#high stakes exams

[crabsnpersimmons]

exam 5 for me... tomorrow!

honestly have been feeling really nervous for this exam since my classmates have either failed it or just barely passed. and i had less time to study this time around because i rushed to book the exam.

so i drew this little encouragement early cuz i need the reminder that no matter what happens tomorrow, i did what i could and i didn't compromise on my boundaries—and that is its own victory.

and i hope that you'll be reminded to celebrate your own big and small victories too!

"You are nervous and that's okay! You did your best! You set boundaries! You took breaks! We're so proud of you, Starlight! Whatever happens, we'll always be here, cheering you on!"

[rosalinesurvived]

Kunikidazai is a galaxy-brain ship obvs but but i need a fresh out of the PM Dazai viewing Kunikida as like the Ultimate CumulationTM of both Oda and Chuuya, the people who loved him, one Dazai left and the other who left first, I need Kunikida terrified of Dazai not because of any PM suspicions but because Dazai’s everything Kuni could be if he skewed to the right: the sucide obsession, the dangerous morality, the lost ideals, the general bizarreness–what puts Kuni off of Dazai is that he’s everything like Kuni and at the same time nothing like him, surely and that has to Fuck You Up, being stuck with your distorted image day in and day out.

“You are everything I could have had,” Dazai thinks towards Kunikida

“You are all of the horrors I could become,” Kunikida thinks of Dazai

[pikslasrce]

moodboard for when you know ur supposed to be studying lest you fail your exams but the mere thought of doing that makes you unbelievably tired so youre bedridden for most of the day and with each passing hour you feel less and less rested no matter what you do

[im-still-watching-anime]

my fav part of hunter x hunter so far is how every single fight immediately turns into ‘wait this is….actually a battle of mental stamina……to see who can endure…..’

[saintshigaraki]

deutsch final tomorrow morning......physics final in the afternoon......manifest only good things for me please

[dionysus-complex]

wondering if it’s this city or this phd program or both that have a way of consuming your entire consciousness and making you forget there’s a world outside of it

[orbees]

jan was me easing into my school shit and now feb i have to actually start studying for my exams =___= i dont want to wausgshdfsdhg

[faerociousbeast]

i hate fandom poll tournaments!! like actually

[townpostin]

Modi Govt Saved NTA Skin Before Supreme Court: Dr. Ajoy Kumar

Former MP Criticizes Verdict, Questions Government’s Stance on Paper Leak Responsibility In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision not to order a re-examination of NEET UG 2024, concerns have been raised about the integrity of the testing process and the impact on aspiring medical students across India. JAMSHEDPUR – Dr. Ajoy Kumar, the former MP from Jamshedpur, has slammed the central…

[edernetdotorg]

South Korean Students Sue After Exam Cut Short by 90 Seconds

In a significant legal action, 39 students in Seoul, South Korea, have filed a lawsuit over a critical error during the Suneung exam, a pivotal college admission test in the country. The exam, known for its intense difficulty and national importance, ended 90 seconds early at a Seoul testing center, causing widespread disruption and distress among the examinees. Why the Suneung Exam Matters The…

[drjvh]

Florida's New College Entrance Exam: A Trojan Horse for Ideological Indoctrination?

The education community is buzzing about Florida’s new college entrance exam, a significant departure from traditional standardized tests like the SAT and ACT. But what many may not realize is the loaded political and ideological baggage that accompanies this shift to a “classical” exam. I weighed in this week the burgeoning issue based on my scholarship in curriculum and testing policy on NBC…

[feraligatrfangs]

I'm glad to hear you're going to be okay, though that must have been a terrifying experience! Wishing you all the best with your recovery, and lots of time with your Pokémon!

aww thanks for thinking of me!

ngl you're right, it was super scary, and i was quite certain that was it for me... but it isn't!

i have to lie very still for a few days and only eat soup broth so my stitches don't pop, but my Pokemon are working around this limitation to baby me! for instance, arachne is very light and can sit on my head. she will not let go.

thank you again!

