[HN Gopher] Students think the College Board is running a Reddit...
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Students think the College Board is running a Reddit sting
Author : hhs
Score : 118 points
Date : 2020-05-17 18:59 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vulture.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vulture.com)
| goda90 wrote:
| On a related note, I've seen multiple posts online about
| technical difficulties with online AP tests like videos from
| students trying to press the submit button as the countdown timer
| is almost to zero and nothing happening. Some claimed they
| contacted College Board and were told they'd have to troubleshoot
| their computers during the makeup exam. That seems unreasonable
| for such an expensive test.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| They should have Amazon run the exams. They are the one tech
| company committed to their services actually working when
| needed.
| schoolornot wrote:
| They outsource their certification exams to Pearson and PSI.
| Both platforms are riddled with bugs.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Oh, the education giants are horrible.
| bransonf wrote:
| Nearly every single one. In college, I probably used
| close to a dozen different web applications for
| assignments. Math, chemistry, engineering, biology,
| Spanish.
|
| I can't remember the name of the web app for my calculus
| homework, but this was the only one I kind of liked, and
| ironically it was free. I think it might have been
| webwork. And in a CS class we used Perusal, which I liked
| as well, but the grading was an awful black box.
|
| The others cost several hundred dollars, sometimes per
| semester. I remember the immense frustration of my
| Spanish professor, who sent an email to their support at
| least once a week. Their answer was always "We only
| support Firefox"
|
| That did not stop dozens of students from using Chrome
| and Safari, myself included. I remember once getting
| frustrated with the homework, so I wrote a little
| JavaScript to brute force a question. The security was
| generally awful.
|
| My fondest memory was using Github to submit assignments,
| and later as a TA to grade these assignments. Much less
| friction.
|
| Obviously, I think college professors are looking for a
| way to reduce their burden of creating assignments and
| grading, but these education giants put out poor quality
| apps, knowing they'll generate revenue regardless.
|
| Frankly, I think there needs to be a widespread effort to
| open source education. Both content and assignments.
| There is no justification to charge tens of thousands in
| tuition and top this off with a few more thousand in jank
| software.
| userbinator wrote:
| _Their answer was always "We only support Firefox"_
|
| These days, that's better than "only support Chrome", but
| I get your point --- being browser-agnostic seems to be
| something a lot of sites, not just learning-related ones,
| are unfortunately not doing lately.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Open source is never going to be good enough for non-
| technicals in institutions. They want the support
| contracts, nice installers, and good UIs. They want an
| answered RFP which proves that it meets some 200
| requirements. They want someone they can just pass a
| support issue off to.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Open source is not the same as DIY. You can definitely
| combine open source content and 3rd-party support, though
| lots of OER's (including e.g. Khan Academy) are sadly
| licensed under "non-commercial use only" terms that make
| this artificially difficult, and do not even provide
| commercial support themselves.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| You can, but the open-source types are usually quite
| fanatical about you not doing so.
| dylz wrote:
| mymathlab is the antithesis of good UI
| bransonf wrote:
| Yep, Pearson makes MySpanishLab as well. Generally one of
| the most awful UX I'v ever had in a web app.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| You have to compare it to GIMP.
| iratewizard wrote:
| They exist and thrive on what I'll call "frat bro
| networking." They're able to become gatekeepers to so
| many things by using their connections to pull strings.
| Once they establish themselves in a space, they use
| standard bullying tactics to stay the gatekeeper. That's
| how textbooks routinely become $1,000 paperweights each
| year. That's how brands like Varsity become synonymous
| with a sport's skill bracket. I've personally lost fights
| with the giants and know a textbook startup founder that
| was forced to do a 180 pivot by Pearson.
| applecrazy wrote:
| As a college student, don't even get me started on
| Pearson/Cengage. Terrible UX, horrible glitches, and the
| "access codes" which only exist to shake down students
| for money and undermine the used textbook market.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Access codes that cannot be purchased independent of a
| textbook. The fact that these companies structure their
| "products" that way bothers me less than the fact that
| universities allow their students to be exploited by it.
| Learning that they don't actually care about my personal
| or financial wellbeing really disillusioned me to the
| whole college education system.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Complain to your university. We outsource grading the
| weekly portion of homework to Pearson because there is no
| money for TA's. The alternative would be a fulltime
| position to administer a LONCAPA instance for the
| institution, but in the current financial climate that's
| an impossibility.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Was you just a couple of years ago...
