Hm. What index would that be? There are many of them, but I just can't see Sweden at the highest places anywhere? Or even high? Or even not low? I would also like to remind you that there are huge problems with the reliability of many of those indexes.
Also, why would poverty NOT be a reason for crime?
Poverty isn't the reason for violence but it's the reason for crime.
Crime rate is an arbitrary measure. I could say the Doku rate went down this year by 23.6 points but you'd ask me to define Doku and I could say "Well we change that definition depending on how we feel politically and depending on whether a Democrat or Republican wins."
Crime is a variable definition which can change at any moment so as to make the crime rate rise or fall. The best way to lower the crime rate is to make less behaviors a crime. The only rate we should be concerned about is the violent crime rate.
So most parents think it's better that these creeps go out in the park and take pictures of their kids to wank to instead of looking at drawn pictures?
Most parents are sick fucks.
A lot of parents want to give the death penalty for anyone who thinks like a sick fuck.
I don't think that makes children any safer and until there are some actual scholarly studies on the subject there is no real evidence that sick thoughts correlate with sick behavior.
If they believe that they need to crack the encryption, that just means they're going after the wrong people. Instead of wasting time going after the darknet sites and/or their customers, they should be focusing 100% of their efforts on trying to identify A. the kids and/or B. the locations where the videos were shot. This approach has several advantages:
It doesn't require any access to the actual transactions.
It doesn't require weakening the security model of the Internet to do it.
By jailing the people who make the porn, you actually protect children by getting them out of abusive situations.
In contrast, by going after other people in the chain, you *might* occasionally get an actual child abuser, but usually you just ruin the lives of people who did something stupid and probably would not have actually harmed anyone's child. It's a bit like the difference between jailing people who are using guns to kill people and jailing everyone who carries a gun in the wrong part of town because a few of them might kill people....
If they believe that they need to crack the encryption, that just means they're going after the wrong people. Instead of wasting time going after the darknet sites and/or their customers, they should be focusing 100% of their efforts on trying to identify A. the kids and/or B. the locations where the videos were shot. This approach has several advantages:
It doesn't require any access to the actual transactions.
It doesn't require weakening the security model of the Internet to do it.
By jailing the people who make the porn, you actually protect children by getting them out of abusive situations.
In contrast, by going after other people in the chain, you *might* occasionally get an actual child abuser, but usually you just ruin the lives of people who did something stupid and probably would not have actually harmed anyone's child. It's a bit like the difference between jailing people who are using guns to kill people and jailing everyone who carries a gun in the wrong part of town because a few of them might kill people....
I agree with you. They should be focused on going after the actual perps in those videos.
They ship through USPS because it requires a warrant, and USPS does not require senders to give their actual personal information if they pay in cash. So senders can use a fake name and ship by rotating through delivery hubs. It would still be somewhat traceable, but would require significant resources and time.
USPS could just be an undercover FBI agent. Then what?
Let's assume that the criminal group you're going after is shipping physical objects. Tracing information obviously will require heavy tech skills, but old-fashioned investigative work works well in the physical world.
Place an order on their site for the product, the drugs or whatever. Odds are they ship through an existing service, FedEx or something - it's simply implausible that they do the actual delivery themselves. With a simple warrant/subpeona, you can get the shipping info, find where it was shipped from.
Once you know where it's being shipped from, it's stakeout time. Repeat the buys a few more times, while recording everyone who ships a package from that location. You should be able to narrow it down rather quickly by process of elimination.
Now, the actual stuff you bought probably can't be used as evidence - it's probably entrapment, but IANAL so I can't be sure. But if they're shipping the stuff you bought, they're also shipping stuff to the actual customers.Catch the courier (who's most likely not a high-level guy, just a small-time crook doing the grunt job), and get him to roll over on the guys he works for. From there, it's literally the same routine as taking down any criminal enterprise.
Is it a lot more work than just serving up a subpeona and instantly getting every detail on the site operator? Yeah. But it's doable with as little tech skills as "being able to *use* Tor".
