WTF Bites
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Imagine if clicking a link in a browser that is not the system default opened the link in another browser...
Using Edge chronimim edition opens some of our internal sites in IE.
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@DogsB there is a policy that can be set for that, so it's probably your system administrator that forced it
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Students argue that the testing systems have made them afraid to click too much or rest their eyes for fear they’ll be branded as cheats. Some students also said they’ve wept with stress or urinated at their desks because they were forbidden from leaving their screens.
One system, Proctorio, uses gaze-detection, face-detection and computer-monitoring software to flag students for any “abnormal” head movement, mouse movement, eye wandering, computer window resizing, tab opening, scrolling, clicking, typing, and copies and pastes. A student can be flagged for finishing the test too quickly, or too slowly, clicking too much, or not enough.
If the camera sees someone else in the background, a student can be flagged for having “multiple faces detected.” If someone else takes the test on the same network — say, in a dorm building — it’s potential “exam collusion.” Room too noisy, Internet too spotty, camera on the fritz? Flag, flag, flag.
Read the article. It's insane.
This Twitter thread is also frightening:
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
It's insane.
The product is total junk. It doesn't do what it is purported to do.
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And even if it did, it's something that would belong in a dictatorship.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that solved in all practical cases by simply making each file in group B depend on every file in group A?
You can force it, but it's really horrible and painful (BTDT back with Java 1.0). It's much easier to use a tool that understands what is going on instead. For example, if you're after a lot of the make aesthetic with Java and don't have complicated dependency issues, use ant. More complex projects are better using one of the more advanced systems like Maven.
Oh yeah, that's a big problem I've encountered myself. But that's a different problem - a single recipe building multiple files. Make just doesn't work like that. But everything depending on everything? Make handles this part just fine.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
Students argue that the testing systems have made them afraid to click too much or rest their eyes for fear they’ll be branded as cheats. Some students also said they’ve wept with stress or urinated at their desks because they were forbidden from leaving their screens.
One system, Proctorio, uses gaze-detection, face-detection and computer-monitoring software to flag students for any “abnormal” head movement, mouse movement, eye wandering, computer window resizing, tab opening, scrolling, clicking, typing, and copies and pastes. A student can be flagged for finishing the test too quickly, or too slowly, clicking too much, or not enough.
If the camera sees someone else in the background, a student can be flagged for having “multiple faces detected.” If someone else takes the test on the same network — say, in a dorm building — it’s potential “exam collusion.” Room too noisy, Internet too spotty, camera on the fritz? Flag, flag, flag.
Read the article. It's insane.
Yes it is. But what you gonna do instead? Let them all collaborate on Discord open in second window?
The main reason why teachers assume all students cheat as much as they can is because they do.
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WTF of my day: Warning, mildly political but I honestly can't wrap my head around this particular catch-22 by this guy.
So, a company got a government contract worth more than 100 million dollars to procure personal protective equipment.
1st problem: The company did not exist five weeks before getting the contract.
2nd problem: It is led by the spouse of a politician who has some influence over the contracting process.
3rd problem: There was no open tender.So you might see how this looks a bit ... dubious. But still, a fanboy of the government in question tells me that this is above board. Because, and I quote: "If there were companies rejected from receiving this contract then we'd have heard about it!"
I'm not sure that he realizes that the lack of an open tender means that there cannot be have been any rejections because other companies never saw the offer to begin with.
I think the guy might be related to those bureaucrats from the beginning of the Hitchhiker's Guide.
“But the plans were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
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@Rhywden led*
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So, a company got a government contract worth more than 100 million dollars to procure personal protective equipment.
1st problem: The company did not exist five weeks before getting the contract.
2nd problem: It is lead by the spouse of a politician who has some influence over the contracting process.
3rd problem: There was no open tender.So you might see how this looks a bit ... dubious.
Our Government's been up to that too. Been caught more than once.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
Students argue that the testing systems have made them afraid to click too much or rest their eyes for fear they’ll be branded as cheats. Some students also said they’ve wept with stress or urinated at their desks because they were forbidden from leaving their screens.
