Remote Proctoring

[mleok]

I'm in a math department as well, and I wasn't aware of photomath, that's truly disturbing. We've been having a lot of cheating with Chegg, and it does indeed seem like a soul draining battle.

It uses some extremely unusual methods for certain specific types of problems; for example, the paired logic approach it uses for nonlinear inequalities is nothing like anything we teach and since this level of student is often very shaky on intersection/union of intervals they don't have any idea what it's doing, they just copy it down. There are some extremely distinctive oddities about the way it handles rational coefficients and equations as well.

Yes, that's often the way that we identify work that has been plagarized, when they perform the calculation in a manner which seems odd or which uses techniques that are well beyond their knowledge level.

[apl68]

This semester, we have generally been having remote class, but requiring the students to take paper exams in person (separated into multiple rooms with lots of distance).  We don't think we can win a technological arms race here.

We (my department, which is math) are trying very hard to get our college to let us do this.

There are some courses where we feel that we can ask pedagogically sound questions in an unproctored manner (math for liberal arts, for example), but our algebra and calculus courses for future STEM majors are just not amenable to this. This applies especially to the noncredit algebra courses.

Pretty much all of the solutions suggested just don't work.

Larger question bank? Irrelevant, the issue is not so much collaboration or chegg, it's the damned apps, especially photomath.

Have them show work? Photomath gives steps if you pay.

Authentic applications? The authentic applications for a beginning algebra course are in precalc and calc; furthermore, if they manage to figure out what they should do computationally, they can stick it into photomath after that.

Rewrite our courses to utilize technology and focus on concepts? Not if we want it to transfer. We stopped offering college algebra with technology (actually was a great course for people in non-technical majors, some awesome applications) because nobody would accept it. Our primary transfer schools don't even allow calculators in STEM major math.

Ask more conceptual questions? Doing that, but they still need to be able to compute for the next courses.

I'm in a math department as well, and I wasn't aware of photomath, that's truly disturbing. We've been having a lot of cheating with Chegg, and it does indeed seem like a soul draining battle.

I find it disturbing that people with ambitions to be our future engineers, scientists, doctors, etc. seem to think it's okay to Chegg or Photomath or whatever through their work.  Really hoping that the assorted gatekeepers catch them all before any of them get all the way into their chosen professions.

[kiana]

I find it disturbing that people with ambitions to be our future engineers, scientists, doctors, etc. seem to think it's okay to Chegg or Photomath or whatever through their work.  Really hoping that the assorted gatekeepers catch them all before any of them get all the way into their chosen professions.

Honestly a lot of them (at least in my classes) have no idea what engineering really involves -- in a vague sense they think it involves tinkering with things -- and how much math is required. They just know that it's a defined career path that makes a lot of money and is respected and respectable.

[EdnaMode]

I find it disturbing that people with ambitions to be our future engineers, scientists, doctors, etc. seem to think it's okay to Chegg or Photomath or whatever through their work.  Really hoping that the assorted gatekeepers catch them all before any of them get all the way into their chosen professions.

Honestly a lot of them (at least in my classes) have no idea what engineering really involves -- in a vague sense they think it involves tinkering with things -- and how much math is required. They just know that it's a defined career path that makes a lot of money and is respected and respectable.

Yes, a lot of the first years start out as clueless to what engineering is. And they learn quickly that we are serious about, it does involve a lot of math, and we expect a lot beyond memorization. To attempt to combat at least some of the cheating, a lot of my colleagues no longer grade homeworks, they assign them for student learning, post answers, and answer questions in class if there are any - the serious students typically do the work and ask questions, the others just copy down answers they obtained from who knows where. We fully understand that the use of Chegg and other "cheating" technology is rampant. When times are "normal" almost all of our exams are on paper and in person, require all the steps to be shown for calculations, and many (like me) require an explanation of the steps they used. I almost always require sketches and diagrams. In these plague times, with remote exams, many have given up on trying to catch cheaters unless it is extremely egregious and relatively easily provable. I'm lucky enough to have been able to teach labs in-person last fall and this spring so all exams have been moved from lecture to lab so I can keep my beady eyes trained on them. The only time I was fully remote was last spring when everything shut down.

We have many upper level project based courses that have different projects every semester. Hand calculations are required to back up anything that the computer or their calculator shows as an answer. Steps must be shown. Many of these projects are graded by multiple faculty during formal presentations and if the students can't adequately explain their answers, then they just might fail. In my classes, I have always had a lot of smaller assignments that they must start and finish in class, with no technology except paper, pencil, calculator. book, and notes.

We also have a senior level capstone course where they work on actual industrial projects. These change every year, and if they've only been skating by, it really shows up then. We hate to fail seniors, but we end up doing so with a few every year. Some of them come back and finish, some don't.

It's tough. I know I'll never keep up with all the ways that students can cheat, but I do my best, and so do most of my colleagues, to make sure we are teaching and assessing in ways that students can't be successful over the long term in our program if they're not actually learning the material.