Current Events > Many college students now have to buy external webcams for their classes.

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://twitter.com/jacksonhvisuals/status/1277770393449689088



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This is the future. In order to apply to colleges you need to do advisement. And all of it is done through Zoom classes so if you don't have a webcam, laptop/phone, and a stable internet connection you can't attend classes. You SOL.

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Wait, why would you need an external camera and why is an internal one bad.
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I took online classes and didn't need a webcam at all.

I always found it super fucked up when they used that wording in college -- "look into buying this now because it will be sold out later this summer!"

So if I don't participate in your class weeks before I'm even in your class I will be punished for things out of my control?

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I tried to buy a webcam like a month ago or two, they were all sold out wtf except random cheap low quality ones but I ain't getting one of those >:(

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Dude is whining about not being able to cheat. I think he might be the one who needs to grow up.

Good. At big universities so many undergrads cheat their way through classes. At least I could easily tell how many of the CS students cheated when I was a grad TA.

Cull the weak.

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I took some online classes damn near over a decade ago and cheating was very hard outside it being kind of open book. There was still a time limit.

Don't understand why this can't be figured out a decade later.

MelbuFrahma4 posted...

This is the future. In order to apply to colleges you need to do advisement. And all of it is done through Zoom classes so if you don't have a webcam, laptop/phone, and a stable internet connection you can't attend classes. You SOL.

This is about external cameras even though your laptop might have one built in.

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My college's proctor service says a smart phone also works.

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sktgamer_13dude posted...

Wait, why would you need an external camera and why is an internal one bad.

Probably so the professors can see you and your surroundings in your house. There were a lot of cheating scandals the previous semester all over the US. To give one example some students had cheat sheets near their computers or just went on the internet for the answers.

JoeDangIt posted...

I took online classes and didn't need a webcam at all.

Depends on class but a lot are making Zoom mandatory for it. I wonder if they will even ban people who put tape over the webcam or have an avatar now.

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Lebronwon posted...

just went on the internet for the answers.

I mean there should be some kind of desktop viewing that the proctor should have during a test to curb that tbh.

Lebronwon posted...

Depends on class but a lot are making Zoom mandatory for it. I wonder if they will even ban people who put tape over the webcam or have an avatar now.

I mean its kind of rude to the teacher unless you have a legit reason to do it tbh. You dont have an avatar go to class for you.
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Yeah, I kind of get it for intro classes because in those subjects you really can just google all the answers.

It would probably be better to switch to project based evaluations instead, but designing and grading those is a lot more time intensive than straightforward exams and shifting a curriculum that much can't be easy to do. And it's probably more difficult for math classes, and other subjects I'm sure.

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Remember in the real world how you can never look up anything to help you and you need to just know it all off the top of your head?

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lmao thats bullshit. if the college is demanding extra stuff be required then either they pay for it or dont demand it

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ThunderTrain posted...

Remember in the real world how you can never look up anything to help you and you need to just know it all off the top of your head?

college isn't the real world. life isn't fair. if you're not smart enough for the degree you certainly should not receive one

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IllegalAlien posted...

college isn't the real world. life isn't fair. if you're not smart enough for the degree you certainly should not receive one

Instead of helping people prepare for the real world, we make them pay thousands to take a test and then they'll get a job and the first year there learn more than the 4 years they spent in college.

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who the hell said college is to prepare people for the real world lol

i've been around the block for a while now, learned a lot in a lot of verticals, but i would never trivialize the wealth of knowledge i learned in my undergrad.

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what's wrong with just putting the phone in a position that covers the room?

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That's okay

I'll just take potato chip

AND EAT IT

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Touch posted...

That's okay

I'll just take potato chip

AND EAT IT

*over the top Gregorian chanting*

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IllegalAlien posted...

who the hell said college is to prepare people for the real world lol

i've been around the block for a while now, learned a lot in a lot of verticals, but i would never trivialize the wealth of knowledge i learned in my undergrad.

Most because work places bar people without college education. Therefore it's not unreasonable to go simply to get a job. Education may not just be about getting a job, but for many people that's the only reason they're there.

That being said, being able to call upon basic knowledge in your field without constantly needing to look things up is important. And often an education can help you develop the skills to research and learn about complicated topics independently, at least at the graduate level. But this is assuming you're actually working in a field related to your major.