| vulcan01 wrote:
| Funnily enough, I think that they _are_ running on AWS
| Lambda.
| zackbloom wrote:
| They actually did, many of the errors students have been
| experienced are with Amazon's Lambda product.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Amazon Lambda is basically like a part though. I mean
| contracting Amazon to build the system and operate it.
| Wasn't the Lambda error a resource limit one?
| joncrane wrote:
| They mean "Amazon should run" the exams, not "they should
| have built their exam submission infrastructure using AWS."
|
| Lambda is part of Amazon's Cloud Computing subsidiary
| Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is a utility like
| DigitalOcean or any hosting provider. It's not some kind of
| guaranteed success strategy.
| artificial wrote:
| This made me smile. AWS is now the new Microsoft in the
| sense that "nobody got fired for picking AWS" or like the
| gold plated cables at Big Box Store to the less informed.
| MoAr BeTtAR.
| seemslegit wrote:
| I'm more curious how well the 'we made a whole new batch of tests
| under emergency time pressures so that students won't benefit
| from googling' claim holds up, I mean google certainly did its
| part here during the last decade by becoming less and less useful
| for finding answers to non SEOed questions and yet...
| MattGaiser wrote:
| In the information age, we are going to need an alternative to
| testing merely information in an easy to grade way.
| bnj wrote:
| Are colleges even going to accept high scores on these exams for
| credit / advanced placement?
|
| It's a shame the college board decided to go through all this
| instead of refunding the fees they collected from students,
| especially when the value proposition on the students' side is
| uncertain.
|
| Add in behavior like "posting content to confuse and deter those
| who attempt to cheat" when internet research during the exam is
| not actually a violation of their rules, and the organization
| starts to look fairly predatory.
| TAForObvReasons wrote:
| Some schools don't just accept the scores as-is. After getting
| a 5 on AP Chem, I had to pass another entrance exam and take a
| freshman organic chem class to get the AP credit
| brewdad wrote:
| I think the most likely scenario will be either additional
| testing administered by the university like you experienced
| or generic credits towards a degree with a requirement that
| students still take Chem 101 or whatever.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Do universities have a choice?
|
| My local school system is guaranteeing students that their
| grade will not be lower than when they closed schools. Many
| classes had not yet had any kind of exam, so they have 95%
| averages.
|
| Universities obviously believe that any grades from the
| semester are now worthless and some have said so. But what are
| they going to do? Not accept any local students?
|
| Every metric you might use to admit students has been tainted
| by this COVID business.
| whymauri wrote:
| I think universities are necessarily going to rely more on
| the "soft" aspects of applications to select students. It
| won't be a problem for top colleges - they could probably
| toss out the entire admitted class twice over and still
| select a world-class pool of students from the application
| pool.
|
| I think it might be problematic for T2-T3 schools and state
| schools that are generally lenient when accepting AP credit.
| As for graduate and professional schools... that's going to
| be a mess. Harvard Medical School will only consider COVID
| Pass/Fail grades if colleges make those grading schemes
| mandatory for students; otherwise, students will have to
| submit letter grades. That's (1) completely heartless and (2)
| an arbitrary advantage for students who went to schools where
| P/F is mandatory.
| ghaff wrote:
| Presumably a lot of admittance decisions have already been
| made. These are about AP exams--basically placing out of
| college courses--so not a huge deal overall (especially at
| more selective schools).
|
| Honestly, the bigger issue for a lot of students at the
| moment is the uncertainty over the degree to which schools
| will open up for physical classes in the fall. What makes
| sense under those circumstances? And, of course, a lot of
| the usual gap year options aren't going to be available
| either.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| The issue is for applications next year when these
| courses should have been at the centre of applications.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I think we are going to see that it means nothing.
|
| Andy Grove got his education at City College when it was
| open admission.
|
| Missing a semester of grades isn't going to ruin SUNY Stony
| Brook it whatever.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Cambridge International Examinations (UK based high school
| board for O/A levels) is giving students grades on their O/A
| levels based on the grades they got in their last few internal
| school exams [1].
|
| Universities will pretty have to accept them if they want a
| reasonable intake of students.
|
| [1] https://www.cambridgeinternational.org/covid/
| Gaelan wrote:
| In the US, AP tests aren't really used for admissions--that
| primarily falls on the SAT/ACT, GPA and the more subjective
| things (essay, rec letters, etc). AP tests mainly are just
| for the college credit.
