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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"?
Simply take a course where you were already familiar with the subject matter. (I really suspect a lot of the students in the language classes I took were already fluent in the language. Boy did that suck for me.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
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"?
Must have been business majors.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Everyone knows that everyone with a piece of paper saying they graduated college is intelligent and deserving of a job. They shouldn't have to show you that they know what they're doing! You should just immediately give them a job!
That's one of the biggest reasons why online degrees are suspect.
Of course cheating has always occurred in bricks and mortar schools, too, but it's supposed to be harder. For STEM courses, exams usually make up the majority of the grade, and are held in proctored halls. At the best schools, cheaters who are caught are dealt with harshly; usually they fail the course (which goes on the official transscript) and sometimes they are expelled.
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.
I've taken quite a few online courses, where the tests and quizzes during the semester were online, and I've cheated on a couple (lazy professors who actually copy/pasted questions that were easily found Googling), but the final was always a written exam taken on campus.
You can breeze through the bulk of the semester all you want with the help of the good folks at Google, but you'll be screwed at the end if you can't Google your way out of the final. And if you don't pass the final, you fail the course, regardless of your test/quiz grades.
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
yes we need more tech / vol / apprenticeships when the test is on the job and it's about doing the job for real and not in class room with no books or other reference books.
This won't be an issue for long, because online classes (I have in mind Udacity and MITx) were not designed to have online exams in the first place. They said from the beginning that exams will be held in test centers under surveillance. It is not implemented yet, as MITx is currently a prototype, but we are getting there. Udacity just partnered with Pearson VUE to hold exams in their test centers. Pearson VUE has about 4000 test centers in 170 countries.
It will most likely still be possible to take online exams, but the certificate earned for completion will have much less weight than a certificate earned by taking exams in a test center.
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.
Making new tests every time means we can't analyze student responses to confirm that test questions really are testing what they are supposed to be testing. When I was teaching in the classroom, I used the happy medium: I generated tests and homework with LaTeX packages that randomized numbers in the questions and the wrong answers, so I could verify phrasing and alignment with learning outcomes quite rigorously while still making sure the third period class couldn't feed useful answers and tips to the fourth period class. It works extremely well in my fields (math and physics), although I openly admit Language Arts/English and Social Studies teachers would have a tougher time of it.
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
The problem described with the students cheating could be solved very easily by not releasing the test scores until all students have submitted their answers. This is a setting on most learning management systems.
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...
Simply take a course where you were already familiar with the subject matter.
I know I sure as hell didn't major in History for the amazing job prospects :)
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Why should people who can cram but don't know what they are doing get better marks then people who know what they are doing but are not good at craning.
This is a problem with test design, which has little to do with whether memorization is good or not.
As an undergrad engineering major, most of my advanced engineering courses were open book -- usually not just open book, but open notes, open just about anything you could carry. (One student in one course actually carried in a graduate student and was allowed to make use of him -- they changed the rule to exclude carrying in persons the next year.)
Electronic devices other than calculators were restricted I think, but this was before the age of Wi-Fi, so perhaps even laptops were allowed.
Of course, all of those exams consisted of problems unlike any of us had seen before -- they were designed to test whether you could actually think independently and apply the broad concepts of the course to new problems, rather than just regurgitating information or plugging numbers into an equation. Google would have been of little assistance with such a test.
All of that said, I do still believe that there is value in a test that is NOT open book/open notes/open Google, whatever. Most of the information I have in my head has been through extra levels of processing and understanding. For example, to memorize an equation, I usually tend to know something about why the form of the equation is the way it is, rather than just memorizing the abstract symbols.
These days, it seems many people devalue the skill of memorization, but with memorization comes the ability to internalize the content, to recall it at will, to think through it as a tool when considering various problems, even to meditate upon it. (Medieval monks tended to memorize entire books to gain greater understanding and synthesis of ideas in this way.)
All of this is unlikely if you're just cramming and memorizing the night before, because you're likely to forget all of it next week. But if you're a more mature person with different study habits and learn things gradually, review them, and go over them in preparation for the test yet again, memorization is likely to come more naturally and ultimately reflect a greater internalization of the ideas.
I think you got the GP wrong.
His point is, if I understand him correctly, and I do agree in this point with him, that it becomes more and more obsolete to have a mass of facts in your brains without the ability to apply them. It gets easier and faster every day to look things like that up. What's heaps harder and rarer is the ability to solve problems.
My profs at the university, and I still thank them for that, preferred the latter. I'd have a hard time thinking of any (but pure basic) tests that weren't open book, "bring whatever materials you want" tests. In general, anything but interactive material (read: sending the test to someone else and have him come up with the answers) was pretty much ok. You were actually expected to use your notes and books, because they didn't test what you could stuff into your head, they were much more interested in you showing that you understood what they taught and that you could demonstrate that you can apply it to "real life" problems. The test question were not "solve this equation" but rather "you're facing this problem", with the test being more to come up with a solution rather than actually solving it.
