• (cs)

    At least the tests weren't held for ransom

  • Ken B (unregistered) in reply to taylonr
    taylonr:
    Mr. Happy:
    1993, eh? That would be about the same time that I accidentally discovered the "grades system" on the school network and that it was totally unprotected. You just had to know where it was to get into it. I kindly informed the teacher that he may want to look into at least adding a password to it. I got thanked for it, but they still had all of my teachers manually re-calculate my grades to prove that I hadn't tampered with it. They determined that I hadn't, but my girlfriend made the honour roll that term... ;) Shhh...she still doesn't know I did it.
    Which goes to show she REALLY didn't deserve it.
    And what's the point in improving your girlfriend's grades if you do get a little "thank you" for your effort? :-)
  • (cs) in reply to borat
    borat:
    Kinda reminds me of my IT teacher at college who, when a PC froze up, would thump the monitor in an attempt to "unfreeze" it.
    Hey, it worked for the Fonz with the jukebox, so why not her?
  • pmv (unregistered) in reply to Kermos

    You definitely haven't been to a high school in a while...

  • (cs) in reply to DoctorFriday
    DoctorFriday:
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    So now we know what caused the gangs in River City Ransom (subtle reference to said great game in this story?) - the fact that they actually had to *study* for tests instead of cheating.
    Despite how much time I've spent playing RSR back in the day *snip*
    RSR... that's... let's see... um, River Sity Ransom?
  • pong (unregistered) in reply to Ken B
    Ken B:
    Argh:
    I think Edutron changed their name to Diebold and have continued to apply their expertise in security measures and quality assurance in their electronic voting machines.
    http://www.xkcd.com/463/

    are you saying C is for condom?

    captcha: pecus

  • Bar (unregistered) in reply to Foo
    Foo:
    Back in 1993 our maths teacher used a simple Visual Basic program to generate random addition and subtraction exercises for us. The program showed the numbers and we had to type in the answer. I noticed that the fields for source numbers were not set to read-only. So I simply replaced their values with ones and the result was always two :-)

    For very small values of two, if the problem involved subtraction?

  • Schnapple (unregistered) in reply to borat
    borat:
    Kinda reminds me of my IT teacher at college who, when a PC froze up, would thump the monitor in an attempt to "unfreeze" it. She didn't seem to grasp that (a) the monitor was just a display or (b) thumping a digital device is likely to make it work again

    Actually I heard the other day on one of my podcasts but one of the old technologies used in early "tube" televisions was prone to fail by misaligning itself and hitting the side of the television did have the side effect of snapping it back into place. I think the podcast they discussed this on was either this week or last week's TWiT.

    So your teacher probably made the correlation that "monitor = TV, so fix in the same way". That she believed this and was still an IT teacher at a college is indeed a WTF but I can see where the correlation could be made.

  • Foo (unregistered) in reply to Bar
    Bar:
    Foo:
    Back in 1993 our maths teacher used a simple Visual Basic program to generate random addition and subtraction exercises for us. The program showed the numbers and we had to type in the answer. I noticed that the fields for source numbers were not set to read-only. So I simply replaced their values with ones and the result was always two :-)

    For very small values of two, if the problem involved subtraction?

    The +/- field could also be changed.

    Poor teacher, she never understood why I was so "good" on maths...

  • (cs) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    RSR... that's... let's see... um, River Sity Ransom?

    I spent my childhood playing pirated Chinese cartridges.

  • Czenda (unregistered) in reply to TopCod3r

    There's no cmd.exe in DOS.

  • (cs) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    They stored the answers on the same machine that the test was being taken on, and they paid the price. That's a total failure of data hygiene, and I'm ashamed that the clbutt teacher didn't pick up on it. After all, the kids did…
    IIRC, part of the article went like this:
    Because Classroom Assistant wasn’t a networked product, deploying the tests involved taking the 3.5" disk containing the test questions and then loading the disk into each computer.
    So, if you're not storing the answers on the the same machine, where will you put them so that the grade is available soon after the test?

    Of course they could at least encrypt the data, //good not use some lame filename such as "answers.key", //security by wishful thinking or maybe have a scanner locked (so that the students won't touch it) and a picture of the answers carved on a wooden table // </tongue-in-cheek>

  • (cs)

    Most of the tests in one of my classes in high school were Scantron multiple choice. The teacher had the machine to read the forms right in the room, and would hand us back our tests before we left.