FBI informants can be used for entrapment and can break the law. Honestly the FBI and others always use child porn as the excuse for mass surveillance and the children are never any safer as a result of any of these arrests.
Arresting people who have the files isn't arresting the people who abused the children. So it's not logical to believe that it's keeping children safer unless all who are arrested are proven sex offenders.
If the people who have unhealthy diet/lifestyle constitute a negative effect on the health care system, isn't it also true that they would prevent a positive effect on the Social Security/retirement system, since they are more likely to die sooner?
If we can presume to tax them for the degree they burden the health care system, shouldn't we credit/reward them for not requiring as many retirement payments as other people?
Social security and retirement are something they paid into themselves.
While not Schneier or Kaspersky, Jeff Moss did found DefCON & Black Hat. He has some real skills & experience as a security expert.
If that is the standard that they are going by, that one has to be Bruce Schneier to be qualified then probably only Bruce Schneier and a handful of others in the entire world are qualified. If you look at what most of the jobs being advertised are, you don't have to be Bruce Schneier. If you look at what they expect people to know and what they ask people to do, it's digital forensics, it's policy, it's not as technical as designing encryption algorithms, it's more deciding which encryption to use and which access control policy and so on.
Based on the certifications they list as wanting the skill-set bar isn't that you have to be a professor in cryptography. It's that you need to be certified in X with Y years experience.
They never outline a clear path from University to a job in Cyber Security. All the Cyber Security jobs they talk about expect years of experience, a security clearance, and social connections. Most people will be lucky to have just one of those qualifications.
As far as skills go they can take any college student off the street. As far as experience goes they can find some people who have skills and experience. When they want skills, experience and a security clearance then their list is drastically smaller. When they want all of this and want to pay chump change, then they run into problems.
If their goal is to build a cyber workforce, in my opinion the answer is paid internships. If they offer 10,000 paid internships a year they'll have a skilled workforce in no time. If they want to save money they could even get away with offering it unpaid and in this economy people would still take it.
For everyone furiously typing their post that includes words like "choice" "responsibility" and other good words you've cynically crafted in to politically charged euphamisims.
1. There is an obesity problem 2. It is linked to sugary drinks 3. The price of sugary drinks is artificially low due to government subsidies 4. Why do you support government handouts that hurt the public?
Because it's easier to tax sugar than to end subsidies for sugar.
In what world do most obese children "choose" to be fat? Most children are unaware of the nuances of dieting, the dangers of obesity, and the difficulty in losing weight once gained. They don't choose their parents or the culture they're born into either.
That is why we need the tax. The parents are making them fat to catch sales and save money.
"If you choose to be fat, if you choose to smoke, if you choose to live an unhealthy lifestyle, you should be the one to pay for your healthcare expenses."
So, you're an intrusive nannying moronic asshole, I assume you intend to pay for the broken nose I give you when you stick it in my business?
What's funny, is that you assholes pass laws to force me to accept government health care then try to use that as a bludgeon to get me to live the way you want.
It's called tyranny of the majority for as reason, and you and your kind are the worst example of it.
If its your business then pay for your own healthcare. If you want taxes or other people to pool their money to pay into your healthcare the least you can do is care about your health.
I'd say sedentary lifestyle has just as much to do with it. When you were a farmer, you could have a gigantic breakfast, huge lunch, and crazy dinner. Thing was because you were outside moving around all day, you'd just burn those calories up and it wouldn't be an issue.
If you are a farmer who smokes and drinks soda you'll still get fat and sick, just not as quickly.
Dr. Bibbins-Domingo credits the taxation of tobacco products with being the sole cause of decreased smoking. But it seems to me that I grew up with no desire to try cigarettes after spending my childhood watching PSA after PSA pointing out that it would cause all sorts of horrible diseases. Taxation never figured into it for me...and it also seems that taxation only matters after you're hooked on cigarettes, too. I smoke cigars occasionally, but whatever added cost comes from the taxes don't matter, since it's a rare occurrence. The taxes would matter only if I were regularly spending money on them, like habitual cigarette smokers do. And I've seen how hard it is for smokers to stop, once they are hooked...it's incredibly hard. So I doubt that taxation was the main cause of the decrease in smoking.
