
Students think the College Board is running a Reddit sting - hhs
https://www.vulture.com/2020/05/college-board-fake-reddit-account-ap-test-cheaters.html
======
jackson1442
I took the AP Chem exam last Thursday, fortunately without incident. One of my
friends was unable to submit his AP Literature assessment, facing the same
error popup that has plagued so many of the other students. I've heard from
several other students in my district that have had a similar problem. My
brother had an AWS Lambda error message when he tried to access his exam the
first time; CollegeBoard had surpassed their Lambda service limits
(Fortunately he was able to access his exam after trying again).

Their online tooling has never been great–AP Classroom takes at least 3 tries
for me to access, one to log in again which then redirects back to AP Central,
one that just redirects back to AP Central, then finally one that takes me to
my assignments page.

This certainly isn't an easy problem to solve. CollegeBoard definitely should
have designed a more stable system to host their exams on, but as with
anything digital, there's always an opportunity for error–even moreso since
everyone takes the exam at the same time (which is an entirely different can
of worms, with students in Guam taking exams at 1a, 3a, and 5a).

If I were to design these assessments, I'd have it be an untimed, synthesis-
based assessment, more similar to AP Computer Science Principles[0], with
their Digital Portfolio. Simply having a deadline for all students to upload
to a basic tool (which already exists as CB's Digital Portfolio system). Like
the current exam, have the submissions sent back to teachers for validation
(there's nothing on the current system that validates your identity, simply
paste in your AP ID and enter your name/dob, and you're in the system).

I think if a student can write a well-formed essay over a topic, they can get
college credit. In science classes, they could design an experiment and
simulate a lab report. CS classes can create a program, etc.

[0]: [https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-computer-
scien...](https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-computer-science-
principles/exam)

~~~
acbart
I still have yet to hear anyone propose a workable solution for the ultimate
problem of remote assessment in CS: hiring someone to just do your work for
you. Everyone keeps saying "oh just make it project-based" like I _didn 't_
have a student last fall who hired someone to do his final project. I only
detected him cause the person he hired sucked and left bread-crumbs; how many
students did I not detect because they hired competent people?

~~~
chrisseaton
> I still have yet to hear anyone propose a workable solution for the ultimate
> problem of remote assessment in CS

What about 1-on-1 interviews? Ask people the questions face-to-face, ask them
to talk you through their answers. That's how advanced degrees like PhDs are
assessed.

~~~
acbart
I'm 1-on-1 interviewing my 59 Algorithms students this semester. 20 minute
interviews, and I have 2.5 TAs to help offset the workload. Starts on
Wednesday, I'm absolutely dreading it. This would never scale to my _180_
Intro students that I'll be getting this fall.

~~~
turndown
What are the 59 algorithms?

~~~
chrisseaton
59 students of algorithms, not students of 59 algorithms, I would guess.

~~~
chongli
I would definitely take a course entitled "59 Algorithms". What a fantastic
idea for a second course in algorithms! Looking at 59 of the most important
algorithms (in the opinion of the professor). It's even more intriguing since
it's not a round number, so you know the prof didn't add a bunch of filler
just to get a nice number.

------
goda90
On a related note, I've seen multiple posts online about technical
difficulties with online AP tests like videos from students trying to press
the submit button as the countdown timer is almost to zero and nothing
happening. Some claimed they contacted College Board and were told they'd have
to troubleshoot their computers during the makeup exam. That seems
unreasonable for such an expensive test.

~~~
MattGaiser
They should have Amazon run the exams. They are the one tech company committed
to their services actually working when needed.

~~~
zackbloom
They actually did, many of the errors students have been experienced are with
Amazon’s Lambda product.

~~~
joncrane
They mean "Amazon should run" the exams, not "they should have built their
exam submission infrastructure using AWS."

Lambda is part of Amazon's Cloud Computing subsidiary Amazon Web Services
(AWS). AWS is a utility like DigitalOcean or any hosting provider. It's not
some kind of guaranteed success strategy.

~~~
artificial
This made me smile. AWS is now the new Microsoft in the sense that "nobody got
fired for picking AWS" or like the gold plated cables at Big Box Store to the
less informed. MoAr BeTtAR.

