[ege_erdogan]

I see online synchronous 1-2 hour exams as a mistaken result of the "let's emulate in-person teaching in a remote setting" mindset.

You don't succeed in remote teaching and learning by trying to make it as close as possible to the in-person setup. You have to treat it as an entirely different problem.

Consider the synchronous exam. It is a perfect method of grading in-person. It is hard to cheat and all people take the same test in the same place. It is as fair as it can get.

In an online setting however, people can face all sort of troubles in a few hour window in their home. Your internet might stop working, neighbor might be making too much noise etc. Everyone takes the exam in a different setting and it is as unequal as it can get. It is also practically impossible to prevent cheating.

[proverbialbunny]

When I was in college in 2005 I had classes that could be taken online. When tested we were given a deadline, usually 24 hours after the test had been handed out. We could start whenever we wanted, take breaks, work throughout the day, as long as we had it in before the deadline. It seemed to work fine.

[ericd]

Yeah, take home tests were awesome. The problems on the ones I remember were ridiculously hard (specifically thinking about an algorithms take home that we were given a week for), but that spurred us to do some of our best thinking and learning.

[bzb6]

It worked even finer for those who paid someone else to do the test for them.

[pizzaknife]

How does one fib proficiency in a role as an individual contributor? I mean after school is through? I have been a software engineer for 14years. I am self taught with only a 2yr degree i completed my 4th year into this career. Can a line in resume(a degree mention) remedy a failed technical screening process?

Personal experience : I have declined several MD CS holders this year alone for positions because their demonstrated abilities were not up to par(and these were not particularly difficult questions).

[epylar]

If you're lucky you get a manager who doesn't want to rock the boat and just assigns someone competent to 'help' you constantly.

[delaynomore]

People cheat for all kinds of reasons. I'd say in many cases it bears little or no relevance to their proficiency as an IC. For example, I've seen people cheat in a Computer History class (compsci elective) presumably because they just want an easy A to push up the GPA. It doesn't necessarily mean they can't code.

[suramya_tomar]

Even if they can code, I don't think I would want to hire anyone who would cheat on something so basic just to push up their GPA. What is to prevent them from doing the same thing at work to get a better bonus/raise?

In the end it comes down to trust. We can't trust someone who is willing to cheat to get ahead even if they are a super coder.

- Suramya

[ralphc]

With remote, anything is possible. Someone basically outsourced his job to China, paid someone a cheaper rate to do his work for him.

[otagekki]

Yeah, incredible story... Could have lasted, but too bad he was a bit careless in handing out his company's personal credentials to the Chinese team as well.

[PragmaticPulp]

> You don't succeed in remote teaching and learning by trying to make it as close as possible to the in-person setup. You have to treat it as an entirely different problem.

I agree at a high level, but practically speaking it's not realistic to expect colleges to completely reinvent their entire teaching systems for a temporary, 1-2 year remote learning period.

Now that we've been dealing with COVID for almost an entire year, it's easy to forget that at one point we thought this would all be over in a matter of weeks or months. The situation was also evolving in real time. Colleges were looking for the most efficient stop-gap solutions, not for ways to completely overhaul their learning experience.

> It is also practically impossible to prevent cheating.

It's a mistake to assume that because we can't eliminate all cheating, we shouldn't bother reducing any cheating.

The advantage of synchronous test taking is that everyone is exposed to the problem set at the same time. The obvious cheat with asynchronous test taking would be for one person to volunteer to take the test early and then send the questions to their peers, all of whom take the test at the last possible minute.

This happens whenever in-person classes offer two time slots for taking a test. The later time slot is always far more packed than the first and comes back with significantly higher scores. Adding the internet and screenshots/camera phones to the equation amplifies this because students can share the exact test, not just what they recall from memory.

> In an online setting however, people can face all sort of troubles in a few hour window in their home. Your internet might stop working, neighbor might be making too much noise etc.