One system, Proctorio, uses gaze-detection, face-detection and computer-monitoring software to flag students for any “abnormal” head movement, mouse movement, eye wandering, computer window resizing, tab opening, scrolling, clicking, typing, and copies and pastes. A student can be flagged for finishing the test too quickly, or too slowly, clicking too much, or not enough.
If the camera sees someone else in the background, a student can be flagged for having “multiple faces detected.” If someone else takes the test on the same network — say, in a dorm building — it’s potential “exam collusion.” Room too noisy, Internet too spotty, camera on the fritz? Flag, flag, flag.
Read the article. It's insane.
This Twitter thread is also frightening:
In my online Calculus class, they made me use something called Lockdown browser to take exams, which disables most OS functionality (clipboard, task switching, window moving/minimizing/maximizing, etc) and browser functionality (context menus, tabs, bookmarks, etc)...
I spent more time writing a program that sandboxes Lockdown and intercepts all its OS API calls than I did studying.
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@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
So, a company got a government contract worth more than 100 million dollars to procure personal protective equipment.
1st problem: The company did not exist five weeks before getting the contract.
2nd problem: It is lead by the spouse of a politician who has some influence over the contracting process.
3rd problem: There was no open tender.So you might see how this looks a bit ... dubious.
Our Government's been up to that too. Been caught more than once.
Oh, it wasn't the German one. Because the EU would slap us around a bit for pulling a stunt like that.
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The main reason why teachers assume all students cheat as much as they can is because they do.
I resent this
implicationassertion!By the way, did you know that Wolfram|Alpha can not only solve most equations, but actually show you a step-by-step breakdown of how the answer was calculated? It was a very useful erm, studying, tool!
Too bad Lockdown browser wouldn't let me access any other sites during the exams...
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@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
So, a company got a government contract worth more than 100 million dollars to procure personal protective equipment.
1st problem: The company did not exist five weeks before getting the contract.
2nd problem: It is lead by the spouse of a politician who has some influence over the contracting process.
3rd problem: There was no open tender.So you might see how this looks a bit ... dubious.
Our Government's been up to that too. Been caught more than once.
Oh, it wasn't the German one. Because the EU would slap us around a bit for pulling a stunt like that.
Poland says hi.
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Oh, it wasn't the German one. Because the EU would slap us around a bit for pulling a stunt like that.
Funny thing is that in most EU countries, any attempt to slap them is met with strict response: Up yours, Makrell!
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:
any attempt to slap them is met with strict response: Up yours, Makrell!
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
Proctorio
My son used that. If it can't detect a camera (because, say, flaky drivers), you can't even attempt to take the test.
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Let them all collaborate on Discord open in second window?
For one of my son's current classes, yes. Everything, including
exams (or at leastquizzes), is small-group collaboration of 3-4 people, with groups (I think) assigned by the teacher. Exams use the Lockdown browser, and are a royal PITA.
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@HardwareGeek I should have clarified that I'm not against going away with traditional testing altogether, thus going away with the entire notion that there is anything a student could do that would be considered cheating. But other than going away with the entire notion of cheating, I don't see anything that could be done to stop cheating on online tests other than that totalitarian dystopia from the article.
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It's the same problem as using heavy DRM. It greatly annoys honest people (sometimes to the point of becoming dishonest just in spite), and it's not really effective against motivated pirates either.
The goal should not be to prevent cheating at all costs, because this is impossible anyways. It should be on designing exams so as to make cheating less effective and easier to detect. Such as less emphasis on rote memorization, and more on personal work.
Of course, doing so requires more work to write and grade the exam. And it would also show how many students can repeat what they've been taught, but don't actually understand it. No wonder it isn't done.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
It's the same problem as using heavy DRM. It greatly annoys honest people (sometimes to the point of becoming dishonest just in spite), and it's not really effective against motivated pirates either.
I wouldn't say so. A single motivated pirate is enough for millions of "crack kiddies" to get access to the game without paying without even trying. Meanwhile, every school cheater has to cheat by themselves. And the ratio of pirates to honest customers is much lower (like an order of magnitude or two lower) than the ratio of cheaters to honest students (at least in my experience - I literally didn't know a single person in my entire high school who didn't cheat at least once in a while, and a majority cheated at every opportunity; this matches experience of everyone I know).
