"Win"dows

Or, you know, paper.

• That's what desk/workspace scanning in the most extreme cases is meant to detect. This is why I really don't like online schooling, because in the absolute worst case, your school will literally scan your place.

You know what would be a really good way to show if your students learned your course material? Let them show it with a practical test of some kind...

When my wife did her online courses, she actually had to set up a webcam showing her face and hands while she did the tests.

They use massively privacy-invading measures to ensure that you don't do that. I don't know about Pearson specifically, but there are horror stories from the "proctoring" industry about what people have to put up with.

For example: "facial detection, eye tracking, and algorithms that measure “anomalies” in metrics like head movement, mouse clicks, and scrolling rates to flag students exhibiting behavior that differs from the class norm" As is widely known, facial detection doesn't work as well for dark-skinned people, and eye and head movement of so-called "normal people" is not fair to people who are not cheating, but not "normal".

And you can't leave your desk because you might have something out of camera sight to help you cheat. Straightforward right? Not really: "A University of Florida student felt forced to vomit at her desk when the proctor threatened to fail her if she left the screen (Harwell, 2020). She vomited at her desk in front of the stranger."

Maybe you can get away with hiding notes on another device or paper, but they try hard to make that impossible. They want to you to get up and show them everything in the room before you start your test. They want to see your hands at all times, and even track your eye movements. If your eyes are always darting to a certain area off screen where you might have notes, they might interrupt your test and demand to be shown what you're looking at. If you look up or off to the side when you're thinking, they're going to demand that you show them what you're looking at too. If you think you can scroll through notes on your phone... maybe. But, they often demand that your hands be visible on-camera at all times.

It's an arms race, and sometimes people do manage to cheat, but when that happens the proctoring companies just implement more and more outrageous surveillance.

Oh Pearson definitely does thst as well. But not everyone lives near or has reliable transit to a testing facility. Online testing is essentially a requirement for those people.

They actually already do that. Many schools will have dedicated exam rooms setup (some are even certified by Pearson) where you empty your pockets before entering, cameras are trained on you while you take the test, recorded for future review if needed, the computer is configured to be locked down to only the test site and there's a test proctor actively monitoring as well.

Honestly just give me a printed packet in a classroom with a teacher watching the test takers any day

I also blame the Uni for not advertising that it would be required for the coursework.

Just like Steam now says "REQUIRES KERNEL LEVEL ANTICHEAT" like a big ugly Surgeon General's warning, I think college courses should say stuff like this too.

Along with "REQUIRES INVASIVE KERNEL LEVEL REMOTE ACCESS MALWARE BROWSER TO TAKE EXAMS"

Hold up, I can trigger a trauma response:

Answer entered:

25

Incorrect. The correct answer is:

25

The homework code is what I meant. Sorry for not being clearer in my comment.

CS for me was on SunOS / Solaris.

That's is really cool. There were a lot of Windows fanboys at my college unfortunately.

Kernel-level anti-cheat, it's not just for gamers.

There are some fairly in depth setups to hide the fact that its a VM normally used for testing malware, I winder if those would fool it.

Thankfully our uni forces us to use Linux at least in a form of WSL.

worked for several years in higher ed

softwares

/Sigh

I've got my stuff customized to be as close to real paper as I can manage regarding contrast and readability but sometimes I just can't and have to look at my printed copies instead.

Screens aren't meant for reading, they're meant for watching.

Note to self: Find color E-Ink monitor for textbooks

Heroic is so aptly titled. Combined with one of those helper apps to install "Proton GE", it makes you just about unstoppable.

I'm finding that Linux has given me better compatibility with my game library as a whole!

For real legacy stuff, Bottles also works a treat. Never thought I'd get Sims 1 working again with so little hassle.

It's a wonderful time.

I agree. I run Heroic as well, but it’s not as straightforward for most people. GOG should at least redirect Linux people to Heroic or something. Having to find it by myself isn’t great

Have an official tutorial for the normies

I have contacted some of them and what they said was often: GOG's tools suck, their support team suck…

I don’t know how a company could fuck this up so I take it as is, and don’t fully trust it, but they haven’t improved their store in years

Titles, headers, and other web elements typically have punctuation standards that differ from the punctuation standards for body text.

They added an OS check to a website? What's next, checking if your desk is sturdy enough to carry the weight of their javascript?

It's the name of a publisher famous for overpriced courses full of typos and inaccuracies

For anticheat.

To harvest your data! Why else?

I'm surprised they allow VMs, I would've assumed given shit like this is generally even worse than the worst gaming anticheats when it comes to invasiveness, that VMs would've been blocked too.