Educators aren't oblivious to this fact. Working with students who have interruptions is just part of the job. Having someone lose internet isn't much different from having someone get a flat tire on the way to the test. It happens, we deal with it, and it's fine.

I also think you're not giving students enough credit. They're not dumb. If noise is a problem, they're going to use headphones. If internet is flakey, they're going to find a better location to take a test.

It's such a weird double standard to see HN champion work from home as unequivocally superior to working in an office, yet whenever the topic of learning from home comes up we get a laundry list of what-about possibilities that might make the experience worse.

[KallDrexx]

> I agree at a high level, but practically speaking it's not realistic to expect colleges to completely reinvent their entire teaching systems for a temporary, 1-2 year remote learning period.

I don't really understand what you mean by this though. I graduated college in 2007, and all throughout my time from 2003-2007 I had half my courses online, including the quizzes and tests.

Online courses and asynchronous testing isn't something new to Covid, colleges have been doing it for well over a decade now.

Yes you had people try and cheat their way through asynchronous testing by having friends take them earlier, but why is that more of a big deal now than it was previously?

[saagarjha]

> I also think you're not giving students enough credit. They're not dumb. If noise is a problem, they're going to use headphones. If internet is flakey, they're going to find a better location to take a test.

They aren't, but many are much less privileged than you are making them out to be. My mom teaches students who join her class from their car parked as close as possible to get a weak Wi-Fi signal from their house because they have no quiet places at home.

[saghm]

> It's such a weird double standard to see HN champion work from home as unequivocally superior to working in an office, yet whenever the topic of learning from home comes up we get a laundry list of what-about possibilities that might make the experience worse.

This seems like a false equivalence; most employers don't use surveillance software to ensure their remote employees keep their microphone and webcam on, continue looking at the screen at all times, etc. One of the benefits of working from home is that your privacy is _increased_ compared to working an office; if everyone needed to allow their boss or HR or whoever to demand microphone and webcam access to me as they worked (and no, this is NOT comparable to Zoom meetings), then of course they wouldn't be praising work as much.

[Wowfunhappy]

> Now that we've been dealing with COVID for almost an entire year, it's easy to forget that at one point we thought this would all be over in a matter of weeks or months.

I absolutely agree, but I have to say, I also think it's somewhat bizarre that anyone ever thought that. I know it seemed weird to me at the time.

Where exactly did everyone think the pandemic would go after a few months of lockdown?

[DanBC]

> Where exactly did everyone think the pandemic would go after a few months of lockdown?

We thought we'd combine lockdown with tighter quarantines for visitors and excellent test & trace systems with quarantines for people with covid and that we would, like several countries, get covid under control.

[wasdfff]

I TAed this semester and a surprising amount of students have totally terrible internet. One poor kid had to attempt the blackboard exam a dozen times due to connection issues. Even my home network gets saturated with everyone in the neighborhood working from home, which makes zoom calls impossible when lag is spiking, despite having the fastest internet my limited ISP choices offer me.

[lazyasciiart]

In a college scenario, perhaps you can say that dealing with problems is the students responsibility, but for k-12 schools it is the responsibility of the school to provide education even to children with no internet or headphones.

[syshum]

Absent COVID, institution should have been (and many have been) embracing remote learning anyway.

This should have been an option all along, with out the need for a pandemic to force their hand.

>>The advantage of synchronous test taking is that everyone is exposed to the problem set at the same time. The obvious cheat with asynchronous test taking would be for one person to volunteer to take the test early and then send the questions to their peers,

This problem has been largely solved for a long time, because as you noted it is generally impossible to give a test to EVERYONE at the same time.

Thus properly written tests will draw a random selection of questions from a larger pool, the ratio between Pool:Questions the better the security. (i.e a 25 question exam using a 50 question pool is not as secure as a 25 question exam using a 200 question pool)

This method is also used for standardized tests given at the same time, as it cuts out the problem of shoulder surfing or other in-person cheating methods.

