The Surveilled Student

I am really sick of the word share. Share your data with us, share your heart rate with us, we just share this with a few of our partners. Sharing is caring, I guess.

Agreed. In the previous paragraph to that quote:

> As he sees it, handing over health information is a relatively small price to pay if it means halting the spread of a virus that has ravaged the nation.

That "if" is doing a lot of work. Does BioButton actually help? Does it help even after mass vaccinations?

If it doesn't help, then why pay any price, no matter how small?

Or, just after what you quoted:

> He says the wearable technology seemed the least invasive way to catch symptoms early and give students tools to know if they might have early signs of, or potential exposure to, Covid-19.

How many false positives will it give? If there are 100 false positives to one true positive, then the signal will be drowned out in the noise.

And young adults are among the least affected. There are no justifications for this kind of medical surveillance.

Is the privacy of many more important than the life of few?

We must make these judgments and trade-offs all the time in society. We surrender freedoms regularly: You aren't free to drive on the wrong side of the road; you have to surrender personal info for a credit card, passport, plane/train/bus ticket; if you have another deadly, highly contagious disease, you can be quarantined.

I don't love the tone, but the number of deaths is an indicator of cost when considering the trade-off.

I went to a college with an honor code, and proctoring exams was forbidden. Most exams were taken where the student was most comfortable (I usually opted for wherever I'd studied, be it an empty classroom or my dorm room). Most exams were simply open book.

I really think it was a great system. But, it's not perfect. I believe the military academies are all on similar honor systems, and I remember a few times of mass-cheating scandals, which have pretty heavy penalties, including expulsion in those environments.

This argument pops out in many societal issues, not only cheating on exams.

Most people don't cheat and act in good faith but we make them suffer anyway because we will be damned if even one person cheats their way through the system, not on my watch! Make sure it's bad for everyone just because if someone exploits the system it will be bad for everyone.

In the end there is a healthy balance and those who cheat the system will either fail later from the lack of skill/knowledge or, if they don't, it means it was sort of unnecessary anyway

> If I have someone who did the homework, learned the material, and can demonstrate it on the exams, and they find out that someone else in class got the same grade by cheating, aren't they justified in being angry?

Why should they be angry? The whole point of college should be to learn, to build knowledge, not just to get good grades. If someone wants to pay money to cheat and not learn the curriculum, that is their choice

Hm. If exam is not measuring competence adequately, the exams validity is lacking, ergo, exam should be redesigned for better validity. Open-book exams with good validity exist, as do tests allowing scientific calculators and formula sheets. Admittedly, that is harder, but... what is "cheating" in the age of information anyway?

I know you're making this argument in good faith, but whenever someone talks about balancing one person's rights against the needs of society, it is an excuse to treat someone in a way they know is wrong, on some level, but they don't want to accept. Rights are a moral issue, and it sounds a lot better to say, "We need to balance individual rights against the needs of society," than to say, "I know we can't morally treat people this way, but we are going to anyway because they are in the way of our big goals."

> aren't they justified in being angry?

1. It's not a binary thing - indifferent or beside themselves with rage.

2. Not enough to expect the authorities to engage in draconic measures to prevent this from happening.

> And am I not justified in being distressed to find that I am certifying someone as knowledgable (say,as part of an undergraduate program to become a person who designs bridges), when they are not?

"distressed"? Not really justified IMHO. Grading is statistical and partially arbitrary anyway, don't sweat it so much.

Due disclosure: My academic experience is a Ph.D. program, teaching assistantship, and junior academic staff union rep.

Pretending like computers can do the job of a person is not that much sillier than pretending a poorly paid proctor who doesn't care can do the job of a professor is not that that much sillier than pretending a class grade is sufficient to certify somebody's knowledge is not that much sillier than pretending a written test can do the job of a one-on-one evaluation.

But each step is more "efficient" than the previous one. It's just that each one is also less effective.

> If I have someone who did the homework, learned the material, and can demonstrate it on the exams, and they find out that someone else in class got the same grade by cheating, aren't they justified in being angry?

They are justified in feeling whatever emotion they feel. That doesn't mean you have to react to their emotion.

If you had a student that felt they had a good understanding of the subject, but failed your test; they might assert that your test - not their knowledge - is flawed. Naturally they would have the right to be angry. So would you change your test? I doubt it.

> And am I not justified in being distressed to find that I am certifying someone as knowledgable (say,as part of an undergraduate program to become a person who designs bridges), when they are not?

So because someone passed a single test, they are going to go start building structurally flawed bridges? If that is the case, then there are much more serious issues than cheating.

What's more likely is that a successful cheater might pass your class and fail their career. You might be embarrassed or upset about it, but it wouldn't be that big of a deal.

The problem here is that an obsession over "accreditation" is being held as more important than education. The mission of a university has shifted from learning to credit, at the expense of everyone involved.

Certification and evaluation is already receiving a lot of attention, the cryptocurrency world is full of nonsense but the core idea of doing decentralized verifiable computation is necessary for having a p2p society.

However we still don't know how to solve the tragedy of the commons in a decentralized way. The most promising angle for studying that is machine learning (they want to train models distributed over many machines so they need to do probability preserving compositions, this works for markets).