| applecrazy wrote:
| I believe the College Board surveyed universities on whether
| they'd take these virtual exams for credit. Most institutions
| said yes.
|
| edit: really? respond instead of downvoting.
| willart4food wrote:
| r/entrapment
| vulcan01 wrote:
| Found the below on the CollegeBoard website today [1]. Only
| effective for the second week of AP exams.
|
| > Students with an unsuccessful submission will see instructions
| about how to email their response on the page that says, "We Did
| Not Receive Your Response." The email address that appears will
| be unique to each student.
|
| [1]: https://apcoronavirusupdates.collegeboard.org/faqs
| dylan604 wrote:
| Even if they are, so what? Sure, time would probably be better
| spent making their online testing actually work. However, anti-
| cheating is always something these types of tests prepare for
| whether that's exam room monitoring or trying to protect their
| online exams. Setting up a honeypot to get students seems exactly
| like the lazy method these people would attempt.
| jedberg wrote:
| Why is setting up a honeypot lazy? If they had been good at it
| it would have worked flawlessly.
|
| Just disqualify anyone who copy/pastes answers from the known
| shared workspace.
| jedberg wrote:
| The college board was in a tough spot this year. They couldn't
| really cancel the exams -- Juniors need them for college
| admissions, and Seniors need them for college credit.
|
| But they also have to instill trust in the system.
|
| Which led them to them having claims on their website that the
| test was "uncheatable" and had "the highest level of integrity"
| while on other parts of their website claiming they had deployed
| extreme security measures to thwart cheating.
|
| At the end of the day I suspect the colleges will just accept the
| scores under the assumption that it would be poor form on their
| part to give the students a hard time about something they had no
| control over.
| Traster wrote:
| I'm sorry this is just not true. They weren't in a tough spot
| at all. People who have to go and work in a warehouse for
| minimum wage with no PPE are in a tough spot.
|
| >But they also have to instill trust in the system.
|
| Yes, and I have to rob a bank to demonstrate I'm rich.
|
| What you're saying is that they're in a tough spot because they
| can profit from lying and chose to do so.
| abhisuri97 wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/u/dinosauce313 for reference.
| eanzenberg wrote:
| Honeypotting minors is so unethical I don't know where to begin.
| These kids' futures could've been completely fucked
| catalogia wrote:
| While honeypotting teenagers does seem kind of fucked up, it's
| not the honeypotting that would have been screwing over the
| kids trying to use reddit to cheat on their exams. That's very
| much a _" hoist with their own petard"_ scenario.
| elliekelly wrote:
| It also bothers me that they cancelled exams of students they
| said had planned to cheat. The College Board should have given
| them an opportunity to take the exam and see if they
| participated in the cheat chats before cancelling their score.
| In my mind thinking about cheating, researching ways to cheat,
| and even planning on cheating isn't the same as actually
| cheating. Anxious kids who are studying do all kinds of dumb
| stuff and joining a subreddit of potential cheaters doesn't
| necessarily mean the student is a cheater. You have to give
| someone - especially a kid - the opportunity to do the right
| thing.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| If you think abstractly about pedagogy as a social science, it's
| very obvious from seeing how much education is struggling with
| cheating that the field has had zero progress in the past
| century. We need to stop conflating social development,
| socialized childcare, and education systems.
|
| Here's my shitlist:
|
| * Children should attempt hard problems that they can make
| progress on, but probably cannot solve. It is wrong that schools
| give nearly zero exposure to truly hard problems, and plenty of
| exposure to trivilally solvable problems. And no, making them
| tease out the meaning of a word-problem doesn't qualify as
| difficulty. I mean give them a problem that makes them find a
| wikipedia page and learn on their own.
|
| * Computers are here to stay. I remember when I was little, I was
| told that I wouldn't always have a calculator on me. That is
| demonstrably false, I literally do not go anywhere without a
| computer in my pocket. Furthermore, that computer has a
| WolframAlpha app that can interface with server clusters running
| the most advanced computer algebra systems in existence. Why did
| I learn stoichiometry? _There is something deeply wrong with
| education if students could easily pass an AP Physics exam with
| access to WolframAlpha, and will (probably) have access to
| WolframAlpha in every practical application of their AP physics
| education, but are artificially prevented from having access
| during the exam._ Why don 't the tests correspond to real-world
| application of the subject? Oh, it's more convenient for you to
| evaluate it this way? That's tough shit, figure it out.