[nonbinaryeye]

I cannot wait to take break from my psychology exams to finally study for my journalism master's degree state exams. Because right now I'm trying to learn for just one exam in one day third of the amount I will have ten days to learn for entire master's state exams. That will be so much time.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Company that makes millions spying on students will get to sue a whistleblower

Yesterday, the Court of Appeal for British Columbia handed down a jaw-droppingly stupid and terrible decision, rejecting the whistleblower Ian Linkletter’s claim that he was engaged in legitimate criticism when he linked to freely available materials from the ed-tech surveillance company Proctorio:

https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/ca/23/01/2023BCCA0160.htm

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/20/links-arent-performances/#free-ian-linkletter

It’s been a minute since Linkletter’s case arose, so I’ll give you a little recap here. Proctorio is a massive, wildly profitable ed-tech company that sells a surveillance tool to monitor students while they take high-stakes tests from home. The tool monitors the student’s computer and the student’s face, especially their eye-movements. It also allows instructors and other personnel to watch the students and even take control of their computer. This is called “remote invigilation.”

This is ghastly in just about every way. For starters, Proctorio’s facial monitoring software embeds the usual racist problems with machine-learning stuff, and struggles to recognize Black and brown faces. Black children sitting exams under Proctorio’s gimlet eye have reported that the only way to satisfy Proctorio’s digital phrenology system is to work with multiple high-powered lights shining directly in their faces.

A Proctorio session typically begins with a student being forced to pan a webcam around their test-taking room. During lockdown, this meant that students who shared a room — for example, with a parent who worked night-shifts — would have to invade their family’s privacy, and might be disqualified because they couldn’t afford a place large enough to have private room in which to take their tests.

Proctorio’s tools also punish students for engaging in normal test-taking activity. Do you stare off into space when you’re trying through a problem? Bzzzt. Do you read questions aloud to yourself under your breath when you’re trying to understand their meanings? Bzzzt. Do you have IBS and need to go to the toilet? Bzzzt. The canon of remote invigilation horror stories is filled with accounts of students being forced to defecate themselves, or vomit down their shirts without turning their heads (because looking away is an automatically flagged offense).

The tragedy is that all of this is in service to the pedagogically bankrupt practice of high-stakes testing. Few pedagogists believe that the kind of exam that Proctorio seeks to recreate in students’ homes has real assessment merit. As the old saying goes, “Tests measure your ability to take tests.” But Proctorio doesn’t even measure your ability to take a test — it measures your ability to take a test with three bright lights shining directly on your face. Or while you are covered in your own feces and vomit. While you stare rigidly at a screen. While your tired mother who just worked 16 hours in a covid ward stands outside the door to your apartment.

The lockdown could have been an opportunity to improve educational assessment. There is a rich panoply of techniques that educators can adopt that deliver a far better picture of students’ learning, and work well for remote as well as in-person education. Instead, companies like Proctorio made vast fortunes, most of it from publicly funded institutions, by encouraging a worse-than-useless, discriminatory practice:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/24/proctor-ology/#miseducation

Proctorio clearly knows that its racket is brittle. Like any disaster profiteer, Proctorio will struggle to survive after the crisis passes and we awaken from our collective nightmare and ask ourselves why we were stampeded into using its terrible products. The company went to war against its critics.

In 2020, Proctorio CEO Mike Olsen doxed a child who complained about his company’s software in a Reddit forum:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#moral-exemplar

In 2021, the reviews for Proctorio’s Chrome plugin all mysteriously vanished. Needless to say, these reviews — from students forced to use Proctorio’s spyware — were brutal:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/04/hypervigilance/#radical-transparency

Proctorio claims that it protects “educational integrity,” but its actions suggest a company far more concerned about the integrity of its own profits:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#cheating-anticheat

One of the critics that Proctorio attacked is Ian Linkletter. In 2020, Linkletter was a Learning Technology Specialist at UBC’s Faculty of Education. His job was to assess and support ed-tech tools, including Proctorio. In the course of that work, Linkletter reviewed Proctorio’s training material for educators, which are a bonanza of mask-off materials that are palpably contemptuous of students, who are presumed to be cheaters.

At the time, a debate over remote invigilation tools was raging through Canadian education circles, with students, teachers and parents fiercely arguing the merits and downsides of making surveillance the linchpin of assessment. Linkletter waded into this debate, tweeting a series of sharp criticisms of Proctorio. In these tweets, Linkletter linked to Proctorio’s unlisted, but publicly available, Youtube videos.

A note of explanation: Youtube videos can be flagged as “unlisted,” which means they don’t show up in searches. They can also be flagged as “private,” which means you have to be on a list of authorized users to see them. Proctorio made its training videos unlisted, but they weren’t private — they were visible to anyone who had a link to them.