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so you should be able to cheat and google answers because you're paying to get a job?

i think you think you have a point but im not seeing how it relates to what we're talking about

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IllegalAlien posted...

so you should be able to cheat and google answers because you're paying to get a job?

i think you think you have a point but im not seeing how it relates to what we're talking about

No, earlier I was just saying that they should probably move to a different kind of assessment than a traditional exam. But that is a lot easier said than done, and many upper level classes do so anyway.

When my girlfriend studied abroad in Denmark, for instance, all four of her classes were assessed based on end of term project work rather than exams. So it's not impossible. But it's also untenable to do something like that in a 200 student intro class, so idk.

I'm not sure how much all this matters thanks to online test banks anyway. When I graduated undergrad a few years ago, and even in my masters, old test banks were so thorough that a professor couldn't use a question from the past 5-10 years without several student having seen it beforehand. They basically dealt with this by never giving out finals, where the average score and grades would often plummet and create the bell curve. I guess you wouldn't be able to directly reference the old test material during the test if you were monitored from a separate web cam.

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DeathDeathSong posted...

lmao thats bullshit. if the college is demanding extra stuff be required then either they pay for it or dont demand it

Lmao yeah just like they pay for textbooks right

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ThunderTrain posted...

Instead of helping people prepare for the real world, we make them pay thousands to take a test and then they'll get a job and the first year there learn more than the 4 years they spent in college.

The post of someone who has never been to college. Or paid no attention in college

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ASithLord7 posted...

The post of someone who has never been to college. Or paid no attention in college

Wrong but nice try :)

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Jabodie posted...

No, earlier I was just saying that they should probably move to a different kind of assessment than a traditional exam. But that is a lot easier said than done, and many upper level classes do so anyway.

When my girlfriend studied abroad in Denmark, for instance, all four of her classes were assessed based on end of term project work rather than exams. So it's not impossible. But it's also untenable to do something like that in a 200 student intro class, so idk.

I'm not sure how much all this matters thanks to online test banks anyway. When I graduated undergrad a few years ago, and even in my masters, old test banks were so thorough that a professor couldn't use a question from the past 5-10 years without several student having seen it beforehand. They basically dealt with this by never giving out finals, where the average score and grades would often plummet and create the bell curve. I guess you wouldn't be able to directly reference the old test material during the test if you were monitored from a separate web cam.

i would agree that there are flaws with higher ed in the usa

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Jabodie posted...

No, earlier I was just saying that they should probably move to a different kind of assessment than a traditional exam. But that is a lot easier said than done, and many upper level classes do so anyway.

When my girlfriend studied abroad in Denmark, for instance, all four of her classes were assessed based on end of term project work rather than exams. So it's not impossible. But it's also untenable to do something like that in a 200 student intro class, so idk.

I'm not sure how much all this matters thanks to online test banks anyway. When I graduated undergrad a few years ago, and even in my masters, old test banks were so thorough that a professor couldn't use a question from the past 5-10 years without several student having seen it beforehand. They basically dealt with this by never giving out finals, where the average score and grades would often plummet and create the bell curve. I guess you wouldn't be able to directly reference the old test material during the test if you were monitored from a separate web cam.

What level was your girlfriend? Because thats how grad school usually works here in the US


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ThunderTrain posted...

Wrong but nice try :)

Really the only explanation for such a stupid post

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ASithLord7 posted...

What level was your girlfriend? Because thats how grad school usually works here in the US

It was her first semester of senior year. I'm entering my fourth year of grad school this fall (sad v_v). Hopefully I'm gonna graduate in 2 years.

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ASithLord7 posted...

Lmao yeah just like they pay for textbooks right

ive come to expect smooth brain takes from you and all but like...........you know textbooks are like what the learning material is, right. like you know that the textbooks actually serve a purpose in the classroom correct. unless you really thought you had a point in comparing this to a completely unnecessary webcam

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DeathDeathSong posted...

ive come to expect smooth brain takes from you and all but like...........you know textbooks are like what the learning material is, right. like you know that the textbooks actually serve a purpose in the classroom correct. unless you really thought you had a point in comparing this to a completely unnecessary webcam

Textbooks are not usually the sole learning material, no, unless the professor is just teaching from the book. They can just as easily be called extra as a webcam can.