|
| * Students should have an entire day dedicated to math, and then
| they should have an entire day dedicated to English, etc. Some
| students might get bored and tired, sure, because sometimes
| learning isn't pleasant. But over and over on this site we hear
| that successful developers are the people who are able to
| maintain focus for long periods of time on difficult problems.
| Why do students waste 35 minutes a day switching classrooms?
|
| * There is not enough differentiation of students. Advanced
| students have so much of their time wasted. The advanced 3rd
| graders should be hanging out with advanced 6th graders.
|
| The way that the education system is collapsing from cheating and
| going online-only is nothing short of exciting to me. A lot had
| to go wrong for us to get to this point -- answer banks exist
| because everyone uses the same textbook and the same curriculum.
| Cheating with other students exists because group-work is the
| natural state of humans. Students aren't excited about the work
| they do because they sense that there's a magical oracle on the
| internet with the solution to the simple problems they're
| solving.
|
| It's all going to fall apart and that's something to celebrate.
| The thing that I'm most afraid of is that Americans have lost the
| ability to take risks at aggregate and think radically about
| redesigning institutions. All of these problems that I'm talking
| about are just as bad in every other country in the world. Some
| country is going to figure it out and they're going to reap the
| rewards, and I'm afraid that America isn't brave enough anymore
| to be the first.
| atq2119 wrote:
| _I remember when I was little, I was told that I wouldn 't
| always have a calculator on me._
|
| This turned out to be false, but being able to do mental
| arithmetic is still an extremely valuable skill. The usability
| of your pocket calculator is really bad in comparison, and what
| the mental arithmetic gives you is a general automatic numeracy
| where you can ballpark the answer to numerical problems much
| faster than using a tool.
|
| This becomes a qualitative difference because you'll do more of
| those mental checks as a matter of course that you would never
| pull out a calculator for. Kind of like how git made merges so
| painless that they're now a standard part of most people's
| development flow. That's the kind of qualitative impact that
| mental arithmetic can give you.
|
| I admit that this is a point that's difficult to get across,
| and schools generally don't do a great job of it...
| nickysielicki wrote:
| Don't you feel like you would have improved at this
| regardless of whether your schooling put a concerted effort
| into it? I've forgotten a lot of things from school -- doing
| math in my head isn't one of them because I use it all the
| time. Is that evidence that it's a good investment of time
| for 1st graders, or is it evidence that you would have
| learned it anyway due to the utility of it?
| dylan604 wrote:
| yes, being able to calculate the tip for your bar tab without
| needing to dig into a purse to find your "calculator" is a
| nicety. Being able to calculate the savings from the 20%
| sales price is also a useful trick. My favorite is just being
| able to round up the prices of items at the grocery store,
| and keep a running total in my head. I know I'm a nerd, but
| the concept calculating the tip by doubling the value after
| moving the decimal place one position to the right of the
| total flabbergasts me on how difficult it is for others to
| grasp. That's like 6th grade level math (at least it was when
| I learned it).
| dehrmann wrote:
| Looks like they're not preparing for it well, but I'm sure
| there's going to be more cheating than usual this time around. I
| bet there will be some oddities in score distribution and
| students with unimpressive SAT score who suddenly nailed AP
| Calculus.
| ghaff wrote:
| AP Calculus would probably be one of the least productive tests
| to cheat on. So you place out of the first semester of Calculus
| at college in spite of not really knowing the subject. Now it's
| the second semester calculus class. How's that going to go? To
| say nothing of other STEM classes that depend on math.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Depends if you need it later. Plenty of people (such as those
| in business school) might have to take one semester of calc.
| This way, you get it out of the way completely.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Plenty of majors only require one semester of calculus.
| Spivak wrote:
| At my alma mater passing AP Calc is enough to test you out
| of your math requirements entirely for Architecture, for
| example.
| labster wrote:
| People who cheat on the AP Calculus test just know no limit.
| They'll just put their derivative answers on the test. Then
| in Calc II, cheating remains their integral strategy --
| they're all-in, not just by parts.
| applecrazy wrote:
| CS major at a state school here.
|
| I got to skip 2 semesters of calculus based on my 5 in AP
| Calc BC.
|
| But yeah I'm kind of ticked off that these virtualized exams
| (which are trivial to cheat on) are being counted for college
| credit.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| You're thinking like an adult, not a teenager.