There is also a lot of work that needs to be done on user interfaces, secure hardware, operating systems and internet browsers. Without a stable foundation we cannot be trusting this infrastructure with our governance. Yet we absolutely need such infrastructure to meet the challenges ahead.

Really the finger-wagging should be directed at all the publicly funded institutions that used Zoom in the pandemic and maybe directed funding towards tracking research when they could have collaborated globally on improving jitsi to fit the needs of all the different education institutions in the world.

What I feel we need in STEM is procedural exams. We've done it in my university with random question orders and random question selection from a large pool but it's still not enough. It slows down cheating but students can still coordinate on facebook quite effectively.

I think the next step is fully unique exams per student with question parameters and solutions generated on the fly.

My opinion is that exams are counter productive. Why do we need the exams? If a person is not knowledgeable it's not the university problem it's the employer problem, it's on the employer to find out that the person does not have the ability to add value to the business. The purpose of univeristy should be to give access to knowladge not to make sure an adult person actually studies it. The university can only attest that the student had access to such and such courses thought by such and such people...

You're absolutely right that cheating is endemic. At the same time, all proctoring software I've ever encountered was garbage.

I believe the solution is to require candidates to take exams at a Prometric or Pearson VUE physical location.

It's absolutely worth the expense.

Why isn't academia fixing these problems? Why us? Why are profs so lazy that they can't fix their issues? You guys are so entitled to your control that when it comes to benefitting society it goes to "nah, let the students handle the stress, we don't care if we rape them privacy wise". Sincerely Pathetic

> I would frequently get a warning from the software that my face was not in view... because I was working on my paper.

From the linked article:

> “I got flagged quite a few times for moving, or taking a second and looking away while thinking,” says Olivia Eskritt, a second-year student at St. Clair College....

I was talking with someone on Zoom the other day, and I noticed that she would generally look at the camera while listening to me but often look away while talking. I know that she wasn’t reading something or looking at somebody else in the room; she was just concentrating on what she said, and it was easier for her to do so when she wasn’t looking at my face on the screen.

I’ve never analyzed videos of myself talking, but I suspect that my eyes also tend to wander when I’m thinking hard about something. I can’t imagine having to try to control the direction my gaze when taking a test.

I'm sorry that happened to you and also glad you're in a better place! :)

Some of my classes use LockDown browser as well and these are computer science courses so there was a lot of pushback due to privacy concerns, so I can sympathize with your viewpoint. Although a majority of students don't cheat, it's still awful that the behavior of a few dictates how the others are perceived.

If this is what I was facing @ uni I'd drop out & build in the where your deepest curiosities & ambitions lead you.

You'll learn & grow so, much, quicker.

The open source / decentralized finance space was where my authentic curiosity lead me.

On top of this, looking away from the subject of focus and absent-mindedly fidgeting are common behaviors of people with neurodivergent conditions like ADHD and ASD. Accusing those who seem to be putting some focus away from the test is harmful to every test taker, but significantly more harmful to neurodivergent people.

What's the worst consequence of doing exactly the opposite the software wants you to do? Just flagging?

If so, I'd put up a mid-test dance party just to mess with the program in protest. Thankfully my university hasn't adopted proctoring software.

> it feels like a violation of my privacy

There is no privacy while taking an exam in the classroom, which is part of the point: Exam is taking in full view of examiner (and others) in order to prevent cheating and to make it public to other students (to build trust in the fairness of the exam).

If the exam is taken at home because of extraordinary circumstances it is reasonable to implement measures to replicate this and as it happens I don't think that there is an alternative to software with webcam.

This generally handy bookmarklet solved it for me: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/

If your browser has a no-script extension available, this will fix the issue.

For me, Firefox reader view (F9) got rid of that.

Not just you. Same here. Using Chrome.

> Can this sort of thing be refused?

As a student at a US public university, the student body has tried everything from basic dissent, to petitioning, to introducing formal proposals to remove proctoring to the university's academic senate. Nothing has worked, and refusing to take proctored exams would simply cause us to fail the course.

> you're a customer aren't you?

You're a captive consumer. There are very clearly defined windows for transfers, so it's not like you can switch immediately if a university doesn't meet your expectations, and there are implications for your graduation date too (meaning you're more than likely going to need to take courses again that don't transfer over, costing even more money)

Not sure where being a "customer" or not comes into it. You sign quite a bit of contractual agreement when entering a university, that takes precedence over whether or not you give them money. Either it's enforceable according to that or it's not but you don't get to retroactively red-line things just because you were the one paying for the service.

Of course "refusal" could simply mean you will go elsewhere, whether you get your money back is up to the agreements you signed when you gave the money though (you won't, at least not all of it).

The highest education I have is secondary school (highscool) and what you say couldn't be more right in my expirence. I got some CompTIA certs while working a night shift to get into IT and prove I knew the basicis. Everything beyond that has been learning in my own time and on the job.

I'm now 30, no debt, self employed (by choice), contractor working in "senior" roles, what ever that means. I do regret not having some basic comp sci theory, but I've never really needed it or had the desire to learn it on my own time. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing, but it's not stood in my way so far.

This might be a controvertial view, but I feel that having to self learn a topic is a good filter to see if you actually enjoy the topic. If you don't want to sit and self learn a dense topic (assuming lives dont depend on it), then you will likely hate working on it.

University for a lot of people is a free holiday for when you havn't decided on what you want to do.