  • foxyshadis (unregistered) in reply to Schnapple
    Schnapple:
    borat:
    Kinda reminds me of my IT teacher at college who, when a PC froze up, would thump the monitor in an attempt to "unfreeze" it. She didn't seem to grasp that (a) the monitor was just a display or (b) thumping a digital device is likely to make it work again

    Actually I heard the other day on one of my podcasts but one of the old technologies used in early "tube" televisions was prone to fail by misaligning itself and hitting the side of the television did have the side effect of snapping it back into place. I think the podcast they discussed this on was either this week or last week's TWiT.

    So your teacher probably made the correlation that "monitor = TV, so fix in the same way". That she believed this and was still an IT teacher at a college is indeed a WTF but I can see where the correlation could be made.

    Sometimes, the machine just frustrates you enough that you have to take it out. I've done that before, knowing full well that it wouldn't fix a thing, I just needed to hit something. If I was caught but a student, I might come up with a crazy explanation like that out of embarassment.

  • Global Warmer (unregistered) in reply to nckomodo
    nckomodo:
    This is no WTF, this is the normal behavior of kids, especially in school. What would be a WTF, however slight, is any kid who DIDN'T resort to cheating in this case.

    No one said the kids were the WTF....it is the software that is the WTF

  • (cs) in reply to DoctorFriday
    DoctorFriday:
    Code Dependent:
    RSR... that's... let's see... um, River Sity Ransom?

    I spent my childhood playing pirated Chinese cartridges.

    What you say!

  • Steve (unregistered)

    This story sort of reminds me of chapter in a book by a fellow named Stephen Talbott (not me, just in case you were wondering) written in the early days of the first online bubble called The Future Does Not Compute. While I don't buy everything he has to say by a long shot, it's worth reading (and it's free, at the URL).

  • (cs)

    See, with proper motivation students really CAN show their true potential!

  • Brompot (unregistered) in reply to TopCod3r

    CMD.EXE? This is Messy-DOS man. Try command.com. Yes, I am that old.

  • (cs) in reply to Abraxus
    Abraxus:
    A little social engineering got us the initial admin password...
    Imagine the minuscule amount of social engineering required to guess that the "operator" account password was "0"...
  • WTF-Catcher (unregistered) in reply to jcoehoorn
    jcoehoorn:
    My brother is a high school math teacher, and where he's at even in 2008 you don't have a computer at every desk, even for tests.

    The problem now with paper tests is that kids these days are so good with cell phone text messages they can send them without looking at their phone. So a student will send a short message to a nearby student. That's student's phone will vibrate, and he'll pull it out just long enough to read "28?", and reply with the answer "D". Very hard to catch.

    The solution is that he has to use a computer program to create the tests. The program will randomize the questions when it prints them out. Makes grading a lot more difficult, though.

    The real WTF ist obviously that you're doing multiple-choice tests. He could just do it like the rest of the world and let the pupils actually solve problems and not guess the right answer.

    Of course that's not up to your brother but a flaw in the us-education system. And because every other country has to internationalize (read: do it like us does) I see this trend in Germany, too. Fortunately in CS we still have to think and are not rewarded for guessing.

  • anonymous wuss (unregistered) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    DoctorFriday:
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    So now we know what caused the gangs in River City Ransom (subtle reference to said great game in this story?) - the fact that they actually had to *study* for tests instead of cheating.
    Despite how much time I've spent playing RSR back in the day *snip*
    RSR... that's... let's see... um, River Sity Ransom?

    wow. nothing gets by you. ... Paula?

  • anon (unregistered)

    class

  • Global Warmer (unregistered) in reply to Ken B
    Ken B:
    Nico:
    All this school talk reminds me of my highschool and college days. The good old days when PCs were expensive pieces of machinery, our school had about 20 XT machines and one if one was very lucky there was the opportunity to use the 286. In another room, there were about 30 C64s, those were really only used to play Paperboy.
    Just a babe in the woods then? For me, the "good old days" were when we replaced the 110 baud ASR-33s with 300 baud Olivetti terminals.

    The IBM Selectrics we got later for APL programming were fun as well, though the teeth kept breaking off the type ball.

    I'm with ya brother

  • EatenByAGrue (unregistered)

    My old man teaches high school math for a living, and to combat cheating would create multiple versions of his tests and hand them out so that no one was within easy eyesight of someone with the same version of the test. The first time he did this, a few minutes into the test, a student pointed to a classmate and said "Mr ____, his paper is different than mine!"