[posguy]

PragmaticPulp doesn't seem to have a grasp on how college systems work. From what I have seen UW, Oregon State, Seattle Colleges, etc were already employing question banks and timed test windows rather than resorting to poorly functioning half measures like Respondus LockDown Browser and its ilk.

Many colleges were already fully capable of distance learning in multiple forms, whether through correspondence courses (what WGU often pitches, complete the project or test and bypass the class, though some of their certificate partners abuse test takers with Respondus or similar) or online learning with systems like Canvas.

Decent colleges offer a mix of these, I can attest to the quality of these programs at Seattle Colleges (specifically North Seattle College & Seattle Central). There is little value in building a panopticon of surveillance in higher education, especially when these divert resources that would otherwise enable students to better master the subject.

[throwaway201103]

Most colleges offered correspondence courses in the pre-internet era. You did everything by mail. There was no proof that you did the work yourself; it was just a matter of trust. I took a required writing course that way because it never worked out to schedule it as a regular class. I think for some of the classes that had exams you maybe went to a local exam center where a proctor would check your ID and you'd take the exam. I don't know what they did if there wasn't an exam center conveniently nearby.

[brewdad]

We lost power (and internet) 45 seconds before my son's Physics final last spring during remote learning. He had to quickly scramble to take his testing materials outside and used his cell phone to access the exam.

It worked out for him but easily could have been a disaster. We live at the edge of the school boundary and it was a localized outage due to a car hitting a pole, so he was the only student in his class that was affected. Good luck convincing the teacher if you don't have alternate access to the test.

[silly-silly]

Are modern teachers really that robotic that they dont understand that 'things happen' outside of their limited domain of expectations ?

[munk-a]

I think this is a pretty big miss on where the issues with these sorts of systems are - I'm sure some teachers are phoning it in but the student in the article (Molina) was immediately awarded an F and then had to go through a two month appeal process to get that undone. Once he was talking to a person things moved pretty quickly but the backlog of cases results in a lot of unnecessary stress on students.

[withinboredom]

If you’re a straight-A student, it’s probably not an issue. Like cutting up, or seen as an “average” student, your excuses are just that, and they aren’t excused.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Teachers? Most developers I know have exactly the same blind spot. "What do you mean there's no internet connection?"

[wasdfff]

My uni had me TA this semester which included proctoring exams over zoom. They gave me zero info what I’m supposed to do or even look for while sitting there in the zoom room. I think I was just there to add some semblance of authority. Total waste of time.

Its stupid easy to cheat in this remote world: write your cheat sheet out on a piece of paper and put it just out of sight of the webcam. No technology can beat that.

[mshumi]

Crazy idea in this space. Eye-tracking will eventually be standard on consumer VR headsets that can be had for $300. As someone following the industry closely, I believe that the Oculus Quest 4 or a device like it will certainly have eye-tracking support. Obviously if one were to take their test in a VR environment with their eye-movements tracked it would be almost impossible to cheat. Eyes also provide a good biometric identifier. Mirrors, screens, exploits, etc can be foiled using software locks, HMDs cameras and imu data. Of course I'm not advocating a testing system like this, but it would put a hard stop to cheating on synchronous exams, enforce some level of standardization, and should be accessible to every student in the 1st world. Understandable privacy and ethics issues with something like this. It is probably better to address why people cheat in the first place and make education less reliant on exams. (continuous low-impact variable feedback vs discrete high-impact fixed feedback)

[limitedmage]

Good luck wearing a VR headset for a full 2 hour exam. I get headaches if I wear one for more than 10 minutes, and the weight is uncomfortable and messes with my hair. More surveillance technology is not the solution.

[munk-a]

My wife, who has issues with motion sickness, would absolutely love this approach - she'd be effectively barred from taking exams due to getting headaches and throwing up whenever she attempted it.

Anyways, I'd prefer an approach that led to less invasive face tracking - even if it suffered from a lower detection rate.