Proctorio sued Linkletter for this. They argued that he had breached a duty of confidentiality, and that linking to these videos was a copyright violation:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/17/proctorio-v-linkletter/#proctorio

This is a classic SLAPP — a “strategic litigation against public participation.” That’s when a deep-pocketed, thin-skinned bully, like Proctorio, uses the threat of a long court battle to force their critics into silence. They know they can’t win their case, but that’s not the victory they’re seeking. They don’t want to win the case, they want to win the argument, by silencing a critic who would otherwise be bankrupted by legal fees.

Getting SLAPPed is no fun. I’ve been there. Just this year, a billionaire financier tried to force me into silence by threatening me with a lawsuit. Thankfully, Ken “Popehat” White was on the case, and he reminded this billionaire’s counsel that California has a strong anti-SLAPP law, and if Ken had to defend me in court, he could get a fortune in fees from the bully after he prevailed:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1531684572479377409

British Columbia also has an anti-SLAPP law, but unlike California’s anti-SLAPP, the law is relatively new and untested. Still, Proctorio’s suit against Linkletter was such an obvious SLAPP that for many of us, it seemed likely that Linkletter would be able to defend himself from this American bully and its attempt to use Canada’s courts to silence a Canadian educator.

For Linkletter to use BC’s anti-SLAPP law, he would have to prove that he was weighing in on a matter of public interest, and that Proctorio’s copyright and confidentiality claims were nonsense, unlikely to prevail on their merits. If he could do that, he’d be able to get the case thrown out, without having to go through a lengthy, brutally expensive trial.

Incredibly, though, the lower court found against Linkletter. Naturally, Linkletter appealed. His “factotum” is a crystal clear document that sets out the serious errors of law and fact the lower court made:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aB1ztWDFr3MU6BsAMt6rWXOiXJ8sT3MY/view

But yesterday, the Court of Appeal upheld the lower court, repeating all of these gross errors and finding for Proctorio:

https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/ca/23/01/2023BCCA0160.htm

This judgment is grotesque. It makes a mockery of BC’s anti-SLAPP statute, to say nothing of Canadian copyright and confidentiality law. For starters, it finds that publishing a link can be a “performance” of a copyrighted work, which meant that when Linkletter linked to the world-viewable Youtube files that Proctorio had posted, he infringed on copyright.

This is a perverse, even surreal take on copyright. The court rejects Linkletter’s argument that even Youtube’s terms of service warned Proctorio that publishing world-viewable material on its site constituted permission for people to link to and watch that material.

But what about “fair dealing” (similar to fair use)? Linkletter argued that linking to a video that shows that Proctorio’s assurances to parents and students about its products’ benign nature were contradicted by the way it talked to educators was fair dealing. Fair dealing is a broad suite of limitations and exceptions to copyright for the purposes of commentary, criticism, study, satire, etc.

So even if linking is a copyright infringement (ugh, seriously?!), surely it’s fair dealing in this case. Proctorio was selling millions of dollars in software to public institutions, inflicting it on kids whose parents weren’t getting the whole story. Linkletter used Proctorio’s own words to rebut its assurances. What could be more fair dealing than that?

Not so fast, the appeals panel says: they say that Linkletter could have made his case just as well without linking to Proctorio’s materials. This is…bad. I mean, it’s also wrong, but it’s very bad, too. It’s wrong because an argument about what a company intends necessarily has to draw upon the company’s own statements. It’s absurd to say that Linkletter’s point would have been made equally well if he said “I disbelieve Proctorio’s public assurances because I’ve seen seekrit documents” as it was when he was able to link to those documents so that people could see them for themselves.

But it’s bad because it rips the heart out of the fair dealing exception for criticism. Publishing a link to a copyrighted work is the most minimal way to quote from it in a debate — Linkletter literally didn’t reproduce a single word, not a single letter, from Proctorio’s copyrighted works. If the court says, “Sure, you can quote from a work to criticize it, but only so much as you need to make your argument,” and then says, “But also, simply referencing a work without quoting it at all is taking too much,” then what reasonable person would ever try to rely on a fair dealing exemption for criticism?

Then there’s the confidentiality claim: in his submissions to the lower court and the appeals court, Linkletter pointed out that the “confidential” materials he’d linked to were available in many places online, and could be easily located with a Google search. Proctorio had uploaded these “confidential” materials to many sites — without flagging them as “unlisted” or “private.”

What’s more, the videos that Linkletter linked to were in found a “Help Center” that didn’t even have a terms-of-service condition that required confidentiality. How on Earth can materials that are publicly available all over the web be “confidential?”

