<story><title>Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en/article/88anxg/students-have-to-jump-through-absurd-hoops-to-use-exam-monitoring-software</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gravypod</author><text>Most code reviews I&amp;#x27;ve done at work take between 5 minutes to 10 minutes. To assume the worst possible case of 200 students, 20 deliverable per student, and a 10 minutes meeting per MR you&amp;#x27;d be at ~28 days (~84 8hr-days). Get 1 TA and you now have 42 days of the semester dedicated to 1:1 time (35%) and the remainder of the semester dedicated to producing learning content. Learning content (lecture videos, etc) can be produced ahead of time and in this case you can replace this with more 1:1 tutoring time effectively allowing you to give each student ~10hr (10 min * 20 sessions * 1&amp;#x2F;.35) direct 1:1 time over the course.&lt;p&gt;From the students perspective all they need to do is:&lt;p&gt;1. Write a &amp;quot;project proposal&amp;quot; where they define a project, define goals, schedule a checkin with you to see if that project is large enough (1&amp;#x2F;20th the grade of the class)&lt;p&gt;2. Watch lecture videos and go through exercises on their own time.&lt;p&gt;3. Write code and bring it in to teacher. (18&amp;#x2F;20th of their grade)&lt;p&gt;4. Demo their finished project to professor (1&amp;#x2F;20th their grade)&lt;p&gt;This does work for later classes. I never had the ability to test this workflow out for earlier (100-level) classes as all of those classes I TA&amp;#x27;d for followed the same model you&amp;#x27;re talking about.&lt;p&gt;The 200+ level classes that followed the model I&amp;#x27;m talking about had ~10% to 30% pass rate which was in line (~2x) with the pass rate of similarly leveled courses from our college&amp;#x27;s Math and Physics department which was used as a sanity check.&lt;p&gt;edit: that&amp;#x27;s not to say you&amp;#x27;re incorrect that it would be difficult to do at scale, this is just the way I&amp;#x27;ve seen it done at moderate scale (20 to 40 students).</text></item><item><author>acbart</author><text>This will never work because it absolutely fails to scale, at a time when we have a complete lack of computing educators. Customized projects for each student? I have 159 students in my CS1 this semester, and I can barely keep track of them with the massive amounts of data I collect. The idea of making individualized assignments is beautiful but unrealistic.</text></item><item><author>gravypod</author><text>Could you make your class project based and give everyone different, but equally difficult, projects of their choosing. Each check in into master would then be merged after a code review with you where you ask questions about why implementations are done specific ways to solve the problem&amp;#x2F;refactor. Code is only merged when it hits a quality marker you set. Students are graded by percentage of deliverable hit from original project specs.&lt;p&gt;Ex: student is to implement a K&amp;amp;R C compiler + code generator in 1 semester. Help them break up the project into manageable chunks (tokenize, AST, register allocation, etc). Each feature includes tests, comments, docs, and is presented to you by X date. Code review and cycle as many times as needed as long as it gets in by X date. By the end of the class the student hit 100% of their deadlines but only pass 70% of some test C files you create so they get a 70% (or higher if their code was consistently good and did not need cleanup) in the class or something.&lt;p&gt;It would never work because &amp;quot;you need to have a final exam&amp;quot; but it&amp;#x27;s the ideal I think we should strive for if you are &amp;quot;teaching programming&amp;quot; since this is how most work I&amp;#x27;ve done in the real world has gone.</text></item><item><author>sn41</author><text>I teach programming. What prevents students from colluding over their tablets&amp;#x2F;mobiles&amp;#x2F;laptops while taking the exam from another device? Can&amp;#x27;t the student mirror the screen elsewhere, leading to interesting possibilities for cheating?&lt;p&gt;Proctoring is not a solution that I am comfortable with. I do not want to peer into the private lives of students and their home environments. Not every student is well-off, and has a private space all to their own for 3 hours.&lt;p&gt;I think taking tests from home does not really work with any of the models I have seen discussed this year. Cheating is real. It has nothing to do with rote learning. I am out of ideas which are foolproof.</text></item><item><author>cloud5ir</author><text>To me, this underscores notion that schools continue to test for the wrong thing. With the exception of professions&amp;#x2F;trades that require impulse application of knowledge, I don&amp;#x27;t know why I would want&amp;#x2F;need someone to memorize a concept in order to apply it. Productive members of our society&amp;#x2F;workforce think critically, they ask good questions, and they research and leverage the information at their disposal to make data-driven decisions. Let&amp;#x27;s test for that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>unishark</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s easy (even a bit fun) to grade and give feedback for good students. Meanwhile it&amp;#x27;s a huge pain to do for the weak students. You need to first figure out what they heck they&amp;#x27;re trying to do before you can tell them how to fix it, which may take a lot. I suspect code reviews for professionals is much more like the good student category.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re asking the students to define unique projects themselves, you run into new problems as students dig up the most obscure blogs they can find on the internet to download and give you. It&amp;#x27;s a never-ending adversarial struggle.</text></comment>
