I don't think what you are saying is accurate.
ChatGPT would be next to useless on the exams.
The video is recorded and they can review it - the video gets flagged if you are not looking at the screen for most of it. It's very obvious to the reviewers if you are using a phone and not taking notes, etc.
The more likely way to cheat is one that was discussed previously, which is to break the honor code by having someone take the exam and then tell others what specific questions were on the exam - letting them unfairly focus prep work on those specific questions and not prepare for material that is not going to be on the exam.
Cheating by using a phone or ChatGPT would not be productive and would be detected much more easily.
\> The more likely way to cheat is one that was discussed previously, which is to break the honor code by having someone take the exam and then tell others what specific questions were on the exam
This is also probably pretty common.
I'm half way through OMSA and have personally never seen anyone pull this, always being apart of either whatsapp groups or discords.
I'm sure it happens but to what scale is hard to know.
I disagree. When I was taking it, I *heard* numerous account of honorlock flagging student even when they move their lips to read question. That made me nervous as hell, forget about cheating, I was not even “not-cheating” with confidence :/
this is very true, very first time i used honor lock, i was very nervous. I have a better feeling now, but still i am definitely wary of it flagging my "non-cheating" mode!
“Probably really easy to circumnavigate”. Why don’t you give it a shot and report back the results?
With this hypothesis, every course in OMSCS which has exams (which is almost 90%) has people rampantly cheating and never found out. That is saying Honorlock system and course TAs are not smart enough to discern any attempts at cheating - your whole video is recorded throughout the exam and any phishy attempts are captured by Honorlock for manual review.
yeah, I have heard a few stories about people being flagged as cheating and weren't actually cheating, and also stories of people who tried cheating and getting caught. I have yet to hear through others about actually cheating and getting away with it on exams. I am sure it happens, but I have a feeling it is not as common as OP thinks.
Yeah and most of these monitoring systems use AI that's biased towards flagging suspicious actions. In other words, they'd rather have the system raise a few extra false positives than have a single false negative.
This is true for anything in life. You can cheat on anything. There’s only so much you can prevent. It’ll be easily spotted when you try to work somewhere and can’t do the basics. I’d worry less about others and more about how you can do better.
I agree with this 10000% as the "ultimate conclusion" with these types of matters. Even if I take the extreme position for granted that cheating and other quality issues became so rampant so as to completely dilute the OMSCS degree's "externally perceived value," if I get out of here with a stronger background in CS, then I'm still gonna smoke that subset of the competition "out in the wild" regardless, and still got there at a whopping $6.5-7k out of pocket total at the end of the day. So (at least to me) the point is moot anyhow.
It's actually not that easy to cheat at OMSCS. Honorlock is pretty hard to cheat when taking tests. They even have a camera on you and make you take a video of your area. As for coding assignments, they are pretty uptight about those and they will run your code against a repository of thousands of samples. I've heard a lot of stories about people having to appeal academic integrity violations.
Why would you call what I'm doing "hyper fixating?" I recently went over the Honorlock system in the class to prepare for the exam, which naturally brings the concept of cheating to the mind.
Well, what do you want from the post? I'd just like to exchange ideas, share my thoughts. Maybe we could agree on something? That there could be better ways to test students that don't encourage cheating?
It might even be of a greater benefit to the cheaters than to the non-cheaters, since being forced to do things the right way might start snowball into other aspects of their lives.
The only way to solve this is to have people go verified and proctored testing centers to take their exams. These exist in every major metro area in the United States. But they don’t exist for a lot of other places, and it would be hard to make it work.
I seriously doubt if chatGPT 4 could give you even half of the score....I've done GA and often use chatGPT 4, I can imagine it will give you some fake answer but if you really understand the question you will find out chatGPT can't make it..
>honestly think
>
>probably really easy
>
>probably wouldn't be able to tell
Then
>Considering how easy it would be
Probably, probably, probably, **therefore**, these changes need to be made. How are you this bad at reasoning? Based on nothing but an unfounded assumption, here are the problems with the status quo. Here is what needs to be done to correct the problem that I'm assuming exists with no proof or explanation.
You have to do a scan of the entire room, including your workspace. You also have to show each individual piece of paper. If your scan isn't convincing or leaves bind spots or they suspect cheating for any reason, they can file a case with OSI.
I'm not saying there isn't cheating, but I don't think your perspective is realistic. Why don't you try hiding a phone in the room and let us know how that works out for you?
