More Terrible Reporting on Education Technology and Misconduct
Plus, a high school's "culture of cheating." Plus, Honorlock and honeypots.
Issue 96
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More Very Bad Writing on University Technology, Security
Over the past few years, we’ve been subjected to some really, really bad “journalism” on the subject of academic security. The “Best and Worst of 2021” Issue of “The Cheat Sheet” had some egregious examples of sloppy, lazy or sensationalized writing on academic integrity, designed to incite instead of inform.
Unfortunately, a change in the calendar has not changed that.
The most recent example is this nonsense at The Georgetown Voice, a student magazine at Georgetown University. I don’t have the patience to refute every premise or correct every error in it, but here are two or three.
The author writes:
As COVID-19 continues, students have been increasingly subject to excessive monitoring technologies—whether proctoring exams or scanning files—such as Proctorio, ProctorU, and Perusall.
And
Oftentimes, these technologies give remote proctors excessive access to student devices, allowing them surveillance controls that are beyond necessary for proctoring an exam.
Excessive? Twice, even. Double-excessive.
Obviously, that’s a matter of opinion and it’s not clear what expertise or experience the author has to determine what controls are “necessary” for exam proctoring and which are “beyond necessary.”
As an aside, no one ever uses the word “surveillance” in the context of taking an exam in a classroom or test center, where people are also watching for misconduct. Taking an exam in front of 200 strangers is normal. Taking the same exam in front of one person via webcam is excessive surveillance. Got it.
But anyway, the story repeats the tropes that classroom and exam technologies are biased and racist. And how “background noise” and “eye twitches”:
can easily be misconstrued into academic dishonesty by a bad-faith instructor, with serious repercussions.
Obviously, a bad-faith instructor would not need a remote proctor to accuse a student - they could just do that.
Moreover, a few seconds of thought would produce the conclusion that, in such an invented scenario where a “bad-faith instructor” wanted to accuse a student of dishonesty, the student would no doubt be very happy there’s an independent proctor with a video record. In such a made-up case, remote proctoring would prevent such a thing, not enable it.
And the article goes on to quote a Georgetown student saying,
“There doesn’t seem to be any checks on [proctors] besides behavioral checks,” [the student] said. “Theoretically, if they didn’t care about keeping their job, they could have gone through all my information.”
Well, sure. “Theoretically,” if people didn’t care, any number of people could do many bad things - the lady at the Apple Store, the student at the IT help desk, any given professor. I’m not entirely sure I understand the point that’s being made there.
I’ve picked at it enough. It’s a student magazine. It just ticks me off.
Honorlock and Honeypots
An outlet called The Markup has a story about proctoring company Honorlock using “honeypots” - websites with answers to test questions - to catch cheating students.
The story says:
The company, according to its materials, provides a way to track cheating students through what Honorlock calls “seed sites” or others call “honeypots”—fake websites that remotely tattle on students who visit them during exams.
These sites, the article says:
are bare bones. They have names like “gradepack.com” and “quizlookup.com.” They’re largely a catalog of thousands of apparent test questions
And, should a student go looking for answers during an exam and find one of them, instead of getting easy answers, they’ll get busted. The story says Honorlock has set their own faux answer sites to alert the company, and potentially professors and administrators, about the cheating attempts.
As I understand it, this is not new. Honorlock has been doing this, offering this service, for a long time but has drifted away from it recently. That’s supported by the story, which says a student:
turned up about a dozen honeypots apparently linked to Honorlock, five of which are still operating.
Dr. Sarah Eaton, at the University of Calgary told The Markup,
“I can sum up this activity in one word, entrapment.”
Personally, I like Dr. Eaton and consider her an ally on academic integrity. But that’s not accurate. What Honorlock has been doing is nowhere near entrapment, which is to entice or pressure someone into doing something they would normally have not done.
No one is enticing or bullying students into using websites such as quizlookup.com to find answers to test or homework questions. Looking up test answers online, when your test rules disallow looking up answers online, is cheating.
When the police hang a sign on a house that says “we sell drugs here” and someone drives there, parks, goes inside and asks to buy drugs - they are not being trapped. That’s a sting, and a pretty dumb drug buyer. It’s not entrapment.
In the article, Dr. Eaton was not alone. Ceceilia Parnther, at St. John’s University said students,
“are being set up”
And that,
“The face-to-face comparison is a teacher walking around with the answer key and putting it on the corner of each desk and then penalizing students if they look over at it,” she said.
Again, no.
The face-to-face comparison here is students knowing a professor keeps the test answers in their desk drawer and, even though they are told not to, they snatch the answers when the professor leaves the room.
These sites are not opening pop-up ads during test sessions. They are not, unlike other cheating providers, advertising. Students are actively seeking them out during a test, which is cheating.
That Honorlock rigged a system to catch some students trying to Google answers during a test is good - we don’t want students to Google the answers to test questions.
Maybe a few students will hear about “honeypot” answer sites - or hear that Chegg and other answer-sellers provide similar information to schools - and think twice. Thinking twice, or even three times, before venturing out on the Internet to cheat is a good thing. It’s exactly what we should want.
Virginia Tech Settles with Student Who Sued After Being Caught Cheating
Back in Issue 83, I shared news of a student at Virginia Tech student who, after being found responsible for cheating, sued the school. According to the news coverage, his main complaint was that the instructor who reported the misconduct did not appear at the discipline hearings to answer questions.
The update is that Virginia Tech and the student have reached a settlement.
Details of the deal were not shared.
Stuyvesant High School’s “Culture of Cheating”
In Issue 93, I wrote about a survey of students at NYC’s elite high school, Stuyvesant.
In that article, I did not mention that the reason I knew about the survey was from this opinion article in the student paper. I saved it for later for the sake of clarity. The title is pretty direct:
Is Stuyvesant’s Cheating Culture Untreatable?
It’s an interesting read. It lays much of the blame for cheating on grade pressure, the ease of cheating and occasionally on bad teaching or bad testing, which are all pretty common excuses.
I particularly like the logic in the article that the one thing the school should not do is to try catch cheaters:
most students agree that cracking down on individual instances of academic dishonesty isn’t an effective method for discouraging the practice. “Stuyvesant is such a big school that you’re never gonna catch everyone who’s cheating. Only some of the kids who are cheating will get suspensions, and a suspension is something that stays on your record,” anonymous sophomore A said.