Kashmir Hill, The New York Times; Accused of Cheating by an Algorithm, and a Professor She Had Never Met
An unsettling glimpse at the digitization of education.
"The most serious flaw with these systems may be a human one: educators who overreact when artificially intelligent software raises an alert.
“Schools seem to be treating it as the word of God,” Mr. Quintin said. “If the computer says you’re cheating, you must be cheating.”"
Natasha Singer and ; Online Cheating Charges Upend Dartmouth Medical School
The university accused 17 students of cheating on remote exams, raising questions about data mining and sowing mistrust on campus.
"At the heart of the accusations is Dartmouth’s use of the Canvas system to retroactively track student activity during remote exams without their knowledge. In the process, the medical school may have overstepped by using certain online activity data to try to pinpoint cheating, leading to some erroneous accusations, according to independent technology experts, a review of the software code and school documents obtained by The New York Times.
Dartmouth’s drive to root out cheating provides a sobering case study of how the coronavirus has accelerated colleges’ reliance on technology, normalizing student tracking in ways that are likely to endure after the pandemic.
While universities have long used anti-plagiarism software and other anti-cheating apps, the pandemic has pushed hundreds of schools that switched to remote learning to embrace more invasive tools. Over the last year, many have required students to download software that can take over their computers during remote exams or use webcams to monitor their eye movements for possibly suspicious activity, even as technology experts have warned that such tools can be invasive, insecure, unfair and inaccurate."
"The winners were announced: Julie Miller first, Susanne Davis second. “She didn’t come down and shake our hands,” Davis said, referring to Miller. “In my entire 20 years of racing, I’ve never had that happen. That’s when I looked at her and said: ‘Gosh, I didn’t see you. Where did you pass me?’ ” Miller replied that she had been easily recognizable in her bright green socks and then all but ran off the awards stage, Davis said, telling Davis that she would see her at the world championships in Kona, Hawaii. Davis compared notes with the third- and fourth-place finishers. They, too, were mystified. They had not seen Miller on the course, either. This odd series of events eventually touched off an extraordinary feat of forensic detective work by a group of athletes who were convinced that Miller had committed what they consider the triathlon’s worst possible transgression. They believed she had deliberately cut the course and then lied about it. Dissatisfied with the response of race officials, they methodically gathered evidence from the minutiae of her record: official race photographs, timing data, photographs from spectators along the routes, the accounts of other competitors and volunteers who saw, or did not see, Miller at various points. Much of it suggested that Miller simply could not have completed some segments of the race in the times she claimed, and all of it raised grave questions about the integrity of her results at Whistler and other races."
