I haven't used any essay-checking or exam-taking software yet.
Even so, based on what I've heard from my immediate superior, I'm flagging somewhere between 10-20% of all of the plagiarism and cheating cases in my faculty.
It's not hard to detect (generally good writing mixed with bad on essays / the repetition of similar phrases by different students on exams), but it does take a bit of time to confirm and you need to write a some policy-consistent boilerplate to make it simple to take action.
Some here have suggested that we need to write the equivalent of "open book" exams for the online environment. I'm not sure that would be beneficial. It's still important to exercise your mental faculties. People who can recall information and reason for themselves are still more valuable than those who can cut and paste. Or to put it another way, you need to understand the math in order to wield a calculator well.
In a lot of disciplines, open book doesn’t help you solve problems all that much.
It might supply some of the pieces required to solve problems, but the ability to remember all of those pieces by rote vs. looking them up is really orthogonal to the ability to apply them to solving a novel problem. Indeed the ability to find the requisite information to solve a problem in a timely manner is an important skill in itself and more accurately represents the real world problem solving one is preparing for.
I try to get away from all that by hosting a site on gopher. Neocities would be another option, if you need the eye candy.
I hate social media, going so far as to delete both my reddit and Mastodon accounts. But this is tempting. It gives me the feeling I used to get when listening to tunes and surfing last.fm
There's also a Firefox extension called "Disable JavaScript" that places a JavaScript toggle switch on your address bar and remembers whether you want JavaScript on or off on each specific site that you visit.
I'm in Western Canada and Greyhound is gone now. A couple of replacement bus lines started up prior to the pandemic, but I don't know if they've survived.
I never had a problem with the depots, though they definitely weren't classy places. If you knew the towns along the route, it was usually easy to walk to a better restaurant, store, etc.
I continued to ride the bus long after my economic situation improved, because I actually enjoyed it. I met a lot of interesting characters taking the bus. I've heard a lot of "Greyhound stories," smoked a bit of weed with strangers, and found myself in some unexpectedly cool situations. Always an adventure. Air travel is so sterile in comparison.
I completely agree, and I'm very glad to see this perspective in this thread. I used to ride cheap buses because I didn't have much money, now (pre-corona) I still ride them even though I'm doing well. You meet people, hear fun stories, find yourself in interesting situations... There are "filters" on the population that rides airplanes or trains, but all of humanity rides the bus. And while the chance that a grandma unpacks her food and shares some with you on the plane is nil, I've had it happen to me multiple times on the bus, so there's that :)
> There are "filters" on the population that rides airplanes or trains
You're on to something here. It's hard to explain generally without sounding like a tool. I occassionaly ride the bus because for the same reasons you mentioned - it's alive in there for some reason. Same with bars and taverns. Blue collar workers have stories for days and make good friends with just about anyone as long as you have a respectful and decent way about you.
Go to eternal-september.org, sign up, set up Thunderbird or another NNTP client, and you can experience Usenet today in all its glory. Comp.misc is a good group to start with.
If you want to set up slrn -- as suggested in another post -- I can help. It's not particularly intuitive. I first used Claws Mail and Thunderbird and then set up slrn.
If you are comfortable with text-based interfaces, I'd suggested getting slrn to see what Usenet was like back in the days when most of us only had text terminals.
If you are an Emacs user, Gnus is another way to get the old school experience.
Another text one that was popular is tin, which I've never used but which, like slrn, is still maintained and updated.
Even so, based on what I've heard from my immediate superior, I'm flagging somewhere between 10-20% of all of the plagiarism and cheating cases in my faculty.
It's not hard to detect (generally good writing mixed with bad on essays / the repetition of similar phrases by different students on exams), but it does take a bit of time to confirm and you need to write a some policy-consistent boilerplate to make it simple to take action.
Some here have suggested that we need to write the equivalent of "open book" exams for the online environment. I'm not sure that would be beneficial. It's still important to exercise your mental faculties. People who can recall information and reason for themselves are still more valuable than those who can cut and paste. Or to put it another way, you need to understand the math in order to wield a calculator well.