The goal should not be to prevent cheating at all costs, because this is impossible anyways. It should be on designing exams so as to make cheating less effective and easier to detect. Such as less emphasis on rote memorization, and more on personal work.
Of course, doing so requires more work to write and grade the exam. And it would also show how many students can repeat what they've been taught, but don't actually understand it. No wonder it isn't done.
A much bigger problem than that is that most subjects cannot be done any other way than rote memorization. Raw facts are the only thing the students learn through the entire course and there is literally zero practical skills that they can be tested on. See: history, geography, social studies, 99% of biology. It's basically just math and physics that can be tested the way you say - and they already are being tested that way. But it doesn't stop cheating either. Have you never "traded" answer sheets in class during an exam?
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@Gąska and there's plenty of "rote" memory work your need to do for physics and math. Otherwise you just can't do further. Especially math. If you don't have the basic math facts down at the automatic level, you're screwed in higher math. The overhead of figuring out the basic operations while you're 6 abstraction levels up the chain grinds the whole process to a halt.
So at the earlier stage, you absolutely have to test the basic rote memory work directly.
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@Benjamin-Hall that said, people whose self-preservation instinct is so low that they'd rather piss their pants on camera than dare to stand up from the computer, probably aren't doing much of higher math.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
Students argue that the testing systems have made them afraid to click too much or rest their eyes for fear they’ll be branded as cheats. Some students also said they’ve wept with stress or urinated at their desks because they were forbidden from leaving their screens.
One system, Proctorio, uses gaze-detection, face-detection and computer-monitoring software to flag students for any “abnormal” head movement, mouse movement, eye wandering, computer window resizing, tab opening, scrolling, clicking, typing, and copies and pastes. A student can be flagged for finishing the test too quickly, or too slowly, clicking too much, or not enough.
If the camera sees someone else in the background, a student can be flagged for having “multiple faces detected.” If someone else takes the test on the same network — say, in a dorm building — it’s potential “exam collusion.” Room too noisy, Internet too spotty, camera on the fritz? Flag, flag, flag.
Read the article. It's insane.
Yes it is. But what you gonna do instead? Let them all collaborate on Discord open in second window?
The main reason why teachers assume all students cheat as much as they can is because they do.
Back when I went to school, we had a teacher that thought exams were bullshit, so he basically had the same exam every year, and told the class that we really should check previous years exams for studying for the exam. He shifted the last question around a bit, but that was it, He had the hardest practical tasks, and his course was the one that taught programming, and the one that I still remember shit from. Much like my other class mates.
And if it's a topic where you can't have practical exercises, have home exams, like universities have had for forever, where you're allowed to collaborate, but that have a lot of research work to actually answer the questions on the topic.
Cheating will always happen. Before Covid-19, it was done with an ear piece and a one way voice feed of what you needed to answer to get it right. That method still can't be defeated with these anti cheat software methods.
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@Carnage One of my Physical Chemistry courses did it in another way - they gave us hard homework which we were allowed to collaborate on, though. And someone always had to demonstrate the solution, so if you simply copied a solution without thinking about it then you had a bad time.
But if you then understood the solutions to the homework the exam itself was a cakewalk. Scored 120% on that one.
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@Benjamin-Hall that said, people whose self-preservation instinct is so low that they'd rather piss their pants on camera than dare to stand up from the computer, probably aren't doing much of higher math.
I wouldn’t say so. I can quite imagine that some of the more ambitious but anxious students are more prone to do whatever it takes than some students who don’t care anyway.
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@topspin yeah. We had a lot of kids who were really wound tight. Severe anxiety was a really common issue. Generally high achievers, too.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
Of course, doing so requires more work to write and grade the exam.
It's only really more work to grade such long-form written exams. They're not particularly difficult to set; multiple choice is actually harder because you want to have the wrong answers to those at least look plausible. Moreover, the mark scheme for a long-form exam isn't typically too hard to work out as a teacher if you've been rigorous about the learning goals of the course.
I prefer to not grade exams, but it's not too difficult. I'd just rather do coding than teaching.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
Of course, doing so requires more work to write and grade the exam.