| vulcan01 wrote:
| They are sending our scores and responses to our teachers, and
| I am sure that most teachers will report a student with a C in
| class who then gets a 5 on the AP exam.
| jedberg wrote:
| Unlikely. Most AP teachers are rated on their AP pass rate.
| They have every incentive in the world to help you cheat.
|
| That's why they don't let your teacher proctor your exam
| unless they have to.
| x0x0 wrote:
| I think Calculus is actually one of the most robust tests to
| googling. You either understand the material well enough to
| apply it, perhaps with a quick reminder of eg a particular trig
| substitution, or you don't. Using my previous example, you're
| not going to learn either recognize a trig substitution is
| appropriate or how to apply a trig substitution in the 3
| minutes or whatever you have per question.
|
| edit: NM, I forgot wolfram alpha. oof.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| I took the AP Chem exam last Thursday, fortunately without
| incident. One of my friends was unable to submit his AP
| Literature assessment, facing the same error popup that has
| plagued so many of the other students. I've heard from several
| other students in my district that have had a similar problem. My
| brother had an AWS Lambda error message when he tried to access
| his exam the first time; CollegeBoard had surpassed their Lambda
| service limits (Fortunately he was able to access his exam after
| trying again).
|
| Their online tooling has never been great-AP Classroom takes at
| least 3 tries for me to access, one to log in again which then
| redirects back to AP Central, one that just redirects back to AP
| Central, then finally one that takes me to my assignments page.
|
| This certainly isn't an easy problem to solve. CollegeBoard
| definitely should have designed a more stable system to host
| their exams on, but as with anything digital, there's always an
| opportunity for error-even moreso since everyone takes the exam
| at the same time (which is an entirely different can of worms,
| with students in Guam taking exams at 1a, 3a, and 5a).
|
| If I were to design these assessments, I'd have it be an untimed,
| synthesis-based assessment, more similar to AP Computer Science
| Principles[0], with their Digital Portfolio. Simply having a
| deadline for all students to upload to a basic tool (which
| already exists as CB's Digital Portfolio system). Like the
| current exam, have the submissions sent back to teachers for
| validation (there's nothing on the current system that validates
| your identity, simply paste in your AP ID and enter your
| name/dob, and you're in the system).
|
| I think if a student can write a well-formed essay over a topic,
| they can get college credit. In science classes, they could
| design an experiment and simulate a lab report. CS classes can
| create a program, etc.
|
| [0]: https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-computer-
| scien...
| acbart wrote:
| I still have yet to hear anyone propose a workable solution for
| the ultimate problem of remote assessment in CS: hiring someone
| to just do your work for you. Everyone keeps saying "oh just
| make it project-based" like I _didn 't_ have a student last
| fall who hired someone to do his final project. I only detected
| him cause the person he hired sucked and left bread-crumbs; how
| many students did I not detect because they hired competent
| people?
| Frondo wrote:
| Could something like pair programming work to reduce the risk
| of hiring out the whole project?
| acbart wrote:
| Reduces the risk, but doesn't prevent it.
| GhostVII wrote:
| You could make them give a video presentation about their
| project to show that they actually know how it works, not
| foolproof but it helps. I think it is pretty much impossible
| to completely remove that possibility though. I've had lots
| of courses where the majority of my mark is assignments and
| projects, and I'm sure some students pay others to do it for
| them, and the professors just accept that as a possibility. I
| don't think it is worth providing a worse experience to the
| majority of honest students to prevent a small minority of
| dishonest students from cheating.
| whymauri wrote:
| Some companies, like Pinterest, use systems like "lytmus" to
| prevent cheating. It's a monitored VM box where you do the
| entire assignment inside the GUI VM. I'm sure certain trust
| factor guarantees prevent you from outsourcing the assignment
| overseas.
|
| All that said, it's an awful system and I ragequit the take-
| home midway through. It's buggy, slow, lacks useful hotkeys,
| and basically requires you to become accustomed to a wiped
| Linux box without any of the tools you would typically use.
| Sure, you can install them - but it's a timed assessment, for
| crying out loud.
|
| Finally, I suppose nothing stops you from logging in with
| your credentials on your authorized machine and then
| physically handing that machine to a paid agent.
| derefr wrote:
| > I'm sure certain trust factor guarantees prevent you from
| outsourcing the assignment overseas.
|
| Who said anything about overseas? Hire your classmate to
| sit down at your own PC to do it. _That 's_ the Hard
| Problem.
