Exams for my daughter in high school this spring required a camera feed to be on the entire time and a downloaded app that disabled other browser windows. Her school also has (had, now that she's done, sad!) very small class sizes -- typically between 10 and 12 students in any given class, which makes policing this much easier.

USC's exams in the spring permitted drops after grades came back, WTF.

That's a good solution for small class sizes. For engineering prerequisites (which can have monstrous class sizes), that will be almost impossible to enforce.

I suppose you could have exams proctored in very controlled environments with social distancing protocols in place. That presents other challenges to academic integrity though.

I meant her major. Tulane has a pretty big Arch contingent.

humble brag

She doesn't know yet. I'd say there's a fairly high possibility she ends up in law school.

Not intended that way, but I see where you're coming from. She tells me -- update 20 minutes ago -- that at the moment, all of her classes are planned to be in person.

Seems wasteful to have every professor recording a lecture every day. Just figure out who gives the best Organic Chemistry lecture in the nation and stream that to all the kids.

Martin Shkreli is still out on leave.

This 100%
My first year of college I lived at home and commuted from Fremont to Berkeley, (about 1.5 hour from my door to class via BART), 5 days a week. I was 17 and didn't want to move out. Stupidest thing I've ever done. Well maybe after signing up for 8am classes.
Looking back, I feel like I missed out on basically everything.

make it interactive where you can politely interrupt the professor at certain points (no more than 20-30 times per lecture as to not have an insane decision tree size) to ask a question and then have him continue this and all future lectures based on the interaction and I'm in

What are you all talking about? re: mark and Howard. You act like online classes are new. I graduated from Indiana university almost exclusively online and sure you can "cheat" on some exams but a lot of teachers are smart and frame their questions where you cant get an objective answer to their questions.

They are aware, and a lot dont do a ton of exams. Its papers. Especially for 300 and 400 level classes. Obviously I didnt get many social benefits from college but I gained a lot of valuable insight, and beyond that I understood what it means to think critically- which they dont care about teaching in high school.

The lack of critical thinking is why we are where we are. So there’s that.

Confirmed

Prediction: Since it is July 16th and nobody is currently working on the PUA extension, meaning they haven't even started to argue their sides yet, it will end on July 31st and **** will start getting real in August. They will waste the entire month of August and settle on some ridiculous number like 200 a week.

Reality will set in for the 21 million unemployed, alongside evictions and foreclosures just beginning, and then September starts getting ugly and crazy.

We've also only had ONE $1200 stimulus check in fourrrrr months. Just looking at all the employees from top to bottom in the restaurant industry, that is just sickening.

Cracks start in August. Dike breaks in September.

Prescience, thy name is Mr. Show:

I was referring specifically to hard sciences (engineering, math, physics etc.). There are some practical limitations to taking those exams online. For example: a Dynamics exam (sophomore engineering course), may have 3 problems on it and take 90 minutes to complete. Since it's graded for partial credit, simply having the right idea on how to complete can get you 90% credit on a given problem. This means that a group of people colluding on an exam can virtually guarantee a decent score if one of them can figure out the solution. Also, if you had other resources available (textbooks, online solutions) you could probably find a similar problem and get most of the credit.

Keep in mind, a lot of these majors have something like a 50% (best guess) drop rate because exams are brutal.

I suspect this is the reason that there are virtually no accredited online engineering programs. The format for testing just doesn't translate well.

Just last night, I was asking the HS-Sr-to-be how coronas are affecting her college applications etc.

As part of that discussion, I told her about some of my experiences from a million years ago. For anyone who has children in that age range, the best advice I can give is: go away for college.

I ended up ~ 400 miles from my hometown. Far enough I couldn't just run home if something happened, but close enough I could get home for holidays. While it was dumb luck on my part, it forced me to figure some things out. Could call home for advice, but when something went wrong, I had to deal with it.

That plus the social aspects mentioned above makes going away for school a good idea. (If things were equal of course. In today's coronavirus world, might be enough to swing the decision back the other way.)

Who had "nations that don't go hard at contain begin to suppress data"

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnb...dc-to-hhs.html

Easy over

This is prediction thread, not debate thread, but this is incorrect. At best it’s very bad comprehension and analysis of the data that is out there.

It actually ends the 25th. HTH the 11% unemployed.

This is a weird take. The issue with online sci/eng classes is the need for labs, not testing. Cheating is an issue for any form of test: B&M/online, multiple choice/short answer/show your work/essay. It will be easier to detect cheating in this 3 problem, 90 minute exam than any MC/SA exam. Multiple students with the same work shown would be a red flag.

Labs are certainly a factor too. However after doing a cursory look, online math degrees are also scarce which IME require no lab work yet have similar testing challenges as engineering.

I challenge your assertion that multiple students with the same work would be a red flag and that these types of problems would be easier to detect cheating. To use the dynamics example again, for any given question, there is usually only one method that will arrive at the correct solution. It's very formulaic but will eat someone alive who is ill prepared. A good free body diagram gets you something like 25% credit right away and those all should look the same.

Another reason these programs are challenging to do online is that you need qualified faculty. I suspect that someone with a PhD in Mechanical Engineer needs to be paid similarly to what private industry will pay (high) and online universities would probably struggle to match the necessary pay.

I could be dead wrong but I just don't see online engineering, math, and science degrees being recognized the same way that B&M degrees are.

Not that proctoring solves cheating, but the student having to use a web camera pretty much eliminates the forms of cheating you are describing. And for most of the online classes I took the actual tests were on campus.

The only arguments that make sense for me for why science and engineering wouldn't be as valuable online, is because those are collaborative fields, so learning how to function as part of a group is probably important, but I don't really know why that couldnt also be achieved online. So really it would just come down to labs.

As for math, if it's not the case that there are online programs, it would come down entirely to demand, I have an undergrad in math, and there's literally no reason every class couldn't have been online, and it's definitely not because of the cheating aspect of tests. Once you get past the low level math everyone has to take most of the tests aren't something you could easily cheat on as they aren't solving equations or contain answers you can google your way to. And all those low level maths classes it would be ridiculously easy to cheat in, those all have online options these days.

Some of the most difficult engineering tests I remember taking were upper level, 24 hour take home. AFAIK no one cheated on them, because the problems were sufficiently difficult and unique that you couldn’t look up a solution, and it would be pretty obvious to the prof if you used another student’s solution. Obviously, these exams were written differently than in-class exams, as I would expect instructors to structure online course material/exams differently than live courses.

IME different students do produce uniquely correct solutions to Newtonian physics-based problems, and the more advanced the material and more complex the problem, the more unique the solutions become. Even correct FBDs are drawn differently. Take a simple block on an incline: the incline could be facing different directions or have differing relative inclines, the block may be positioned differently, the normal force may be labeled differently (N, FsubN), etc.

You wouldn’t necessarily notice these things on a first pass grading an exam. But you would likely notice students getting unusual results, and would go back and take a second look. I have zero experience teaching online or at a university level, so maybe I am completely off-base, coming from a perspective of teaching Chinese HS students math and physics. But everything I remember from being a college student leads me to think that detecting cheating would be easier at a higher level.