You know why? Smokers are draining societies resources in the form of expensive healthcare. Sugar addicts are among the worst, diabetes risk, cancer risk, heart disease risk, etc. It's perfectly rational to tax people who choose to make bad choices which will lead to higher health care costs for everyone else.
If you choose to be fat, if you choose to smoke, if you choose to live an unhealthy lifestyle, you should be the one to pay for your healthcare expenses. The tax allows the government to charge the people who are running up the healthcare expenses and this is an excellent idea for a state which provides universal coverage.
The people with the bad habits should shut up and pay the tax or better maybe the government can simply cut them off healthcare entirely and let them die? Which is it? All I know is the rest of us shouldn't have to pay for their choices.
Much like taxing cigarettes. If cigarettes are so bad for the individual (as the government states - and anyone with a fucking brain knows) why is the government in the cigarette business? And try to be honest with yourself - the government is in the cigarette business when they make 20x the profit on a pack, compared to the cigarette company.
Taxing soda won't do anything but hand over more money to the government. It won't stop a thing and people know it.
Want to stop children drinking soda? then simply make it illegal for them to do so. (Which I don't agree with)
California has universal healthcare. Sick people cost more money than healthy people which means your taxes go up paying for smokers and soda drinkers. Make them pay the extra dollar and suddenly they have to pay for their own bad habits.
I guess "cheating" makes for a better headline but this is an excellent way of taking notes in class.
With several people contributing to the same page of notes you can correct each others mistakes and don't risk missing an important point in the lecture because you were busy writing down the last important point.
Right and that would be fine but the exams should still be different for each student so that they cannot just get all the right answers from their notes. If it's basic memorization it's just an IQ test and I usually ace those sorts of tests. It's not fair but there are people who can just listen to lectures, never take notes, and ace exams simply because the professor is just asking you to recite what he or she said, or to recite what you memorized.
The hardest exams are open book, but that is because the grading is subjective and the professor can fail you for poor handwriting. Honestly I think it's best to have an example with some memorization, an exam with some very difficult conceptual questions, and to mix up the questions in such a way so that people who do have good memorization skills cannot help the people who don't, and people who do have deep conceptual understanding cannot help people who simply memorized the answers.
I took on online class, calculous, to fulfill a pre-requsiste for my MBA.
I had not taken calculous since High School, and it was almost impossible to learn it via the online class and the text book. To take the weekly tests and quizzes, I just figured out the patterns of where the numbers went. You could take the quizzes over and over again till you go a passing grade.
Give me a class with a grad student who can not speak english any day.
The pattern thing is something I've seen in many multiple choice exams and I've figured it out too. Some multiple choice exams you can solve by figuring out first which answers are least likely to be correct and then logically narrowing down until you end up with 2 answers to choose from which you can then guess on and half the time guess right.
I've used that method on exams, it's not considered cheating because it's not our fault if the Professors use a multiple choice exam which has patterns which can be found by the more higher IQ students. These exams are more like IQ tests.
That being said you probably don't want to take an exam without studying. The method of finding the least correct answers to determine the correct answer is a strategy of test taking itself which breaks most multiple choice exams. It's a hack. But if you don't study you still wont get an A and that hack will only result in a passing grade for an exam you never studied for.
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.
Written exams are difficult to cheat on if the exams are random questions. If the exams all have the same answers than a pool of answers can be generated and covertly distributed.
You don't have to make the questions easier. I've written "open library" tests at University that allowed us to bring in any and all books we wanted. (1998; wi-fi was not an issue.) The tests had questions hard enough, phrased well enough and timed well enough that a student who understood the material had no problems getting it done in time, but students who depended on being able to look things up during the exam bombed because they didn't have time to find the final answers.