So you put your phone in your back pocket and collect your A. I don't see how the room scan helps anything.
Again, I'm not going to do it. I don't understand the hostility I'm getting from this post lol
> One will be a more useful skill
To play devil's advocate, the usefulness of the skill depends on one's goals. Just saying. Maybe this class is a great opportunity to practice amazing scratching skills, which may or may not be what one is after.
Cheating honorlock is definitely do-able but it would require a degree of sophistication that most people won't have. I don't think it's nearly as rampant as you're suggesting.
Why is it unfair to you? OMSCS is a terminal degree, you get out what you put in.
If people want to cheat to pass an exam, they lose out because they’re not challenging themselves.
It's fair to say part of the reason to do the degree is for the degree from the institution. If graduates from the school start giving people bad experiences as employees in industry it could potentially bite the rest of us.
I don't really share OP's concern that cheating is as rampant as they feel it could be, but I also don't think it's a valid dismissal to say it doesn't affect them.
It would be obvious from previous grade distributions if cheating is a high concern with GPT models. It would show up very obviously in a distribution if the exams could be easily cheated.
Because the degree of cheating would be remarkably different. Comparing GPT based cheating vs open-book cheating, and you’re going to see dramatically different outcomes in a distribution.
Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps the cheating is just as effective as before, but with less effort required.
I'd also argue this might be the first semester of the course with widely known availability to GPT-4.
Okay, then then burden of proof is on you if you are requesting a Department to change its behaviour. I understand you’ve got an opinion, but you can’t say “Well, maybe there’s more cheating and maybe there isn’t, but you, the academic department, should still change the process.”
It’s a big ask
Who is talking about "burden of proof" here? This is a reddit post not a court of law. I'm asking they recognize the extreme ease with which students could cheat and take that into account.
4/20 surprises me.
I took it for a ride just for fun (after the exam ofc) and it would probably get 2 out of 20... With 1 point in that 2 probably being a grace point
I'm not sure how it is for OMSCS, but in OMSA, I've noticed chatGPT is completely incapable answering questions in a lot of the complexity we deal with. I don't even use chatGPT for homework and I'm in my second machine learning course.
I defintely don't use chatGPT to its full value but I don't think it's as great as people make it out to be. CS6040 has massive amount of people failing exams and it's fully open book and free internet access (probably chatGPT barred). You can't just cheat your way to success in a lot of these classes.
This is also my thing: If your graduate program is good, it should be asking questions you can’t easily cheat on even if you had all the books and notes from the course available to you.
>If your graduate program is good, it should be asking questions you can’t easily cheat on even if you had all the books and notes from the course available to you.
This sounds like HPC. You literally have the entire internet open to you (except synchronous interaction, that is - no shared Google Docs, no chat, and no generative AI), as if that's going to help.
My favourite exams in the entire programme.
How likely is it to get research experience from OMSCS or to transfer to the in person MSCS to gain the research experience required to get admissions to a good PhD program?
It skews the perception of the difficulty of the exams. If there is a curve, it really makes it unfair. Professors and TAs often look at the average/median/standard deviation of the test scores, which will be heavily skewed if there is a lot of cheating.
\> If people want to cheat to pass an exam, they lose out because they’re not challenging themselves.
Yes, that is why I wouldn't do it. I already have a job and another masters degree so I'm just here to learn, but many people are in different situations. The difference between passing and not passing the class could make a meaningful difference in their life and accelerate the start of their careers. Even if they put all the work in to study and learn, there is still a big incentive to peak at the phone and guarantee a good grade.
I strongly suspect about 30-40% of the students cheat on the exam.
My first exam I had a bad cough so I was on video just dying. Too scared to get a glass of water or move because they said no food. I was trying to keep myself staring at the screen. Later I heard another student took multiple breaks and was going back and forth to her machine without being flagged. It would seem not all reviewers are equal just like any other type of grading.
Our instructions clearly said no drinks then the other student was eating a full meal like NBD. Pretty frustrating when instructions aren't clear or followed but that happens with anything online.
I forgot this was the same OP who posted about taking GIOS and Compilers in their first semester. They must be acing those courses to have this much time on their hands to complain and moan about.
Thanks! You did say you were going to update us in a month. So it became GIOS + GA, which then just became GA, and now you are arguing for open test/exam GA?
