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from the these-are-our-future-leaders dept.
These Students Figured Out Their Tests Were Graded By Ai — And The Easy Way To Cheat:
On Monday, Dana Simmons came downstairs to find her 12-year-old son, Lazare, in tears. He'd completed the first assignment for his seventh-grade history class on Edgenuity, an online platform for virtual learning. He'd received a 50 out of 100. That wasn't on a practice test — it was his real grade.
[...] At first, Simmons tried to console her son. "I was like well, you know, some teachers grade really harshly at the beginning," said Simmons, who is a history professor herself. Then, Lazare clarified that he'd received his grade less than a second after submitting his answers.
Now, for every short-answer question, Lazare writes two long sentences followed by a disjointed list of keywords — anything that seems relevant to the question.
[...] Apparently, that "word salad" is enough to get a perfect grade on any short-answer question in an Edgenuity test.
Edgenuity didn't respond to repeated requests for comment, but the company's online help center suggests this may be by design. According to the website, answers to certain questions receive 0% if they include no keywords, and 100% if they include at least one. Other questions earn a certain percentage based on the number of keywords included.
[...] Edgenuity offers over 300 online classes for middle and high school students[...].
Of course, short-answer questions aren't the only factor that impacts Edgenuity grades — Lazare's classes require other formats, including multiple-choice questions and single-word inputs. A developer familiar with the platform estimated that short answers make up less than five percent of Edgenuity's course content, and many of the eight students The Verge spoke to for this story confirmed that such tasks were a minority of their work. Still, the tactic has certainly impacted Lazare's class performance — he's now getting 100s on every assignment.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Thursday September 03 2020, @08:49PM (4 children)
Freshman year of HS. Science teacher gets transferred. Gym teacher ends up covering science course. Gym teacher grades based on *verbatim* answer. No paraphrasing allowed. There was some general animosity between me and that teacher for other reasons--just personality conflicts I guess. The bad mark culminated in a parent-teacher conference. My grade was fixed, but of course that does nothing to fix the animosity. Gutted out freshman year in that class... I think I got a B or something. This was in Fairfax County, VA too--considered to be one of the best public school systems at the time. I shudder to think of what *bad* public schools systems were like.
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(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2020, @09:50PM (3 children)
> I shudder to think of what *bad* public schools systems were like.
Jr. high and HS in South East San Diego.
Jr. high had 10 foot tall chain link fence topped with razor wire. In the "war" with the other jr. high kids (11-13yr olds; although there was one kid, "Binky" who I swear was in his 20s-- dressed like a pimp with a $100 bill in his hat band) from my school brought guns, knives and teargas-- one guy showed up with a sword. Didn't learn much there except how not to get noticed.
High school had a sniper shoot our basketball team while they were practicing, some guy dragged from a rope tied to the rear bumper of a car around the student parking lot, all kinds of shit went down there. One of our two math teachers was a drug dealer, and was caught almost 10 years after I graduated. One was suffering dementia, and would suddenly get a confused look on his face as he stood before the class which was our cue to leave since he had no idea where he was. Almost 10 years later, I ran into a sociable girl that was also in my graduating class, and she named off the 25 folks I thought were most likely to escape, but none of them made it to university. I was homeless in high school, but apparently, I was the only one who made it to university. Our valedictorian was a single mother 8 months after graduating HS.
We didn't have metal detectors and searches at school, so there are worse than mine too.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Friday September 04 2020, @10:21AM
This list of examples from a single guy sounds utterly ridiculous, but it isn't. This is how bad some schools are these days.
The writer was AC, but I'll sign my name here to support that what it is said is actually correct.
(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Friday September 04 2020, @01:51PM (1 child)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOT3BvhjXcA [youtube.com]
Also: https://inallthings.org/why-is-school-like-a-prison/ [inallthings.org]
And in general: https://archive.org/details/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanEducation_758 [archive.org]
One major perspective problem in the USA is that people confuse schooling with education. It's true that sometimes education happens in school, but that is not the main thing schools are about. Congrats on obviously getting an education for yourself despite school.
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Friday September 04 2020, @02:27PM
"Public Schools Look Like Prisons For A Reason!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D0tbRUtB7A [youtube.com]
"Prison vs. School"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTmn_-wuWjg [youtube.com]
Also: https://themindunleashed.com/2016/05/public-school-or-prison-here-are-10-ways-its-hard-to-tell.html [themindunleashed.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system [wikipedia.org]
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/09/john-taylor-gatto/the-prussian-connection/ [lewrockwell.com]
"The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.
The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the “Address to the German Nation” by the philosopher Fichte — one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time would be different.
In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that “work makes free,” and working for the State, even laying down one’s life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition1 lay the power to cloud men’s minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling. ...
The Prussian mind, which carried the day, held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to the army;2 2) Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; 3) Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; 4) Well-subordinated clerks for industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike on most issues; 6) National uniformity in thought, word, and deed. ..."
Thinking on what you wrote about East San Diego, not that I would wish that on anyone, but maybe ironically you got a better "education" in some aspects of life through learning how to survive there through independent thinking than many kids get in a more typical "good" school?
Also tangentially related: "The Prisoner":
https://archive.org/details/The_Prisoner [archive.org]
From "The Chimes of Big Ben" episode:
Number 6 (Prisoner) to Number 2 (Warden): You're just as much a prisoner as I am.
Warden: Of course, I know too much - we're both lifers. I am definitely an optimist. That's why it doesn't matter who Number One is. It doesn't matter which side runs the Village.
Prisoner: It's run by one side or the other.
Warden: Oh, certainly. But both sides are becoming identical. What has been created is in fact an international community, a blueprint for world order. When the sides facing each other realize they are looking into a mirror, they'll see this is the pattern for the future.
Prisoner: The whole earth as the Village?
Warden: That is my hope. What's yours?
Prisoner: I'd like to be the first man on the moon.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilla_Watson [wikipedia.org]
"If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."
But a caveat from Manuel De Landa: http://netbase.org/delanda/meshwork.htm [netbase.org]
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.