Exactly. Time limits are one of the solutions. Another solution is to never give the same set of questions but to always give random questions. The third is to put questions on the exam which aren't simply choose the right answer from A to E, but instead put in multiple right answers and have then list the order of rightness or wrongness of the answer.
So that B is more right than C, but E is more right than D and A.
Something that helps is having deep understanding questions not trivial calculation questions. In the real world you'll have Google and 90% of what you learn in college will not be relevant to your job and when you switch jobs it will be understood that it was 10 years ago and you need time to get up to speed. Google/internet has a very hard time of giving answers to understanding type questions (things like what causes electric current to flow on the outer edge of a conductor rather than through the whole thing). You take a while to figure it out and you either understand it or you don't versus 4 pages of DEs to solve only to find out that you made a 4th grade arithmetic error on page one. It doesn't test understanding just the ability to churn out lots of math with little errors quickly.
I agree but it depends on the subject also. Some subjects people prefer to rely on "technical" sophistication rather than simplicity. How do you test certain subjects without testing for fundamental knowledge?
Right... and so therefore, it doesn't matter whatever questions you set, so long as the students can google for the correct answer, everything's fine right?
That's why you randomize the questions so that they cannot. There wont be enough time for them to Google up all the answers within the time limit since they wont know in advance what the questions are. Finally you can just include questions which cannot be answered by Google.
An example is look at this problem and find the most efficient solution, A, B, C or D. Google isn't going to be able to tell you that. If the question is "find the most inefficient solution" Google cannot tell you that either. Google only generally tells you the facts, it's not going to tell you about anything you learned in class or anything you can deduce.
Such as for instance what is the next number in this sequence 3,6,9,15,24,*
Slashdot Mirror
Hm. What index would that be? There are many of them, but I just can't see Sweden at the highest places anywhere? Or even high? Or even not low?
I would also like to remind you that there are huge problems with the reliability of many of those indexes.
Also, why would poverty NOT be a reason for crime?
Poverty isn't the reason for violence but it's the reason for crime.
Crime rate is an arbitrary measure. I could say the Doku rate went down this year by 23.6 points but you'd ask me to define Doku and I could say "Well we change that definition depending on how we feel politically and depending on whether a Democrat or Republican wins."
Crime is a variable definition which can change at any moment so as to make the crime rate rise or fall. The best way to lower the crime rate is to make less behaviors a crime. The only rate we should be concerned about is the violent crime rate.
The reason crime rates in the USA hasn't shot through the roof is because you can go on welfare or get Obamacare.
Get rid of that and watch what happens.
So most parents think it's better that these creeps go out in the park and take pictures of their kids to wank to instead of looking at drawn pictures?
Most parents are sick fucks.
A lot of parents want to give the death penalty for anyone who thinks like a sick fuck.
I don't think that makes children any safer and until there are some actual scholarly studies on the subject there is no real evidence that sick thoughts correlate with sick behavior.
It's just bit. There is no difference to the network between an image of child porn and a manifesto to free Tibet.
If you can find the source of one you can find the source of the other.
So the "problem" is actually a case of "working as designed".
Exactly the point.
If they believe that they need to crack the encryption, that just means they're going after the wrong people. Instead of wasting time going after the darknet sites and/or their customers, they should be focusing 100% of their efforts on trying to identify A. the kids and/or B. the locations where the videos were shot. This approach has several advantages:
In contrast, by going after other people in the chain, you *might* occasionally get an actual child abuser, but usually you just ruin the lives of people who did something stupid and probably would not have actually harmed anyone's child. It's a bit like the difference between jailing people who are using guns to kill people and jailing everyone who carries a gun in the wrong part of town because a few of them might kill people....