------
jedberg
The college board was in a tough spot this year. They couldn't really cancel
the exams -- Juniors need them for college admissions, and Seniors need them
for college credit.

But they also have to instill trust in the system.

Which led them to them having claims on their website that the test was
"uncheatable" and had "the highest level of integrity" while on other parts of
their website claiming they had deployed extreme security measures to thwart
cheating.

At the end of the day I suspect the colleges will just accept the scores under
the assumption that it would be poor form on their part to give the students a
hard time about something they had no control over.

~~~
saagarjha
> Juniors need them for college admissions, and Seniors need them for college
> credit.

A position which the College Board has fought tooth and nail to be in for the
last few decades!

~~~
willio58
College Board was a primary scourge of my education. How a single private
company could get its dirty fingers into public education beats me to this
day.

And please, don't come at me with "they're a non-profit", last I looked in
2014 they had made $750 million, and I'm sure they pay their top executives
_very well_ to say the least.

------
bnj
Are colleges even going to accept high scores on these exams for credit /
advanced placement?

It's a shame the college board decided to go through all this instead of
refunding the fees they collected from students, especially when the value
proposition on the students' side is uncertain.

Add in behavior like "posting content to confuse and deter those who attempt
to cheat" when internet research during the exam is not actually a violation
of their rules, and the organization starts to look fairly predatory.

~~~
MattGaiser
Do universities have a choice?

My local school system is guaranteeing students that their grade will not be
lower than when they closed schools. Many classes had not yet had any kind of
exam, so they have 95% averages.

Universities obviously believe that any grades from the semester are now
worthless and some have said so. But what are they going to do? Not accept any
local students?

Every metric you might use to admit students has been tainted by this COVID
business.

~~~
whymauri
I think universities are necessarily going to rely more on the "soft" aspects
of applications to select students. It won't be a problem for top colleges -
they could probably toss out the entire admitted class twice over and still
select a world-class pool of students from the application pool.

I think it might be problematic for T2-T3 schools and state schools that are
generally lenient when accepting AP credit. As for graduate and professional
schools... that's going to be a mess. Harvard Medical School will only
consider COVID Pass/Fail grades if colleges make those grading schemes
mandatory for students; otherwise, students will have to submit letter grades.
That's (1) completely heartless and (2) an arbitrary advantage for students
who went to schools where P/F is mandatory.

~~~
ghaff
Presumably a lot of admittance decisions have already been made. These are
about AP exams--basically placing out of college courses--so not a huge deal
overall (especially at more selective schools).

Honestly, the bigger issue for a lot of students at the moment is the
uncertainty over the degree to which schools will open up for physical classes
in the fall. What makes sense under those circumstances? And, of course, a lot
of the usual gap year options aren't going to be available either.

~~~
MattGaiser
The issue is for applications next year when these courses should have been at
the centre of applications.

~~~
lonelappde
Those kids could retake normal proctored tests November, assuming the world
stops burning and CB seta up testing.

------
kilroy_jones
At what point do we stop wasting time and energy trying to build better tools
to catch cheaters and start focusing on building a better system of education
and assessment?

If a kid can cheat, pass, get a degree and go out and not fail in the real
world, what does that say about the validity of the tests? Even futher, what
does that say about the world we live in?

~~~
WalterBright
> If a kid can cheat, pass, get a degree and go out and not fail in the real
> world

I've known many cheaters (they tend to brag about it). The ones that do good
work don't need to cheat, and the cheaters don't stop cheating once they
graduate.

Who'd you rather work for / hire / trust with your money:

1\. a cheater

2\. not a cheater

?

~~~
st1ck
In some countries it's pretty normal and expected for students to cheat in
school, but after they find a job where they are treated with trust and
respect and given real-world problems to solve, absolute majority will stop
playing tricks.

~~~
WalterBright
If they have to cheat to solve the toy academic problems, how are they going
to solve real problems?

~~~
saagarjha
Well, toy academic problems often have no relevance to real problems.

~~~
WalterBright
Yeah, they're a lot simpler.

~~~
saagarjha
Model planes are a lot simpler than real ones, often to the point where they
are completely different to work with.