| marcinzm wrote:
| I heard some companies, possibly only in India, required
| a webcam to be on the whole time and for you to rotate it
| around the room beforehand.
| erichurkman wrote:
| This is the same reason I offer candidates remote screen
| share-based technical assessments. Part of what makes an
| effective engineer is mastery over tools: by putting you
| into Coderpad or Hacker Rank type tools, I'm handicapping
| you.
|
| Not everyone opts for that (maybe their local environment
| is messy, or they only have a locked down work device,
| etc), but I always make it an option.
|
| I've learned many things over the years watching other
| experts in their local environments as an interviewer. New
| packages, new shortcuts, new helper apps, ...
| [deleted]
| vulcan01 wrote:
| An interesting way to assess your students, if you have time
| and a reasonable amount of students, is to do what the IB
| organisation required my Spanish teacher to do: a one-on-one
| oral exam with presentation and follow-up questions from the
| teacher, all recorded and sent to the IBO grading board.
| acbart wrote:
| I'm 1-on-1 interviewing my 59 Algorithms students this
| semester. 20 minute interviews, and I have 2.5 TAs to help
| offset the workload. Starts on Wednesday, I'm absolutely
| dreading it. This would never scale to my 180 Intro
| students that I'll be getting this fall.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| It's definitely a problem, even on CollegeBoard's current
| platform. Normal AP exams/SATs require photo ID validation at
| the exam site, and are run by school admins who will notice
| if someone is out of place. I work as a tutor on Wyzant and
| have been asked to "tutor" during the exam as well as to just
| do CS Principles students' portfolio assignments.
|
| While some might argue my approach is too aggressive, I
| report every account that messages me asking to cheat to
| Wyzant as well as the appropriate organization. My goal is to
| make it simply not worth the attempt to cheat (obviously only
| if they explicitly ask; I don't report when it's a possible
| miscommunication). Just about all of them have had their
| accounts deactivated.
|
| If technology access could be assumed, I don't think it would
| be unreasonable to ask students to upload a picture of
| themselves with their photo ID, as well as some sort of
| validity check, like a unique code only provided to the
| device they're taking the exam on. Obviously, that can't be
| implemented because of equity issues. Ideally, a secured
| assessment would be done on something similar to Pearson Vue,
| ProctorU, or the multitude of other online proctoring
| services. Unfortunately, that's not an option due to both
| scale and technology access (not everyone has a compatible
| device, I'm sure many students are taking the exam on their
| phones).
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > I still have yet to hear anyone propose a workable solution
| for the ultimate problem of remote assessment in CS
|
| What about 1-on-1 interviews? Ask people the questions face-
| to-face, ask them to talk you through their answers. That's
| how advanced degrees like PhDs are assessed.
| im3w1l wrote:
| There are entertainers streaming with appearance-modifier
| and voice-modifier filters. You can't know you are
| interviewing the person you think you are.
|
| I don't think there is an off-the-shelf product for
| cheaters, but it's only a question of time. Especially now
| that I mentioned it.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I think ideally you should know your students well enough
| to be able to judge whether they're giving you answers
| which correspond their ability and their own take on the
| topic. If you've been tutoring them up to this point in
| the year you should know them pretty well.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| 1on1's take too long and don't InternetScale^tm
| [deleted]
| indigochill wrote:
| This is also what my team does for professional interviews.
| We give them a take-home test with some simple problems,
| but we actually care much more about how they talk through
| their solution with us than the solution itself. We don't
| even care if they copy/pasted stuff from Stack Overflow.
|
| What we care about is that they can demonstrate they
| understand the problem and solution. The code is just the
| starting point for that conversation.
|
| We have hired people who submitted failing solutions
| because they were able to think through the problem on the
| spot when we told them it failed and asked why.
| acbart wrote:
| I'm 1-on-1 interviewing my 59 Algorithms students this
| semester. 20 minute interviews, and I have 2.5 TAs to help
| offset the workload. Starts on Wednesday, I'm absolutely
| dreading it. This would never scale to my _180_ Intro
| students that I 'll be getting this fall.
| turndown wrote:
| What are the 59 algorithms?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| 59 students of algorithms, not students of 59 algorithms,
| I would guess.
| elliekelly wrote:
| Do you have them upload the source code of their projects? If
| so, after the upload could you display the project's file
| tree along with a last minute change their hypothetical
| client has requested and give them a minute or two to select
| the file(s) that would need a pull request in order to make
| the change? They don't even need to make the change, just
| identify where the change would happen.
|
| Someone who wrote the code themselves will know right away
| and someone who purchased a project won't have enough time to
| sift through the code to figure out the answer.
| joncrane wrote:
| I wouldn't be shocked if College Board just signed up AWS
| ProServe to a big contract.
|
| If not, details in profile, College Board!