If they believe that they need to crack the encryption, that just means they're going after the wrong people. Instead of wasting time going after the darknet sites and/or their customers, they should be focusing 100% of their efforts on trying to identify A. the kids and/or B. the locations where the videos were shot. This approach has several advantages:
In contrast, by going after other people in the chain, you *might* occasionally get an actual child abuser, but usually you just ruin the lives of people who did something stupid and probably would not have actually harmed anyone's child. It's a bit like the difference between jailing people who are using guns to kill people and jailing everyone who carries a gun in the wrong part of town because a few of them might kill people....
I agree with you. They should be focused on going after the actual perps in those videos.
They ship through USPS because it requires a warrant, and USPS does not require senders to give their actual personal information if they pay in cash. So senders can use a fake name and ship by rotating through delivery hubs. It would still be somewhat traceable, but would require significant resources and time.
USPS could just be an undercover FBI agent. Then what?
Let's assume that the criminal group you're going after is shipping physical objects. Tracing information obviously will require heavy tech skills, but old-fashioned investigative work works well in the physical world.
Place an order on their site for the product, the drugs or whatever. Odds are they ship through an existing service, FedEx or something - it's simply implausible that they do the actual delivery themselves. With a simple warrant/subpeona, you can get the shipping info, find where it was shipped from.
Once you know where it's being shipped from, it's stakeout time. Repeat the buys a few more times, while recording everyone who ships a package from that location. You should be able to narrow it down rather quickly by process of elimination.
Now, the actual stuff you bought probably can't be used as evidence - it's probably entrapment, but IANAL so I can't be sure. But if they're shipping the stuff you bought, they're also shipping stuff to the actual customers.Catch the courier (who's most likely not a high-level guy, just a small-time crook doing the grunt job), and get him to roll over on the guys he works for. From there, it's literally the same routine as taking down any criminal enterprise.
Is it a lot more work than just serving up a subpeona and instantly getting every detail on the site operator? Yeah. But it's doable with as little tech skills as "being able to *use* Tor".
FBI informants can be used for entrapment and can break the law. Honestly the FBI and others always use child porn as the excuse for mass surveillance and the children are never any safer as a result of any of these arrests.
Arresting people who have the files isn't arresting the people who abused the children. So it's not logical to believe that it's keeping children safer unless all who are arrested are proven sex offenders.
It's just pictures. Better the creeps inside jacking off than outside doing it personally. Isn't it time to get the government out of the bedroom?
Most parents think otherwise and want to punish the creeps for thinking creepy thoughts.
If the people who have unhealthy diet/lifestyle constitute a negative effect on the health care system, isn't it also true that they would prevent a positive effect on the Social Security/retirement system, since they are more likely to die sooner?
If we can presume to tax them for the degree they burden the health care system, shouldn't we credit/reward them for not requiring as many retirement payments as other people?
Social security and retirement are something they paid into themselves.
While not Schneier or Kaspersky, Jeff
Moss did found DefCON & Black Hat. He has some real skills & experience as a security expert.
If that is the standard that they are going by, that one has to be Bruce Schneier to be qualified then probably only Bruce Schneier and a handful of others in the entire world are qualified. If you look at what most of the jobs being advertised are, you don't have to be Bruce Schneier. If you look at what they expect people to know and what they ask people to do, it's digital forensics, it's policy, it's not as technical as designing encryption algorithms, it's more deciding which encryption to use and which access control policy and so on.
Based on the certifications they list as wanting the skill-set bar isn't that you have to be a professor in cryptography. It's that you need to be certified in X with Y years experience.
They never outline a clear path from University to a job in Cyber Security. All the Cyber Security jobs they talk about expect years of experience, a security clearance, and social connections. Most people will be lucky to have just one of those qualifications.
As far as skills go they can take any college student off the street. As far as experience goes they can find some people who have skills and experience. When they want skills, experience and a security clearance then their list is drastically smaller. When they want all of this and want to pay chump change, then they run into problems.
If their goal is to build a cyber workforce, in my opinion the answer is paid internships. If they offer 10,000 paid internships a year they'll have a skilled workforce in no time. If they want to save money they could even get away with offering it unpaid and in this economy people would still take it.