~~~
WalterBright
Model airplanes have Center of Gravity, Center of Pressure, stability, lift,
drag, weight and thrust - just like real ones.

If you have to cheat to design model airplanes, you have no business designing
real ones.

------
dehrmann
Looks like they're not preparing for it well, but I'm sure there's going to be
more cheating than usual this time around. I bet there will be some oddities
in score distribution and students with unimpressive SAT score who suddenly
nailed AP Calculus.

~~~
ghaff
AP Calculus would probably be one of the least productive tests to cheat on.
So you place out of the first semester of Calculus at college in spite of not
really knowing the subject. Now it's the second semester calculus class. How's
that going to go? To say nothing of other STEM classes that depend on math.

~~~
colinmhayes
Plenty of majors only require one semester of calculus.

~~~
Spivak
At my alma mater passing AP Calc is enough to test you out of your math
requirements entirely for Architecture, for example.

------
abhisuri97
[https://www.reddit.com/u/dinosauce313](https://www.reddit.com/u/dinosauce313)
for reference.

------
MattGaiser
In the information age, we are going to need an alternative to testing merely
information in an easy to grade way.

------
dylan604
Even if they are, so what? Sure, time would probably be better spent making
their online testing actually work. However, anti-cheating is always something
these types of tests prepare for whether that's exam room monitoring or trying
to protect their online exams. Setting up a honeypot to get students seems
exactly like the lazy method these people would attempt.

~~~
jedberg
Why is setting up a honeypot lazy? If they had been good at it it would have
worked flawlessly.

Just disqualify anyone who copy/pastes answers from the known shared
workspace.

------
seemslegit
I'm more curious how well the 'we made a whole new batch of tests under
emergency time pressures so that students won't benefit from googling' claim
holds up, I mean google certainly did its part here during the last decade by
becoming less and less useful for finding answers to non SEOed questions and
yet...

~~~
MayorMonty
As a student who took 3 AP tests this week, it holds up well. The main weapon
CollegeBoard leveraged is that these exams were only 45 minutes long.

For example, AP Calculus had two questions: A 25-minute, and a 15-minute
question, each with 9 or 10 parts. There simply just isn't enough time to
Google anything. If you look at Google Trends data [0] you can see hilarious
spikes in related terms during the exams, but if you didn't have a good handle
on the material then you would just run of out time.

[0]:
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&geo=...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&geo=US&q=derivative)