Here, the court takes yet another bizarre turn in logic. They find that because a member of the public would have to “gather” the videos from “many sources,” that the collection of links was confidential, even if none of the links in the collection were confidential. Again, this is both wrong and bad.

Every investigator, every journalist, every critic, starts by looking in different places for information that can be combined to paint a coherent picture of what’s going on. This is the heart of “open source intelligence,” combing different sources for data points that shed light on one another.

The idea that “gathering” public information can breach confidentiality strikes directly at all investigative activity. Every day, every newspaper and news broadcast in Canada engages in this conduct. The appeals court has put them all in jeopardy with this terrible finding.

Finally, there’s the question of Proctorio’s security. Proctorio argued that by publishing links to its educator materials, Linkletter weakened the security of its products. That is, they claim that if students know how the invigilation tool works, it stops working. This is the very definition of “security through obscurity,” and it’s a practice that every serious infosec professional rejects. If Proctorio is telling the truth when it says that describing how its products work makes them stop working, then they make bad products that no one should pay money for.

The court absolutely flubs this one, too, accepting the claim of security through obscurity at face value. That’s a finding that flies in the face of all security research.

So what happens now? Well, Linkletter has lost his SLAPP claim, so nominally the case can proceed. Linkletter could appeal his case to Canada’s Supreme Court (about 7% of Supreme Court appeals of BC appeals court judgments get heard). Or Proctorio could drop the case. Or it could go to a full trial, where these outlandish ideas about copyright, confidentiality and information security would get a thorough — and blisteringly expensive — examination.

In Linkletter’s statement, he remains defiant and unwilling to give in to bullying, but says he’ll have to “carefully consider” his next step. That’s fair enough: there’s a lot on the line here:

https://linkletter.opened.ca/stand-against-proctorios-slapp-update-30/

Linkletter answers his supporters’ questions about how they can help with some excellent advice: “What I ask is for you to do what you can to protect students. Academic surveillance technology companies would like nothing more but for us all to shut up. Don’t let them silence you. Don’t let anyone or anything take away your human right to freedom of expression.”

Today (Apr 21), I’m speaking in Chicago at the Stigler Center’s Antitrust and Competition Conference. This weekend (Apr 22/23), I’m at the LA Times Festival of Books.

[Image ID: A girl working on a laptop. Her mouth has been taped shut. Glaring out of the laptop screen is the hostile red eye of HAL9000 from '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Behind them is a tattered, filthy, burned Canadian flag.]

Image: Ingo Bernhardt https://www.flickr.com/photos/spree2010/4930763550/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Eleanor Vladinsky (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canadian_flag_against_grey_sky.jpg

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[sharksnshakes]

Night Out (III) - Tim Drake

After discovering Tim is the Red Robin, his behavior starts to make a lot more sense. One confession leads to another...

AN; and we are done!! i hope u all enjoy the final installment of the tim drake miniseries. never done anything like this before and very grateful for the support <33 literally wouldn't have written it otherwise

Wordcount; 1k

TW; cursing, choking, minor injuries, tim being a simp

You don't have to puzzle over Tim's strange behavior for too long. Just days after the incident in the alleyway, you're watching a news report on the Red Robin, who was spotted fighting Dr. Freeze with Nightwing's help somewhere in the Diamond District.

The news anchors play a clip of Robin protecting civilians while Nightwing kicks ass in the background, and when Robin pushes an elderly man out of the way of Dr. Freeze's ray gun, you get deja vu; The arm flung in front of the civilian, the reaching for something in his utility belt--the vigilante's motions match Tim's exactly, right down to the damn batarang.

And then Dr. Freeze kicks Tim in the gut, and you can't keep watching.

You're not sure if you're the world's best detective, if Tim's horrible at hiding things, or if it was just plain luck, but ever since you put two and two together things have been making a lot more sense. Namely, why he constantly backs out of plans at the last minute and is busiest at 3am. His vigilante status might also have something to do with the ungodly levels of caffeine he consumes, but you're pretty sure he'd be drinking all that coffee regardless of whether he was Red Robin or not.

Unfortunately, you figured this out days before finals week, and you know that if you don't confront him you'll be distracted the whole time you're taking exams...

...Which is what leads you to where you are now. You're sitting in the passenger seat of Tim's fancy car (it's glossy black with custom upholstery to match--really, the whole 'Batman and Robin' thing should've been way more obvious) and chowing down on Big Belly Burger in a parking garage.