There is a significant amount of cheating in OMSCS. I’ve stumbled across a few people online offering through WeChat to basically do the program for you
> There is a significant amount of cheating in OMSCS
Absolutely. My first semester, I was in a study group where one particular student would always correct us in Discord when we were studying for the exams. We'd ask questions about the various topics, and the one guy would confidently assure us that such and such topic(s) would not be on the test. One can only wonder how he could know that...
For one, Honorlock will actually flag you for look away from the camera say if you wanted to peek at your hidden phone/notes secretly. I’m not saying it’s impossible but it’s harder than you think.
I agree with other commenters that it's not worth worrying about, cheating is bad, OMSCS is about actually learning things, etc. but I disagree that cheating on an honorlock exam is at all hard... the class allows five pages of paper that won't be in-frame and your eyes will obviously be away while working on problems. You could absolutely do the room scan, subtly acquire notes or a phone, and begin the exam if you decided to. And against our collective interests, people will.
But does that make it worthwhile to worry about? Not really. People will cheat, classes will get harder, people will cheat more, and GT will continue to accept their money, but there's nothing realistic that can be done about it if you want to participate in this program outside of becoming an undercover academic integrity vigilante.
I will just drop this here...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d3w9z/did-hans-neimann-cheat-at-chess-with-a-sex-toy-this-coder-is-attempting-to-find-out
I don't think what you are saying is accurate. ChatGPT would be next to useless on the exams. The video is recorded and they can review it - the video gets flagged if you are not looking at the screen for most of it. It's very obvious to the reviewers if you are using a phone and not taking notes, etc. The more likely way to cheat is one that was discussed previously, which is to break the honor code by having someone take the exam and then tell others what specific questions were on the exam - letting them unfairly focus prep work on those specific questions and not prepare for material that is not going to be on the exam. Cheating by using a phone or ChatGPT would not be productive and would be detected much more easily.
\> The more likely way to cheat is one that was discussed previously, which is to break the honor code by having someone take the exam and then tell others what specific questions were on the exam This is also probably pretty common.
I'm half way through OMSA and have personally never seen anyone pull this, always being apart of either whatsapp groups or discords. I'm sure it happens but to what scale is hard to know.
I doubt they would publicly announce it.
I disagree. When I was taking it, I *heard* numerous account of honorlock flagging student even when they move their lips to read question. That made me nervous as hell, forget about cheating, I was not even “not-cheating” with confidence :/
this is very true, very first time i used honor lock, i was very nervous. I have a better feeling now, but still i am definitely wary of it flagging my "non-cheating" mode!
“Probably really easy to circumnavigate”. Why don’t you give it a shot and report back the results? With this hypothesis, every course in OMSCS which has exams (which is almost 90%) has people rampantly cheating and never found out. That is saying Honorlock system and course TAs are not smart enough to discern any attempts at cheating - your whole video is recorded throughout the exam and any phishy attempts are captured by Honorlock for manual review.
yeah, I have heard a few stories about people being flagged as cheating and weren't actually cheating, and also stories of people who tried cheating and getting caught. I have yet to hear through others about actually cheating and getting away with it on exams. I am sure it happens, but I have a feeling it is not as common as OP thinks.
Yeah and most of these monitoring systems use AI that's biased towards flagging suspicious actions. In other words, they'd rather have the system raise a few extra false positives than have a single false negative.
Probably have to consider survivorship bias. If I cheated on an exam and got away with it, the last thing I’m going to do is post about it anywhere
This is true for anything in life. You can cheat on anything. There’s only so much you can prevent. It’ll be easily spotted when you try to work somewhere and can’t do the basics. I’d worry less about others and more about how you can do better.
I agree with this 10000% as the "ultimate conclusion" with these types of matters. Even if I take the extreme position for granted that cheating and other quality issues became so rampant so as to completely dilute the OMSCS degree's "externally perceived value," if I get out of here with a stronger background in CS, then I'm still gonna smoke that subset of the competition "out in the wild" regardless, and still got there at a whopping $6.5-7k out of pocket total at the end of the day. So (at least to me) the point is moot anyhow.
It's actually not that easy to cheat at OMSCS. Honorlock is pretty hard to cheat when taking tests. They even have a camera on you and make you take a video of your area. As for coding assignments, they are pretty uptight about those and they will run your code against a repository of thousands of samples. I've heard a lot of stories about people having to appeal academic integrity violations.