It's only really more work to grade such long-form written exams. They're not particularly difficult to set; multiple choice is actually harder because you want to have the wrong answers to those at least look plausible. Moreover, the mark scheme for a long-form exam isn't typically too hard to work out as a teacher if you've been rigorous about the learning goals of the course.
I prefer to not grade exams, but it's not too difficult. I'd just rather do coding than teaching.
But writing good exams is hard. And since you can only (reasonably) grade 1-2 long-form questions, at least if you want to do so fairly and in depth, your content coverage is way reduced unless you can write perfect questions that exercise whole bunches of things. In which case making a fair rubric that actually covers the needful parts is nearly impossible.
Whereas writing multiple choice questions is pretty easy (the answers are harder) and you can do them in profusion, since they're machine graded.
I don't like multiple choice questions personally. But I understand why they're convenient and used, especially for the more rote "you either know it or you don't" types of content. Which there is a lot of at the high school and earlier level.
Worked out problems tend to either be pretty much exactly on (maybe with a few operational errors) or way off track. And the way off track ones...judging how many points to assign to those (and doing so fairly) is hard. Because like unhappy families, each answer is wrong in its own special way.
Writing tests, whether unit tests or written tests is hard. Having them mean anything is extremely much more difficult.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:
I don't like multiple choice questions personally.
As a test taker, I like them. Even on tests where points are deducted for wrong answers (like the SAT and GRE) to make random guessing no better on average than not attempting to answer, and even where I don't know the correct answer, I can usually eliminate at least a couple of wrong answers, which makes even random guessing from the remaining choices a net win. Not is much as actually knowing the right answer, obviously, but still a net win compared to not guessing.
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@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:
I don't like multiple choice questions personally.
As a test taker, I like them. Even on tests where points are deducted for wrong answers (like the SAT and GRE) to make random guessing no better on average than not attempting to answer, and even where I don't know the correct answer, I can usually eliminate at least a couple of wrong answers, which makes even random guessing from the remaining choices a net win. Not is much as actually knowing the right answer, obviously, but still a net win compared to not guessing.
Oh absolutely. As a smart test taker, MC questions are my favorite. I never studied and always did well, because I could almost always rule out several answers and then guess (and do so really really fast). At least if they're not worded as traps. But that's exactly why as a pedagogue I don't like them. Too easy to get a decent score without really knowing any of the information in a way that you can actually apply.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:
But writing good exams is hard. And since you can only (reasonably) grade 1-2 long-form questions, at least if you want to do so fairly and in depth, your content coverage is way reduced unless you can write perfect questions that exercise whole bunches of things. In which case making a fair rubric that actually covers the needful parts is nearly impossible.
Writing good questions is indeed difficult. Writing meaningful multiple-choice questions is next to impossible.
I've recently been pulled into courses with several hundred students (~500 apparently). Correcting/assessing anything individual becomes tricky at that point (plan to spend 5 minutes per student? that's ~40 hours of work right there -- and 5 minutes/student is not a lot of time). Correcting multiple-choice questions is easily automated, so crappy multiple-choice questions it is.
(There's a different discussion to be had regarding that large classes. I don't think they're particularly useful, but that's currently above my pay grade.)
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@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:
But writing good exams is hard. And since you can only (reasonably) grade 1-2 long-form questions, at least if you want to do so fairly and in depth, your content coverage is way reduced unless you can write perfect questions that exercise whole bunches of things. In which case making a fair rubric that actually covers the needful parts is nearly impossible.
Writing good questions is indeed difficult. Writing meaningful multiple-choice questions is next to impossible.
I've recently been pulled into courses with several hundred students (~500 apparently). Correcting/assessing anything individual becomes tricky at that point (plan to spend 5 minutes per student? that's ~40 hours of work right there -- and 5 minutes/student is not a lot of time). Correcting multiple-choice questions is easily automated, so crappy multiple-choice questions it is.
(There's a different discussion to be had regarding that large classes. I don't think they're particularly useful, but that's currently above my pay grade.)