"So," you start, taking a sip of your drink to steel yourself, "I have something to tell you."

He swallows a gulp of food, brow furrowing. "Which is?"

"Y'might wanna put the food down for a second."

Tim huffs out a laugh. "No way it's anything that serious."

"Uh, I know you're Robin?"

He chokes.

Thirty seconds and several gulps of water later, Tim is staring at you with a dumbfounded expression that would be comical if the stakes of the situation weren't so high. Are the stakes high? You're not really sure. While you don't peg Batman as the type to have his vigilantes assassinate randos for figuring out their secret identities, he's a grown man running around dressed up like a bat. Who knows what goes on in his head?

Well. Tim might.

Regardless, Tim doesn't even attempt to dispute you. After sitting in silence for an additional two minutes, he just sort of... shrugs?

"Yeah. You're right."

You blink at him. You're not sure what you expected, exactly, but him owning up to it with zero hesitation was definitely not it. "You're just gonna admit it?"

"I mean-" he shrugs again. "What am I supposed to do? Dispute you? I'm sure you've got evidence."

You say nothing.

"You had no evidence?"

"I had a hunch," you protest, "And you just confirmed it!"

He groans, dropping his head into his hands. "You only had a hunch? No photos? No eyewitnesses?"

"It's almost finals week! What was I supposed to do, drop everything and research you instead of my term paper?"

"No, obviously not. Sorry. I'm just..."

"Shocked? Surprised? Caught off guard?"

"Well, you saw the news," he says dryly. Reaching for the hem of his shirt (also black, it was so obvious), he pulls it up a few inches to reveal a dark bruise splashed across his abdomen.

His incredibly toned abdomen--

You wince. "Ouch."

"Yeah, no kidding." At that moment, Tim's cheeks flush pink, and he quickly pulls his shirt back down. "Uh, sorry. Didn't mean to... you know."

"Nah, it's fine," you say, opting to stare out the window so Tim doesn't catch you blushing, "It's not a bad view, if that makes you feel any better."

Wait, what the fuck did you just say?

Your eyes go wide, and you immediately drop your gaze to your lap. There's a time and place for flirting with your best friend who's also Red Robin, and that time and place is not right after he's shown you his injuries and admitted to having a secret identity.

Except maybe it is, because when you risk a glance at Tim, his lower lip is pulled between his teeth and his eyes look just a touch hazy.

"You think I look good?" He murmurs, and you forget everything that's ever happened, ever.

"Yeah," you admit, looking around his face rather than at it, "And I was gonna tell you about that the other night. But, um, then we got interrupted."

Tim sucks in a small breath.

"So judging by your reaction, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that you feel the same way...?"

"No," he deadpans, "I'm just staring at you like you hung the moon because I'm bored."

You blink at him. "You better be fucking joking--"

Tim reaches across the console, cups your jaw in his hand, and pulls your lips onto his.

You gasp. He swallows up the noise, moving slowly, deliberately, like he's been thinking about this moment for a long time; his fingers tremble but he guides your movements regardless, pulling you as close as he can manage with the console in the way.

Tim makes a small, muted noise when you slide your fingers into his hair. It shocks both of you enough to break the kiss--you stare at each other, unblinking. Then someone moves and the cup of ketchup you'd been sharing tips over and launches itself all over Tim's lap.

Both of you burst into laughter.

"You know," Tim says a few moments later, "You figuring out that I'm Robin is, um... really hot," he confesses, cheeks turning the same shade as the ketchup he's wiping off of his pants.

"Really?" you ask, still trying to catch your breath between giggles.

He looks you dead in the eye. "Really."

You dissolve into laughter again, and somehow you just know that your relationship with Tim--whatever form it takes--is right.

[theabigailthorn]

abby, its finals season and im melting. do you have any tips for studying?

Well I kindof brute-forced my university exams, to be honest. I figured out every single possible question they could ask me (there's only so many ways they can say, 'Compare and contrast these 2 theories' or 'Can philosopher X account for Objection Y to Theory Z?') and then I created essay plans for all of them, memorised the plans, and practiced writing the essays against the clock. It was kindof the exam equivalent of counting cards: not even cheating, just having a system you know will work.

The downside is you end up doing a massive amount of redundant work revising every topic and creating every possible essay plan. I did hours and hours more prep for the exams than most students. But when the stakes are that high I figured, "Why leave it to chance?" Turned the exam into a memory test, graduated top of my year - bish bash bosh.