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| The entire problem seems to be that the College Board (and ACT
| and SAT) took an initial design that works fine in a proctored
| classroom and applied it to a global testing scenario where it
| doesn't fit.
|
| > _If I were to design these assessments, I 'd have it be an
| untimed, synthesis-based assessment..._
|
| Yes, but that takes more resources and has more variability
| among reviewers. It does have the advantages of being more fair
| for students with time zone issues or closures, and of being
| durable in the face of temporary website issues. Judging by
| their decisions, the priorities of the testing agencies seem to
| have been taking out the cost of the human element of reviewers
| (multiple choice is easy to grade, synthesis essays need expert
| reviewers) and the variability of the tests and reviewers to
| certify their results for schools.
| Gaelan wrote:
| Normal AP tests are half multiple choice and half "free
| response." What "free response" means depends heavily on the
| test, but they are always human-graded. This year, the tests
| are free-response only.
| pirocks wrote:
| Human graded is a generous way of describing what they do
| with free response. When I took ap tests a large part of
| the preparation was knowing exactly how they where going to
| grade the questions, and optimising answers to hit as many
| points on the answer key.
| entee wrote:
| I agree to a certain extent on your revised assessment
| framework, but I'm not sure it would work very well in some of
| the basic sciences. As someone who has gone to college for
| these things and beyond, I can tell you there's very little as
| a "practicum" that I could have demonstrated coming out of high
| school or early college. This is in contrast to CS, where if
| you build a program, the fact that the program exists and
| solves a given problem correctly is ipso facto a demonstration
| of understanding. Further, it's a demonstration of fairly
| comprehensive understanding of the coursework (you'd have to
| grasp >80% to have the program work at all), which I have
| trouble seeing how to do that in say, chemistry.
|
| You propose a lab report, with example data, and I actually
| really like that idea, but I think it would fail on that last
| score. Looking back, AP chem is a lot of inorganic reactions
| (lots of memorization, some principles), acid base work, some
| organic chem, some lab techniques. It's fairly scattered. A
| single (or several) lab reports would not capture all of it,
| especially given that chemistry doesn't work perfectly
| predictably even with a post-graduate understanding. There's a
| reason basic science lab courses do boring experiments, it's
| because those work reliably.
|
| Anyway, I like the idea, and want to hear more on how to do it,
| but a lab report would have to be supplemented by something
| else to really evaluate understanding in the sciences.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| AP Chem is definitely an exercise in memorization and general
| "knowledge of chemistry" for a good portion of the class.
| Though not a complete solution, a lab report-based assessment
| could look more similar to the CS Principles exam in another
| facet: written response.
|
| On the APCSP exam, there's actually very few points for your
| code itself. You get a point for identifying an abstraction
| and a point for identifying an algorithm, but the rest of the
| points (there are 8 total) are assigned based on your written
| responses. Analytical questions could be added to each exam-
| broad enough that no two students should have too much
| overlap, but narrow enough that it's clear what is expected
| of a student response.
|
| From there, a few points could be assigned for the quality of
| the designed experiment, but a majority would be assigned
| based on the quality of the written response questions.
|
| AP Physics follows a similar model on the regular paper exam-
| you have to prove some theory and design a complete
| experiment to do so. I believe it also included one light
| analysis question.
| derefr wrote:
| > Further, it's a demonstration of fairly comprehensive
| understanding of the coursework (you'd have to grasp >80% to
| have the program work at all), which I have trouble seeing
| how to do that in say, chemistry.
|
| Lock someone in a room with some reagents, and expect them to
| produce extracted/cleaned output products of a certain
| testable purity and mass after N time. Make the process of
| getting from the reagents to the final product really
| involved, requiring at least one of every kind of basic
| reaction/setup taught in the course. (NileRed's "aspirin to
| tylenol" sequence might be a good example challenge:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Ejuew2riA)
|
| You know this is "the practical approach", because this is
| essentially how gangs qualify their chemists. "If you can
| really make [illegal drug], then make us some! Without doing
| anything that'll get the police called! In four hours!"
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