<story><title>Students have to jump through absurd hoops to use exam monitoring software</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en/article/88anxg/students-have-to-jump-through-absurd-hoops-to-use-exam-monitoring-software</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gravypod</author><text>Most code reviews I&amp;#x27;ve done at work take between 5 minutes to 10 minutes. To assume the worst possible case of 200 students, 20 deliverable per student, and a 10 minutes meeting per MR you&amp;#x27;d be at ~28 days (~84 8hr-days). Get 1 TA and you now have 42 days of the semester dedicated to 1:1 time (35%) and the remainder of the semester dedicated to producing learning content. Learning content (lecture videos, etc) can be produced ahead of time and in this case you can replace this with more 1:1 tutoring time effectively allowing you to give each student ~10hr (10 min * 20 sessions * 1&amp;#x2F;.35) direct 1:1 time over the course.&lt;p&gt;From the students perspective all they need to do is:&lt;p&gt;1. Write a &amp;quot;project proposal&amp;quot; where they define a project, define goals, schedule a checkin with you to see if that project is large enough (1&amp;#x2F;20th the grade of the class)&lt;p&gt;2. Watch lecture videos and go through exercises on their own time.&lt;p&gt;3. Write code and bring it in to teacher. (18&amp;#x2F;20th of their grade)&lt;p&gt;4. Demo their finished project to professor (1&amp;#x2F;20th their grade)&lt;p&gt;This does work for later classes. I never had the ability to test this workflow out for earlier (100-level) classes as all of those classes I TA&amp;#x27;d for followed the same model you&amp;#x27;re talking about.&lt;p&gt;The 200+ level classes that followed the model I&amp;#x27;m talking about had ~10% to 30% pass rate which was in line (~2x) with the pass rate of similarly leveled courses from our college&amp;#x27;s Math and Physics department which was used as a sanity check.&lt;p&gt;edit: that&amp;#x27;s not to say you&amp;#x27;re incorrect that it would be difficult to do at scale, this is just the way I&amp;#x27;ve seen it done at moderate scale (20 to 40 students).</text></item><item><author>acbart</author><text>This will never work because it absolutely fails to scale, at a time when we have a complete lack of computing educators. Customized projects for each student? I have 159 students in my CS1 this semester, and I can barely keep track of them with the massive amounts of data I collect. The idea of making individualized assignments is beautiful but unrealistic.</text></item><item><author>gravypod</author><text>Could you make your class project based and give everyone different, but equally difficult, projects of their choosing. Each check in into master would then be merged after a code review with you where you ask questions about why implementations are done specific ways to solve the problem&amp;#x2F;refactor. Code is only merged when it hits a quality marker you set. Students are graded by percentage of deliverable hit from original project specs.&lt;p&gt;Ex: student is to implement a K&amp;amp;R C compiler + code generator in 1 semester. Help them break up the project into manageable chunks (tokenize, AST, register allocation, etc). Each feature includes tests, comments, docs, and is presented to you by X date. Code review and cycle as many times as needed as long as it gets in by X date. By the end of the class the student hit 100% of their deadlines but only pass 70% of some test C files you create so they get a 70% (or higher if their code was consistently good and did not need cleanup) in the class or something.&lt;p&gt;It would never work because &amp;quot;you need to have a final exam&amp;quot; but it&amp;#x27;s the ideal I think we should strive for if you are &amp;quot;teaching programming&amp;quot; since this is how most work I&amp;#x27;ve done in the real world has gone.</text></item><item><author>sn41</author><text>I teach programming. What prevents students from colluding over their tablets&amp;#x2F;mobiles&amp;#x2F;laptops while taking the exam from another device? Can&amp;#x27;t the student mirror the screen elsewhere, leading to interesting possibilities for cheating?&lt;p&gt;Proctoring is not a solution that I am comfortable with. I do not want to peer into the private lives of students and their home environments. Not every student is well-off, and has a private space all to their own for 3 hours.&lt;p&gt;I think taking tests from home does not really work with any of the models I have seen discussed this year. Cheating is real. It has nothing to do with rote learning. I am out of ideas which are foolproof.</text></item><item><author>cloud5ir</author><text>To me, this underscores notion that schools continue to test for the wrong thing. With the exception of professions&amp;#x2F;trades that require impulse application of knowledge, I don&amp;#x27;t know why I would want&amp;#x2F;need someone to memorize a concept in order to apply it. Productive members of our society&amp;#x2F;workforce think critically, they ask good questions, and they research and leverage the information at their disposal to make data-driven decisions. Let&amp;#x27;s test for that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>quiescant_dodo</author><text>Code reviews I have done for unrelated bits of code often take me 90 minutes. And that&amp;#x27;s for code that fits into the idea of my product space, but not super familiar to my everyday life. I don&amp;#x27;t think 5-10 minutes is anywhere close to reasonable.</text></comment>