I distinctly remember a math test that I thought I bombed only to find out my prof gave me an B, despite not having finished a single sample. His argument was that I demonstrated I know what approach was necessary, that I showed I did understand how to use the rules required and he expected that I can punch buttons on a calculator when I dare to study CS and am about to graduate, if I couldn't, I probably wouldn't have survived the entry level programming classes.
And that's basically what counts. Today I am often tasked to screen applicants and I throw similar things at them, only to be surprised how many cannot come up with a solution. And interestingly enough, the ones that usually ace my "real life problems" are the ones without a "relevant" degree.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Bullseye! Can someone hand that guy an insightful mod?
That's exactly what's wrong with our schools (and to a lesser degree even universities). It's simply easier for teachers and educators to come up with cram tests, preferably multiple-choice so they can far easier check the right answers, than to think up some kind of realistic problem and then evaluate the students' solutions, which will invariably differ slightly from one to the next due to them having different, but probably equally valid, approaches. Hell, it might even expose that the teacher knows less of a subject than his student (which isn't as far fetched as it may seem, especially in a field like CS where new developments often render your knowledge obsolete in few years).
It's simple laziness on the side of the teacher, and so we're stuck with tests that favor those who are able to hoover up information like a sponge, pour it out in the test and instantly forget it. I know a few people of that quality. They were doing quite well in school, but out in the reality, they're usually quite useless.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not only this but we need university courses that actually teach, rather than certifying people for the workforce. Our society is facing a major shortage of education institutions in my opinion. Work certification can be done by the employer, and often is anyway. Very few employers will trust a degree alone and many will test employees themselves. If this becomes too much of a burden we could set up certification organisations, who simply administer tests based on the required abilities for specific job types/industries. If I want to learn how to do something, for me that is quite separate from wanting to have evidence that I can do a certain job. Perhaps there are institutes that focus solely on education. If anyone knows of one I would be glad to hear about it.
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.
You're lucky it isn't based on reading comprehension.
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.
It worked pretty well for some guy named Albert Einstein.
"Never memorize something that you can look up. --Albert Einstein
Then again, cheating is still cheating.
So that you don't sound illiterate when you post on slashdot.
Yes, it does take more, which is why we analyze the difficulty and discrimination of tests.
Difficulty: what percentage of the population gets the answer right?
Discrimination: sort the class by overall grade. Divide them into groups. (Thirds, quarters, etc. depending on class size.) Compare, question by question, the percentage of students in the top performing group who answer correctly to the percentage of students in the low performing group who answer correctly. A highly discriminating question should be correctly answered by the top performers but incorrectly answered by bottom performers. If the reverse is true, the question is confusing or miskeyed and needs to be adjusted accordingly.
We should also analyze how often students pick the "distractors" (i.e. incorrect answers) in multiple choice tests to determine if students answer correctly because they know the material or because the wrong answers are so obviously wrong.
Obviously, there is a lot more to it than this. The point I'm trying to make is that test structures need to be chosen and analyzed carefully to ensure validity and reliability. This can't be done by creating tests from "whole cloth" every time. Some degree of reuse needs to take place. That's why I used the LaTeX package. It can base questions on random numbers, and answers can be generated randomly or with preprogrammed algebra, so I set it up to have the correct answer, two answers generated by the most common mistakes, and a random number from a range that could make it the highest or lowest number on the list, sorted from smallest to largest. Then option e was "none of the above" for every question. I rarely used it intentionally, but it came in useful on the first couple of tests where typos in my algebra setting up the tests prevented the right answer from appearing on the list. (If you are interested, I wrote a book on assessment that you can access via my signature.)
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
I really suspect a lot of the students in the language classes I took were already fluent in the language. Boy did that suck for me.
When I was at university, I specifically chose a foreign language where I was unlikely to encounter native speakers for precisely that reason. For example, it was unwise to study Spanish because there were too many native speakers who set the curve very high and engineering curriculum was difficult enough that I couldn't afford to waste study time in non-major courses. I really didn't care much about foreign languages anyway, so the logical choices at my school where German, French or Italian. Russian and Asian languages were out because they involved learning mostly alien alphabets and grammars. I chose German because it's closer to English than either French or Italian and there were hardly any native speakers at my school. Finally, the German language has some pedigree in the engineering fields, as compared to either French or Italian, so there was at least some engineering value in a rudimentary understanding of the German language. It was easy enough to get a solid B in German without diverting too much time from my engineering studies, so that's what I did.
If this becomes too much of a burden we could set up certification organisations, who simply administer tests based on the required abilities for specific job types/industries.
That has already been tried and people game those systems too. There's no substitute for a company specific knowledge, training or apprenticeship program because no third party cares more about finding and training qualified employees than the company doing the hiring.