    However, the best defense in the world against in-class cheating is essay questions (or in math, showing the proof).

  • John (unregistered) in reply to Channel6

    A quote from ..., well someone really did say it: 'There are rarely technical solutions to behavioral problems.'

    CAPTCHA: abigo - <insert your own joke here>

  • Global Warmer (unregistered) in reply to EatenByAGrue
    EatenByAGrue:
    My old man teaches high school math for a living, and to combat cheating would create multiple versions of his tests and hand them out so that no one was within easy eyesight of someone with the same version of the test. The first time he did this, a few minutes into the test, a student pointed to a classmate and said "Mr ____, his paper is different than mine!"

    However, the best defense in the world against in-class cheating is essay questions (or in math, showing the proof).

    That's not new, all my teachers did that. if you teach 7 classes a day with 30 kids per class and each test has 10 questions... that's a lot of essays to grade.

  • Benjamin (unregistered)

    In High School Land, you learn everything you need to know by avoiding any real work, being clever, and outsmarting your "Oh So Incredibly Smart" teachers.

    Unfortunately once you reach College Land you will discover a new set of rules. -Your professors WILL have a PHD in their chosen field and many of them WILL be at least as smart as you are.

    • A student who learned how to work hard in high school will bury your clever but lazy attempts every day of the week.

    Once you reach Real World of Career Land, the rules will be added to again. -Doing something really clever because it is "fun" and "interesting" instead of the task that is assigned to you is a great way to be fired.

    High School isn't about "learning to be clever" and it isn't about acquiring a vapor ware skill like "writing a batch file". It is about learning to work hard at the task assigned to you, especially when that task is neither interesting or clever, because THOSE are the skills that will carry you through college and into a successful career.

    Honestly if you have those skills and you are self-motivated to learn, you don't even need the stop in college. But without them, don't expect to rise far above "bag-boy" at your local grocery store.

  • A. Cworad (unregistered) in reply to Ken B
    Ken B:
    And what's the point in improving your girlfriend's grades if you do get a little "thank you" for your effort? :-)

    Don't.

    It's "if you don't get a little thank you".

    It's not pedantic, it's just wrong. Why do people seem to be doing this more and more lately? "Do" and "do not" are as far apart as "true" and "false".

    OK then. It is being pedantic. But it's a GOOD pedantic..

  • (cs) in reply to John
    John:
    A quote from ..., well someone really did say it: 'There are rarely technical solutions to behavioral problems.'

    I think I was the one to say that. At least I have said it for many years, and I didn't hear it from someone else, so at least I independently came up with it.

    And when I say it, I'm usually referring to our users, when they complain about the software that is developed for them. It has gotten bad enough that we have had to lock things down because they are always trying to work around the software like these kids.

    For example, I wrote an application that lets the user browse folders and files (with copy, move, and rename functionality) but there are some "power users" who keep trying to use Windows Explorer, which is against our policy here. I even caught one person with an unauthorized copy of explorer.exe on her usb drive.

  • IAmAGoodProgrammer (unregistered)

    It is obvious that whoever wrote this exam 'software' cheated on his programming/developping exams throughout university...

  • IAmAGoodProgrammer (unregistered)

    It is obvious that whoever wrote this exam 'software' cheated on his programming/developping exams throughout university...

  • IAmAGoodProgrammer (unregistered) in reply to IAmAGoodProgrammer

    oops.. sorry about the dupe.

  • (cs) in reply to EatenByAGrue
    EatenByAGrue:
    However, the best defense in the world against in-class cheating is essay questions
    Not so. My high school biology teacher always gave essay tests. One or, at most, two "questions" (directions, actually: "List and describe the various avaricti of the trebonidian finculum found in pyxicephalus edulis, including structure and function.") which she would write on the board for us a couple of weeks before test day. This, she explained, would give us plenty of time to study on exactly what the test covered, so that there would be no excuse for not knowing the information.

    I never had the guts (fear of flunking), but there were certain girls in my class who came to test wearing their thick winter coats. They wrote studiously on their blank paper for the majority of the class period, and at some point when the teacher was sufficiently distracted, quietly slipped a completed essay, written at home some days before, out of a coat sleeve to be turned in.

  • Laie Techie (unregistered) in reply to jcoehoorn

    Most of my tests at uni were from a question bank that used a scan-tron system. Every student got a unique test, but the bar code identified each question's internal id. Pretty effective for the most part.

    I don't know many high schools that would invest in scan-tron, though...