And yes, webcams (or at the bare minimum a mic) are absolutely essential for an online class. The instructor, students, and class as a whole suffer from a lack of visual and spoken communication. The only place this isnt necessarily the case is a large undergrad lecture class. Not that I expect much from a communist whos probably never been to college. Stay in your lane.

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ASithLord7 posted...

Really the only explanation for such a stupid post

College does a good job of giving you a lot of basics and then you start learning real stuff once you actually get your job.

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a communist thats never been to college.........why do White College Dudes always try to be so weirdly specific and yet hilariously wrong with their attempts at insults. room temperature iq i swear

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IllegalAlien posted...

Good. At big universities so many undergrads cheat their way through classes. At least I could easily tell how many of the CS students cheated when I was a grad TA.

Cull the weak.

Yeah, it's a problem with college in general. While I can't relate to the CS/TA stuff, I'm a math grad student and I lurk a lot on Mathematics Stack Exchange.

My God the sheer number of people there who just... Ugh. There's so many people there that will just blindly copy-and-paste their homework problem (be it from an assignment or textbook) with little more than a "pls giv solution thx." Hell, a lot of the time they won't even bother to at least write it up in LaTeX, they'll just post a picture or screenshot of it. There are so many people on there just looking for a solution to blindly copy and paste into their homework, and it's infuriating. (Moreso because there's a subset of users there that'll answer the questions anyways, because that means they get rep points on the site, thereby enabling this behavior.)

I imagine there's a similar if not worse problem with CS and Stack Overflow.

ASithLord7 posted...

Lmao yeah just like they pay for textbooks right

At least pirating textbooks is easy enough if you know where to look and don't mind reading on a laptop or whatever.

ASithLord7 posted...

Textbooks are not usually the sole learning material, no, unless the professor is just teaching from the book.

Plus, at least in my experience - a good professor can render the textbook altogether unnecessary, if they're good enough and thorough enough at teaching. Sometimes the most I've had a textbook be required for is just to get homework problems from, which the prof just as easily could've written up themselves >.>

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yeah man, the undergrad classes I TA'd for were Theory of Computation and Comp Sci II.

For theory, it was a purely proof based class, but every answer would be identical lol

Even worse for CS 2 where the code and logical structure would be exactly the same...

This was at a big public research CS school, so 100+ kids per class with huge amounts of overlapping answers.

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IllegalAlien posted...

For theory, it was a purely proof based class, but every answer would be identical lol

lol damn. Even when I have to look up a proof for myself, I usually end up at least make an attempt to understand it and then write it down in my own terms. I won't ride people for trying to look up something so long as they try to ensure they understand it like me, but just a blind copy-and-paste is ... gross.

I could even almost see identical answers for, like, basic computations. But proofs? Come the fuck on lmao, that's so obvious.


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IllegalAlien posted...

yeah man, the undergrad classes I TA'd for were Theory of Computation and Comp Sci II.

For theory, it was a purely proof based class, but every answer would be identical lol

Even worse for CS 2 where the code and logical structure would be exactly the same...

This was at a big public research CS school, so 100+ kids per class with huge amounts of overlapping answers.

Did the final screw them at least?

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@DeathDeathSong
Great rebuttal, really showed youre familiar with what youre discussing and not just shitposting

And uhh, have you not mentioned supporting communism before? Weve always gotten along but you came into this topic swinging so im gonna return that

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Jabodie posted...

Did the final screw them at least?

top CS school, these were smart kids overall

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If this is required, the college needs to supply it for free.
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Webcams are sold out all over the place in the age of zoom meetings. Use exam4 or other similar software that allows screen monitoring and cuts off internet access during the test.
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LightningAce11 posted...

If this is required, the college needs to supply it for free.

See earlier posts

lilORANG posted...

Webcams are sold out all over the place in the age of zoom meetings. Use exam4 or other similar software that allows screen monitoring and cuts off internet access during the test.

They arent sold out anymore.

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if a university is telling me i can't take an exam without a second web cam set up in test proctoring formation, they better include it in my tuition, or in exchange decrease tuition if the courses I'm taking are strictly distance learning

Webcams are pretty cheap most of these college students spend more in one night drinking with friends

i agree with tc, buying s*** sucks