For everyone furiously typing their post that includes words like "choice" "responsibility" and other good words you've cynically crafted in to politically charged euphamisims.
1. There is an obesity problem
2. It is linked to sugary drinks
3. The price of sugary drinks is artificially low due to government subsidies
4. Why do you support government handouts that hurt the public?
Because it's easier to tax sugar than to end subsidies for sugar.
In what world do most obese children "choose" to be fat? Most children are unaware of the nuances of dieting, the dangers of obesity, and the difficulty in losing weight once gained. They don't choose their parents or the culture they're born into either.
That is why we need the tax. The parents are making them fat to catch sales and save money.
"If you choose to be fat, if you choose to smoke, if you choose to live an unhealthy lifestyle, you should be the one to pay for your healthcare expenses."
So, you're an intrusive nannying moronic asshole, I assume you intend to pay for the broken nose I give you when you stick it in my business?
What's funny, is that you assholes pass laws to force me to accept government health care then try to use that as a bludgeon to get me to live the way you want.
It's called tyranny of the majority for as reason, and you and your kind are the worst example of it.
If its your business then pay for your own healthcare. If you want taxes or other people to pool their money to pay into your healthcare the least you can do is care about your health.
I'd say sedentary lifestyle has just as much to do with it. When you were a farmer, you could have a gigantic breakfast, huge lunch, and crazy dinner. Thing was because you were outside moving around all day, you'd just burn those calories up and it wouldn't be an issue.
If you are a farmer who smokes and drinks soda you'll still get fat and sick, just not as quickly.
Dr. Bibbins-Domingo credits the taxation of tobacco products with being the sole cause of decreased smoking. But it seems to me that I grew up with no desire to try cigarettes after spending my childhood watching PSA after PSA pointing out that it would cause all sorts of horrible diseases. Taxation never figured into it for me...and it also seems that taxation only matters after you're hooked on cigarettes, too. I smoke cigars occasionally, but whatever added cost comes from the taxes don't matter, since it's a rare occurrence. The taxes would matter only if I were regularly spending money on them, like habitual cigarette smokers do. And I've seen how hard it is for smokers to stop, once they are hooked...it's incredibly hard. So I doubt that taxation was the main cause of the decrease in smoking.
You know why? Smokers are draining societies resources in the form of expensive healthcare. Sugar addicts are among the worst, diabetes risk, cancer risk, heart disease risk, etc. It's perfectly rational to tax people who choose to make bad choices which will lead to higher health care costs for everyone else.
If you choose to be fat, if you choose to smoke, if you choose to live an unhealthy lifestyle, you should be the one to pay for your healthcare expenses. The tax allows the government to charge the people who are running up the healthcare expenses and this is an excellent idea for a state which provides universal coverage.
The people with the bad habits should shut up and pay the tax or better maybe the government can simply cut them off healthcare entirely and let them die? Which is it? All I know is the rest of us shouldn't have to pay for their choices.
Much like taxing cigarettes. If cigarettes are so bad for the individual (as the government states - and anyone with a fucking brain knows) why is the government in the cigarette business? And try to be honest with yourself - the government is in the cigarette business when they make 20x the profit on a pack, compared to the cigarette company.
Taxing soda won't do anything but hand over more money to the government. It won't stop a thing and people know it.
Want to stop children drinking soda? then simply make it illegal for them to do so. (Which I don't agree with)
California has universal healthcare. Sick people cost more money than healthy people which means your taxes go up paying for smokers and soda drinkers. Make them pay the extra dollar and suddenly they have to pay for their own bad habits.
Why should everyone else have to pay higher taxes because some people like to drink poison or smoke fiberglass particles?
It may be their choice but they should have to pay for their choice and not make everyone else pay.
I guess "cheating" makes for a better headline but this is an excellent way of taking notes in class.