  • Phelps (unregistered)

    Of course, there is always the apocryphal Computer Security course. The professor walks into the first lecture, writes an IP address on the board, and says, "all of your grades are entered on the computer above. You all have Fs. Grades will be submitted at the end of the semester. Bye."

  • SomeCoder (unregistered)

    I had a professor in college that prided himself on his tests. A lot of professors had tests with questionable questions (and some of them had tests that they almost just had to throw out because they were so bad) but this professor's tests were absolutely perfect. Students tried to argue various answers but inevitably, it was impossible to win.

    I wish more tests were like that professor's but it did take him a long time and a lot of work to get them to that state.

  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to borat
    borat:
    Kinda reminds me of my IT teacher at college who, when a PC froze up, would thump the monitor in an attempt to "unfreeze" it. She didn't seem to grasp that (a) the monitor was just a display or (b) thumping a digital device is likely to make it work again

    IT Rule #17: There is no computer problem that cannot be corrected with a sufficiently large hammer.

  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to EatenByAGrue
    EatenByAGrue:
    My old man teaches high school math for a living, and to combat cheating would create multiple versions of his tests and hand them out so that no one was within easy eyesight of someone with the same version of the test. The first time he did this, a few minutes into the test, a student pointed to a classmate and said "Mr ____, his paper is different than mine!"

    However, the best defense in the world against in-class cheating is essay questions (or in math, showing the proof).

    When I was in high school, one of my teachers got suspicious that a certain student might have managed to steal the answer key to a test. There were two strong clues: (1) For most of the year, this student had been getting C's. But then on the multiple choice section of the test he suddenly got 100%. (2) For the essay question, he had written the following essay: "Answers will vary."

  • Jay (unregistered)
    When In Doubt, Choose "C"

    Personally, I still stick to the philosophy, "When In Doubt, Choose Java."

  • KG (unregistered)

    In my old Computer Graphics course (OpenGL based), our professor put a b**ch of a question on the exam that involved matrix transformations.

    I just wrote down the basic equations needed to solve it, but I couldn't quite work through them to get the numerical answer. We couldn't use calculators because we needed an exact answer - involving fractions & trig functions, but simplifying in this form would be such a pain and take too much time. I just put down the approximated calculator answer anyway. I wound up with full credit.

    Another student worked through it in a lot more depth. I think he got the right answer, and he gave a thorough explanation of how he arrived at it too. He got half credit.

    The next period, the class asked the professor to do that problem on the board. After 45 minutes, he had three different solutions that were all incorrect.

  • Global Warmer (unregistered) in reply to Jay
    Jay:
    EatenByAGrue:
    My old man teaches high school math for a living, and to combat cheating would create multiple versions of his tests and hand them out so that no one was within easy eyesight of someone with the same version of the test. The first time he did this, a few minutes into the test, a student pointed to a classmate and said "Mr ____, his paper is different than mine!"

    However, the best defense in the world against in-class cheating is essay questions (or in math, showing the proof).

    When I was in high school, one of my teachers got suspicious that a certain student might have managed to steal the answer key to a test. There were two strong clues: (1) For most of the year, this student had been getting C's. But then on the multiple choice section of the test he suddenly got 100%. (2) For the essay question, he had written the following essay: "Answers will vary."

    Nice urban legend

  • (cs) in reply to Nico
    Nico:
    In college during a C programming course, before we got started with that days lessons, I was showing a friend a (graphical) demo effect I coded at home the night before. The teacher (a former Pascal teacher who was 1 chapter ahead of us in the C book) was convinced that I was playing a game, so he wanted me to leave. It didn't matter how many times I tried to tell him that it was not a game and that I actually coded it myself, but this was obviously impossible for him to accept.

    Wow, and this was college? You'd think they'd be a little reasonable. It'd be very easy to prove you were coding the effects, just change a few variables for color or size or something.

    Something similar happened to me, but it was back in grade 7! My school had Apple ]['s, used mostly for playing Number Munchers, Oregon Trail, and the like. For my science fair project (which battery lasts longest?) I wanted to do something a little fancy. Today's kids would plot voltage versus time into Excel, create a bunch of graphs, and flash them on a PowerPoint presentation. Well, I had to draw my own graphs using an "etch a sketch" application. Which I wrote myself. Then I took all of the saved graphs, and put them into a slide show -- using a program I wrote myself. On the night of the science fair I had to ask the school librarian if I could wheel one of their Apple ]['s into the gym to accompany my display booth. She initially refused, saying I wasn't allowed to play games during the fair. She refused to believe that I was even using it for anything academic, let alone wrote all the software myself. Took a lot of convincing.

