personally, both with personnel security issues as well as secrecy. What I want to see in general in an applicant is whether he has a plan. Whether he can come up with an idea that will solve the problem or at least find the source of it, whether he has "common sense" and whether he knows how people work. That's something that is oddly not taught at any kind of university: People are generally lazy and will gladly cut corners. For some odd reason, everyone with zero "real life" experience will assume that people work according to spec. Hint: They don't.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So that you don't sound illiterate when you post on slashdot.