With several people contributing to the same page of notes you can correct each others mistakes and don't risk missing an important point in the lecture because you were busy writing down the last important point.
Right and that would be fine but the exams should still be different for each student so that they cannot just get all the right answers from their notes. If it's basic memorization it's just an IQ test and I usually ace those sorts of tests. It's not fair but there are people who can just listen to lectures, never take notes, and ace exams simply because the professor is just asking you to recite what he or she said, or to recite what you memorized.
The hardest exams are open book, but that is because the grading is subjective and the professor can fail you for poor handwriting. Honestly I think it's best to have an example with some memorization, an exam with some very difficult conceptual questions, and to mix up the questions in such a way so that people who do have good memorization skills cannot help the people who don't, and people who do have deep conceptual understanding cannot help people who simply memorized the answers.
I took on online class, calculous, to fulfill a pre-requsiste for my MBA.
I had not taken calculous since High School, and it was almost impossible to learn it via the online class and the text book. To take the weekly tests and quizzes, I just figured out the patterns of where the numbers went. You could take the quizzes over and over again till you go a passing grade.
Give me a class with a grad student who can not speak english any day.
The pattern thing is something I've seen in many multiple choice exams and I've figured it out too. Some multiple choice exams you can solve by figuring out first which answers are least likely to be correct and then logically narrowing down until you end up with 2 answers to choose from which you can then guess on and half the time guess right.
I've used that method on exams, it's not considered cheating because it's not our fault if the Professors use a multiple choice exam which has patterns which can be found by the more higher IQ students. These exams are more like IQ tests.
That being said you probably don't want to take an exam without studying. The method of finding the least correct answers to determine the correct answer is a strategy of test taking itself which breaks most multiple choice exams. It's a hack. But if you don't study you still wont get an A and that hack will only result in a passing grade for an exam you never studied for.
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.
Written exams are difficult to cheat on if the exams are random questions. If the exams all have the same answers than a pool of answers can be generated and covertly distributed.
You don't have to make the questions easier. I've written "open library" tests at University that allowed us to bring in any and all books we wanted. (1998; wi-fi was not an issue.) The tests had questions hard enough, phrased well enough and timed well enough that a student who understood the material had no problems getting it done in time, but students who depended on being able to look things up during the exam bombed because they didn't have time to find the final answers.
Exactly. Time limits are one of the solutions. Another solution is to never give the same set of questions but to always give random questions. The third is to put questions on the exam which aren't simply choose the right answer from A to E, but instead put in multiple right answers and have then list the order of rightness or wrongness of the answer.
So that B is more right than C, but E is more right than D and A.
Something that helps is having deep understanding questions not trivial calculation questions. In the real world you'll have Google and 90% of what you learn in college will not be relevant to your job and when you switch jobs it will be understood that it was 10 years ago and you need time to get up to speed. Google/internet has a very hard time of giving answers to understanding type questions (things like what causes electric current to flow on the outer edge of a conductor rather than through the whole thing). You take a while to figure it out and you either understand it or you don't versus 4 pages of DEs to solve only to find out that you made a 4th grade arithmetic error on page one. It doesn't test understanding just the ability to churn out lots of math with little errors quickly.
I agree but it depends on the subject also. Some subjects people prefer to rely on "technical" sophistication rather than simplicity. How do you test certain subjects without testing for fundamental knowledge?
Right... and so therefore, it doesn't matter whatever questions you set, so long as the students can google for the correct answer, everything's fine right?
That's why you randomize the questions so that they cannot. There wont be enough time for them to Google up all the answers within the time limit since they wont know in advance what the questions are. Finally you can just include questions which cannot be answered by Google.
An example is look at this problem and find the most efficient solution, A, B, C or D. Google isn't going to be able to tell you that. If the question is "find the most inefficient solution" Google cannot tell you that either. Google only generally tells you the facts, it's not going to tell you about anything you learned in class or anything you can deduce.
Such as for instance what is the next number in this sequence 3,6,9,15,24,*