Comment on Pearson complaining about using Linux to access my course material

• lightnsfw@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  So what they’re going to make you disassemble your personal space if you happen to have a PC on the same desk you use for your school laptop?

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  • tankplanker@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yup, exactly that. You are not allowed to proceed if you have additional devices including your mobile visible during the setup phase, you have to sweep the area with your webcam so they can see. When the exam is proctored if they see a phone or anything suspicious that you introduced into the frame you are generally fucked and have to go through a review.

    Pearsons run a lot of different exams on behalf of a lot of different companies so the rules change depending on what that company wants and will pay for.

    I know of one that you have to connect with your webcam and again with your phone camera so the phone can capture from behind you.This is one is live proctored by a real person throughout, it is pretty damn expensive so its not the norm. Many are just at the start and end, with AI triggers and random sampling to find cheaters.

    I know of another than limits how many screens you can have connected to just one, this is principally to reduce the chance of a IP KVM being used for proxying. Its trivial for the software to detect how many displays are connected, same with number of HID devices.

    I think you are underestimating how much cheating is attempted with these, and how much they have already been through the loop of being able to detect it.

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    • lightnsfw@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      That’a ridiculous. All that effort when they could just make the test hard enough and time it so even if you have reference materials available you still have to have a good understanding of it. I couldn’t even take a test like this because I have one room to work out of and it’s got all my tech shit in it. Even if I wasn’t intending to cheat I have nowhere else to put it.

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      • tankplanker@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Question difficulty makes no difference whatsoever with proxying, these are already long form questions in the main. The whole point of it is you are paying somebody else to take the exam for you, either directly by something like screen sharing or indirectly by relaying questions and answers. The AI voice assistant is another form of this, its higher risk as LLMs aren’t always right but its still proxying.

        I personally know of half a dozen people who used Cheggs to indirectly proxy their engineering degree exams as they weren’t proctored and had 12/24 hour exam window. The uni was meant to require an in person defense of similar questions from anybody getting unusual results, something people who cheat simply cannot do, but because they had done it the whole way through they never triggered the flag. This is why proctoring is so important.

        One of the reasons so many companies use Pearsons for their exams is because they have centers everywhere, they are by far the largest. If you cannot do it online then you have to go to your nearest center. Simply too much cheating is attempted otherwise. As always the actions of a minority ruin it for everybody else as rules have to be put in place.

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    • OfficerBribe@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      In one of my exams I forgot to remove my watch till the end of exam and later thought result will be cancelled, but luckily it was accepted. I think proctor even commented on that in the end so I was double worried.

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      • tankplanker@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Yeah its a super paranoid process, I would just rather take a traditional person exam

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