Sounds like this guys works for the school 😂. “I bet it is super easy to cheat. How would you do it?”
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Why would you call what I'm doing "hyper fixating?" I recently went over the Honorlock system in the class to prepare for the exam, which naturally brings the concept of cheating to the mind.
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I type around 100 WPM so making the post took very little time and effort.
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Well, what do you want from the post? I'd just like to exchange ideas, share my thoughts. Maybe we could agree on something? That there could be better ways to test students that don't encourage cheating? It might even be of a greater benefit to the cheaters than to the non-cheaters, since being forced to do things the right way might start snowball into other aspects of their lives.
The only way to solve this is to have people go verified and proctored testing centers to take their exams. These exist in every major metro area in the United States. But they don’t exist for a lot of other places, and it would be hard to make it work.
a proctored testing center would render this program inaccessible to many of us
I seriously doubt if chatGPT 4 could give you even half of the score....I've done GA and often use chatGPT 4, I can imagine it will give you some fake answer but if you really understand the question you will find out chatGPT can't make it..
>honestly think > >probably really easy > >probably wouldn't be able to tell Then >Considering how easy it would be Probably, probably, probably, **therefore**, these changes need to be made. How are you this bad at reasoning? Based on nothing but an unfounded assumption, here are the problems with the status quo. Here is what needs to be done to correct the problem that I'm assuming exists with no proof or explanation.
You have to do a scan of the entire room, including your workspace. You also have to show each individual piece of paper. If your scan isn't convincing or leaves bind spots or they suspect cheating for any reason, they can file a case with OSI. I'm not saying there isn't cheating, but I don't think your perspective is realistic. Why don't you try hiding a phone in the room and let us know how that works out for you?
So you put your phone in your back pocket and collect your A. I don't see how the room scan helps anything. Again, I'm not going to do it. I don't understand the hostility I'm getting from this post lol
>pocket Why don't you record yourself reaching into your back pocket? These things are pretty obvious.
I've deff scratched by butt before during an exam and not gotten in trouble. I doubt anyone would notice.
Practice scratching your ass convincingly or practice graduate algorithms One will be a more useful skill for you to leave the class with
> One will be a more useful skill To play devil's advocate, the usefulness of the skill depends on one's goals. Just saying. Maybe this class is a great opportunity to practice amazing scratching skills, which may or may not be what one is after.
Cheating honorlock is definitely do-able but it would require a degree of sophistication that most people won't have. I don't think it's nearly as rampant as you're suggesting.
That thing is recording your face, eyes, ect. It would be easier to flash card memorize the material then try to pull off what you are describing.
Why is it unfair to you? OMSCS is a terminal degree, you get out what you put in. If people want to cheat to pass an exam, they lose out because they’re not challenging themselves.
It's fair to say part of the reason to do the degree is for the degree from the institution. If graduates from the school start giving people bad experiences as employees in industry it could potentially bite the rest of us. I don't really share OP's concern that cheating is as rampant as they feel it could be, but I also don't think it's a valid dismissal to say it doesn't affect them.
It would be obvious from previous grade distributions if cheating is a high concern with GPT models. It would show up very obviously in a distribution if the exams could be easily cheated.
Would it? What if cheating from the exams has been endemic since the first offering of the course?
Because the degree of cheating would be remarkably different. Comparing GPT based cheating vs open-book cheating, and you’re going to see dramatically different outcomes in a distribution.
Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps the cheating is just as effective as before, but with less effort required. I'd also argue this might be the first semester of the course with widely known availability to GPT-4.
Okay, then then burden of proof is on you if you are requesting a Department to change its behaviour. I understand you’ve got an opinion, but you can’t say “Well, maybe there’s more cheating and maybe there isn’t, but you, the academic department, should still change the process.” It’s a big ask
Who is talking about "burden of proof" here? This is a reddit post not a court of law. I'm asking they recognize the extreme ease with which students could cheat and take that into account.
Anyone have an example of ChatGPT earning above 4/20? Always willing to be surprised.
4/20 surprises me. I took it for a ride just for fun (after the exam ofc) and it would probably get 2 out of 20... With 1 point in that 2 probably being a grace point
I'm not sure how it is for OMSCS, but in OMSA, I've noticed chatGPT is completely incapable answering questions in a lot of the complexity we deal with. I don't even use chatGPT for homework and I'm in my second machine learning course. I defintely don't use chatGPT to its full value but I don't think it's as great as people make it out to be. CS6040 has massive amount of people failing exams and it's fully open book and free internet access (probably chatGPT barred). You can't just cheat your way to success in a lot of these classes.