~~~
seemslegit
Is there a sample questionnaire online ? What about someone using Wolfram
Alpha etc. ?

~~~
MayorMonty
[https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/pdf/ap-2020exam-sample-
qu...](https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/pdf/ap-2020exam-sample-questions-
calculus-ab.pdf)

The exams are designed with algebraic solvers in mind and typically, you don't
actually find derivatives and integrals. Instead, they'll show you a graph or
table instead of the equation itself. Typically students are allowed to use a
TI N-spire CAS CX on their exams, which has a lot of the same capabilities as
WolframAlpha.

------
mleonhard
Why does the exam throw out all the student's answers if they fail to click
the final button? It should just record each answer as they go. Then, if their
computer dies or their Internet connection fails, at least they can get graded
for the questions they successfully answered so far.

The UX design is broken.

------
vulcan01
Found the below on the CollegeBoard website today [1]. Only effective for the
second week of AP exams.

> Students with an unsuccessful submission will see instructions about how to
> email their response on the page that says, “We Did Not Receive Your
> Response.” The email address that appears will be unique to each student.

[1]:
[https://apcoronavirusupdates.collegeboard.org/faqs](https://apcoronavirusupdates.collegeboard.org/faqs)

------
nickysielicki
If you think abstractly about pedagogy as a social science, it's very obvious
from seeing how much education is struggling with cheating that the field has
had zero progress in the past century. We need to stop conflating social
development, socialized childcare, and education systems.

Here's my shitlist:

* Children should attempt hard problems that they can make progress on, but probably cannot solve. It is wrong that schools give nearly zero exposure to truly hard problems, and plenty of exposure to trivilally solvable problems. And no, making them tease out the meaning of a word-problem doesn't qualify as difficulty. I mean give them a problem that makes them find a wikipedia page and learn on their own.

* Computers are here to stay. I remember when I was little, I was told that I wouldn't always have a calculator on me. That is demonstrably false, I literally do not go anywhere without a computer in my pocket. Furthermore, that computer has a WolframAlpha app that can interface with server clusters running the most advanced computer algebra systems in existence. Why did I learn stoichiometry? _There is something deeply wrong with education if students could easily pass an AP Physics exam with access to WolframAlpha, and will (probably) have access to WolframAlpha in every practical application of their AP physics education, but are artificially prevented from having access during the exam._ Why don't the tests correspond to real-world application of the subject? Oh, it's more convenient for you to evaluate it this way? That's tough shit, figure it out.

* Students should have an entire day dedicated to math, and then they should have an entire day dedicated to English, etc. Some students might get bored and tired, sure, because sometimes learning isn't pleasant. But over and over on this site we hear that successful developers are the people who are able to maintain focus for long periods of time on difficult problems. Why do students waste 35 minutes a day switching classrooms?

* There is not enough differentiation of students. Advanced students have so much of their time wasted. The advanced 3rd graders should be hanging out with advanced 6th graders.

The way that the education system is collapsing from cheating and going
online-only is nothing short of exciting to me. A lot had to go wrong for us
to get to this point -- answer banks exist because everyone uses the same
textbook and the same curriculum. Cheating with other students exists because
group-work is the natural state of humans. Students aren't excited about the
work they do because they sense that there's a magical oracle on the internet
with the solution to the simple problems they're solving.

It's all going to fall apart and that's something to celebrate. The thing that
I'm most afraid of is that Americans have lost the ability to take risks at
aggregate and think radically about redesigning institutions. All of these
problems that I'm talking about are just as bad in every other country in the
world. Some country is going to figure it out and they're going to reap the
rewards, and I'm afraid that America isn't brave enough anymore to be the
first.

~~~
atq2119
_I remember when I was little, I was told that I wouldn 't always have a
calculator on me._

This turned out to be false, but being able to do mental arithmetic is still
an extremely valuable skill. The usability of your pocket calculator is really
bad in comparison, and what the mental arithmetic gives you is a general
automatic numeracy where you can ballpark the answer to numerical problems
much faster than using a tool.

This becomes a qualitative difference because you'll do more of those mental
checks as a matter of course that you would never pull out a calculator for.
Kind of like how git made merges so painless that they're now a standard part
of most people's development flow. That's the kind of qualitative impact that
mental arithmetic can give you.

I admit that this is a point that's difficult to get across, and schools
generally don't do a great job of it...

~~~
dylan604
yes, being able to calculate the tip for your bar tab without needing to dig
into a purse to find your "calculator" is a nicety. Being able to calculate
the savings from the 20% sales price is also a useful trick. My favorite is
just being able to round up the prices of items at the grocery store, and keep
a running total in my head. I know I'm a nerd, but the concept calculating the
tip by doubling the value after moving the decimal place one position to the
right of the total flabbergasts me on how difficult it is for others to grasp.
That's like 6th grade level math (at least it was when I learned it).

------
eanzenberg
Honeypotting minors is so unethical I don’t know where to begin. These kids’
futures could’ve been completely fucked

~~~
elliekelly
It also bothers me that they cancelled exams of students they said had planned
to cheat. The College Board should have given them an opportunity to take the
exam and see if they participated in the cheat chats before cancelling their
score. In my mind thinking about cheating, researching ways to cheat, and even
planning on cheating isn’t the same as actually cheating. Anxious kids who are
studying do all kinds of dumb stuff and joining a subreddit of potential
cheaters doesn’t necessarily mean the student is a cheater. You have to give
someone - especially a kid - the opportunity to do the right thing.

~~~
vulcan01
Yeah. What if those kids just joined the subreddit for fun, and didn't
actually plan on using it?

------
nearmuse
Tests should have been stretched in time and spread across classrooms to have
smaller groups of people to practice social distancing, not be administered
online; it is a cheatfest.

------
willart4food
r/entrapment

~~~
ganstyles
No, making something available isn't entrapment.