I basically agree with all of this. I've had one case where we could write short (~12 question) MC tests where each of the wrong answers corresponded to one of the common mistakes people make when solving that question. And each student had a unique test (multiple variants of each question, multiple permutations of answers and questions, all identified by a numeric code, with a computer package to automatically grade each one using the right key).
And you know what? It was only semi-meaningful. That's the hazard of any kind of test, let alone a MC one. And yes, large intro classes like that are pretty pointless except as weeders. To weed out those who can't hack it at all before they get to upper-level classes (or in that case, into the harder pre-med track).
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Writing meaningful multiple-choice questions is next to impossible.
They can be useful to assess which types of question/area of knowledge a student is struggling with, in order to determine how to adjust the curriculum to address them. Unfortunately, such in-depth analysis and individual care is seldom found in our educational system.
Of course, if the grade itself is given too much weight, it incentivizes the student to conceal these weaknesses to get a better grade.
I had one teacher that would actually look at your work and give you partial credit for the steps you did right. (Answer with no work shown? No credit.) It encouraged us to take a stab at problems we couldn't solve. She was awesome, but most of my professors were not.
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@Benjamin-Hall that said, people whose self-preservation instinct is so low that they'd rather piss their pants on camera than dare to stand up from the computer, probably aren't doing much of higher math.
They could go the "Tycho" way. Which kinda makes sense, Brahe was decent mathematician.
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@Gąska at least they're in stock!
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WhyTF is Nuget trying to build a solution before installing a package, and failing because it doesn't build?
it doesn't build because the package is not installed.
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WhyTF is Nuget trying to build a solution before installing a package, and failing because it doesn't build?
it doesn't build because the package is not installed.
Does Nuget trigger the build? Or some other tool executes build steps in wrong order?
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Human error blamed for Vega launch failure
Arianespace executives said Nov. 17 that the failure of a Vega launch the previous day was caused when the rocket’s upper stage tumbled out of control.
Analysis of the telemetry from the mission, along with data from the production of the vehicle, led them to conclude that cables to two thrust vector control actuators were inverted. Commands intended to go to one actuator went instead to the other, triggering the loss of control.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
Analysis of the telemetry from the mission, along with data from the production of the vehicle, led them to conclude that cables to two thrust vector control actuators were inverted. Commands intended to go to one actuator went instead to the other, triggering the loss of control.
Left, left! NO YOUR OTHER LEFT!
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WTF of my day: I'm currently looking at our new grading scheme - the one which tells us which achieved percentage results in what grade. Grades go from 15 points (best) to 00 points (worst), with 05 being considered a passing grade. The percentages are not linearly scaled.
Now, until one year ago, 50% would result in a 05, i.e. a passing grade. In STEM fields it was considered the norm to give 50% of the points in an exam for "easy" tasks, e.g. simple memorizations or calculations. The rest of the tasks would need more brainpower.
One year ago someone had a bright idea and the scaling was changed to "45% for 05" and looked like this:
The right column is the lower boundary for a grade. The previous grading scheme looked quite similar just a bit more squashed in the upper grade (i.e. instead of 5% differences, there it was 4%)Okay, fine. So I could reduce the amount of easy tasks!
And then someone shat the bed and decided that this was too easy and we needed to revert! Alright. Ah, no scratch that, now we're veering off into the complete opposite direction!
Do you see that shit? Instead of a somewhat reasonable curve (i.e. the steps are 5-5-5-5-5-... or 4-4-4-4-4-5-5-5-5-...) now it's:
1-5-2 - 3-5-3 - 4-6-4 - 5-7-5 - 6-8-6But it gets better: The new scale only applies to regular exams. For our final exams (the Abitur) the other scale I detailed above is applied.
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Isn't that what happens when you try to rename an existing file or create a directory, and the new name is already used by an existing file?
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
Isn't that what happens when you try to rename an existing file or create a directory, and the new name is already used by an existing file?
I don't know. All I know is the build only succeeds if I roll a natural 20.
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Time to roll that dice again and hope for more luck this time, then.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
Time to roll that dice again and hope for more luck this time, then.
The ninth time's the charm!
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Next time, just offer a bribe to
the DMwhoever is in charge of the build.
Erik Johnson on Twitter