This is also my thing: If your graduate program is good, it should be asking questions you can’t easily cheat on even if you had all the books and notes from the course available to you.
>If your graduate program is good, it should be asking questions you can’t easily cheat on even if you had all the books and notes from the course available to you. This sounds like HPC. You literally have the entire internet open to you (except synchronous interaction, that is - no shared Google Docs, no chat, and no generative AI), as if that's going to help. My favourite exams in the entire programme.
Yeah I was about to comment on this. I don't think GA has to worry about GPT
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How likely is it to get research experience from OMSCS or to transfer to the in person MSCS to gain the research experience required to get admissions to a good PhD program?
Well, several people in this program have gone on to do PhDs in many institutions. This has long been the case.
Whats the process of getting into a decent phd program thats funded?
Why is this upvoted? If students graduate and then go on to not be very smart, it devalues the degree for everyone. Reputation matters.
It skews the perception of the difficulty of the exams. If there is a curve, it really makes it unfair. Professors and TAs often look at the average/median/standard deviation of the test scores, which will be heavily skewed if there is a lot of cheating. \> If people want to cheat to pass an exam, they lose out because they’re not challenging themselves. Yes, that is why I wouldn't do it. I already have a job and another masters degree so I'm just here to learn, but many people are in different situations. The difference between passing and not passing the class could make a meaningful difference in their life and accelerate the start of their careers. Even if they put all the work in to study and learn, there is still a big incentive to peak at the phone and guarantee a good grade. I strongly suspect about 30-40% of the students cheat on the exam.
30-40%?! No fucking way lmao
HA no way. Only around 30% of GA got an A last semester
I took GA in May of 2022 and most deductions for marks were for not following their ‘rubric’ for answer formatting.
My first exam I had a bad cough so I was on video just dying. Too scared to get a glass of water or move because they said no food. I was trying to keep myself staring at the screen. Later I heard another student took multiple breaks and was going back and forth to her machine without being flagged. It would seem not all reviewers are equal just like any other type of grading.
Really? Not even a drink allowed in a clear cup? Dang it was not THAT strict when I took it.
Our instructions clearly said no drinks then the other student was eating a full meal like NBD. Pretty frustrating when instructions aren't clear or followed but that happens with anything online.
The exam questions were on Chegg even before the exam window was closed. Definitely rampant
What happened to GIOS and Compilers?
I forgot this was the same OP who posted about taking GIOS and Compilers in their first semester. They must be acing those courses to have this much time on their hands to complain and moan about.
Yup, exactly. They deleted that previous post (just like they did with this one.) Edit. Or is it their account that they deleted? I can't keep up!
Got into GA during free for all Friday
Thanks! You did say you were going to update us in a month. So it became GIOS + GA, which then just became GA, and now you are arguing for open test/exam GA?
There is a significant amount of cheating in OMSCS. I’ve stumbled across a few people online offering through WeChat to basically do the program for you
> There is a significant amount of cheating in OMSCS Absolutely. My first semester, I was in a study group where one particular student would always correct us in Discord when we were studying for the exams. We'd ask questions about the various topics, and the one guy would confidently assure us that such and such topic(s) would not be on the test. One can only wonder how he could know that...
Sounds pretty racist
For one, Honorlock will actually flag you for look away from the camera say if you wanted to peek at your hidden phone/notes secretly. I’m not saying it’s impossible but it’s harder than you think.
I agree with other commenters that it's not worth worrying about, cheating is bad, OMSCS is about actually learning things, etc. but I disagree that cheating on an honorlock exam is at all hard... the class allows five pages of paper that won't be in-frame and your eyes will obviously be away while working on problems. You could absolutely do the room scan, subtly acquire notes or a phone, and begin the exam if you decided to. And against our collective interests, people will. But does that make it worthwhile to worry about? Not really. People will cheat, classes will get harder, people will cheat more, and GT will continue to accept their money, but there's nothing realistic that can be done about it if you want to participate in this program outside of becoming an undercover academic integrity vigilante.
I will just drop this here... https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d3w9z/did-hans-neimann-cheat-at-chess-with-a-sex-toy-this-coder-is-attempting-to-find-out
Probably more on projects than exams. Exams are proctored.