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427 points JumpCrisscross | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.206s | 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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1. joshvm ◴[] No.41909279[source]
What counts as gaming? In my physics degree, for coding courses, we were allowed to use library algorithms directly provided we cited them. We were mostly tested on how (not) buggy and usable our program was. If you don't care what tools were used or how the solution came up, then that shouldn't be a problem.

If someone writes "perfect" code from a take-home, you can ask them to explain what they did (and if they used GPT, explain how they checked it). Then ask them to extend or discuss what the issues are and how they'd fix it.

I think asking some probing questions about past projects is normally enough to discern bullshit. You do need to be good at interviewing though. If you really want an excellent candidate then there's the FANG approach of (perhaps unfairly) filtering people who don't perform well in timed interviews, provided your rubric is good and you have enough candidates to compare to. There is a trade off there.

Grad positions optimise for what you can test - people are unlikely to have lots of side projects or work experience so you end up seeing how well they learned Algorithms 101. For someone who's worked for 10 years asking about system design in the context of their work is more useful.

Note that PhD and academic positions very rarely ask for this sort of stuff. Even if you don't have publications. They might run through a sample problem or theory (if it's even relevant), but I've never had to code to get a postdoc.

Otherwise you put people on short probation periods and be prepared to let them go.