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427 points JumpCrisscross | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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skhunted ◴[] No.41904004[source]
I’ve been teaching in higher education for 30 years and am soon retiring. I teach math. In every math course there is massive amounts of cheating on everything that is graded that is not proctored in a classroom setting. Locking down browsers and whatnot does not prevent cheating.

The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. But any teacher doing this will end up with no students signing up for their class. The only solution I see is the Higher Learning Commission mandating this for all classes.

But even requiring in person proctored exams is not the full solution. Students are not used to doing the necessary work to learn. They are used to doing the necessary work to pass. And that work is increasingly cheating. It’s a clusterfuck. I have calculus students who don’t know how to work with fractions. If we did truly devise a system that prevents cheating we’ll see that a very high percentage of current college students are not ready to be truly college educated.

K-12 needs to be changed as well.

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lumost ◴[] No.41905157[source]
My personal take, we’ve made the cost of failure to high and cheating too easy.

As a student, the only thing the next institution will see is GPA, school, major. Roughly in that order. If the cost of not getting an A is exclusion from future opportunities- then students will reject exclusion by taking easier classes or cheating.

As someone who studied physics and came out with a 2.7 GPA due to studying what I wanted (the hard classes) and not cheating (as I did what I wanted) - I can say that there are consequences to this approach.

In my opinion, the solution is to reduce the reliance on assessments which are prone to cheating or which in the real world would be done by computer.

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pj_mukh ◴[] No.41905726[source]
Serious question from someone who is regularly tasked with hiring Juniors. What IS a good assessment for entry-level/right out of college positions?

-> GPA can be gamed, as laid out.

-> Take Home assessments can mostly be gamed, I want to assess how you think, now which tools you use.

-> Personality tests favor the outgoing/extroverts

-> On-location tests/leet code are a crapshoot.

What should be best practice here? Ideally something that controls for first-time interviewer jitters.

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methodical ◴[] No.41906735[source]
I think the best test for a Junior is to ask them to submit some of their OSS or personal fun projects they've worked on. From my perspective, especially with Juniors who aren't expected to be extremely knowledgeable, displaying a sense of curiosity and a willingness to learn is much more important.

If, hypothetically, there's two candidates, one who is more knowledgeable but has no personal projects versus someone who has less knowledge but has worked on different side projects in various languages/domains, I'm always going to pick the latter candidate since they clearly have a passion, and that passion will drive them to pick up the knowledge more than someone who's just doing it for a paycheck and could care less about expanding their own knowledge.

To go one step forward, you can ask them to go into detail about their side project, interesting problems they faced, how they overcame them, etc. Even introverts who are generally worse at small talk are on a much more balanced playing field when talking about something they're passionate about.

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1. sa46 ◴[] No.41907486{3}[source]
Most engineers, including good ones, that I've interviewed have no interesting GitHub contributions. GitHub is also game-able. Bootcamps, in particular, push their graduates to build an interesting GitHub portfolio.

I've found that talking through projects is a weak indicator of competence. It's much easier to memorize talking points than to produce working code.

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2. methodical ◴[] No.41908016[source]
It may be a result of personal preference, but I struggle to see how talking through challenges encountered with a personal project are a poor indicator of competence. If you ask some boilerplate list of questions, sure, but few if any candidates could memorize all of the random in-the-weeds architecture questions one could ask while talking through someone's project. For a junior specifically, even a non-answer to these questions provides valuable insight into their humility and self-awareness. I also think that it'd be pretty easy to visually weed out personal projects created for the sake of saying one has personal projects, like a bootcamp may push to create, versus an actual passion project, and even easier to weed out during any actual discussion. I suppose YMMV, but in my experience, the body language and flow of discussion are vastly different when someone is passionate about a subject versus not.
3. democracy ◴[] No.41909177[source]
it doesn't to be on github or "interesting" though, if it's something that a person worked on in their free time - it's good enough to consider...