    I also remember the days of Windows 3.1. Remember how to disable the screen saver passwords? Simply reboot, CTRL-C when it started running autoexec.bat, CD \WINDOWS and EDIT WIN.INI. Find the section called [Screen Saver] and delete the line that said password=xxxxx. Reboot, and done! Did that at many a computer store...

  • Marcus (unregistered) in reply to Ken B
    Ken B:
    Foo:
    Back in 1993 our maths teacher used a simple Visual Basic program to generate random addition and subtraction exercises for us. The program showed the numbers and we had to type in the answer. I noticed that the fields for source numbers were not set to read-only. So I simply replaced their values with ones and the result was always two :-)
    "Darn computers! There must be a bug in the random number generator!"

    Debian! :D

  • bill (unregistered)

    I had a typing class back in '95 where I never did work. I only had to break to DOS, and change some environment variables to be allowed to access my peer's work. So classwork was as simple as "copy file1 file2"

    The test-taking program was written in BASIC(!). Luckily I was fast enough at typing, despite my laziness, where I never had to recode the scoring mechanisms,

  • (cs) in reply to Ken B
    Ken B:
    Nico:
    All this school talk reminds me of my highschool and college days. The good old days when PCs were expensive pieces of machinery, our school had about 20 XT machines and one if one was very lucky there was the opportunity to use the 286. In another room, there were about 30 C64s, those were really only used to play Paperboy.
    Just a babe in the woods then? For me, the "good old days" were when we replaced the 110 baud ASR-33s with 300 baud Olivetti terminals.

    The IBM Selectrics we got later for APL programming were fun as well, though the teeth kept breaking off the type ball.

    We had to carve our answers in a rock.

  • Mr. Happy (unregistered) in reply to taylonr
    taylonr:
    Mr. Happy:
    Kermos:
    While I'll definitely say that this software had a lot of WTF's and flaws in it. The biggest WTF in my opinion is the effort students went through in order to beat the test system, going as far as writing batch files.

    Why don't the students spend just half that effort on actually learning the content of the test? Wouldn't need to hack the system in that case! Might actually learn something by accident. What a concept...

    But it proved one thing...they had enough smarts to figure out how to repeatedly short-circuit the system. And that's what high school kids are best at...subverting authority.

    1993, eh? That would be about the same time that I accidentally discovered the "grades system" on the school network and that it was totally unprotected. You just had to know where it was to get into it. I kindly informed the teacher that he may want to look into at least adding a password to it. I got thanked for it, but they still had all of my teachers manually re-calculate my grades to prove that I hadn't tampered with it. They determined that I hadn't, but my girlfriend made the honour roll that term... ;) Shhh...she still doesn't know I did it.

    Which goes to show she REALLY didn't deserve it.

    Meh, I only bumped her up in a few places that increased her overall average by about 3 points. She was right on the line of making it anyway. It's not like I bumped her up from D's to A's because that would have been REALLY obvious. It was more like turning a B+ average into an A- average.

  • Caleb Jones (unregistered)

    Reminds me of the time my friend tested into 2nd year Japanese in college by putting all C's on his test.

  • Mr. Happy (unregistered) in reply to Ken B
    Ken B:
    And what's the point in improving your girlfriend's grades if you do get a little "thank you" for your effort? :-)

    I got plenty of "thank you's" for other things...

    Finding out she made the honour roll after finishing so, so close just about every year put her on cloud nine for months. I just didn't have the heart to tell her.

  • Henry Miller (unregistered) in reply to Kermos
    Kermos:
    While I'll definitely say that this software had a lot of WTF's and flaws in it. The biggest WTF in my opinion is the effort students went through in order to beat the test system, going as far as writing batch files.

    Why don't the students spend just half that effort on actually learning the content of the test? Wouldn't need to hack the system in that case! Might actually learn something by accident. What a concept...

    There are several problems with this:

    First, you assume the course is worth learning. Ever need to know the difference between mixed numbers and compound fractions (I think that is what they are called?) For many subjects taught in school anything you would want to do instead (including hard drugs) is a better use of your time.

    Second, you assume your memory won't freak out on test day and you do poorly anyway.

    Third, you assume the test is correct. It is not unheard of for teacher to put the wrong answer on the test.

    Fourth, you assume it really is 1/4th the effort. Sometimes it is far more than that.

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