YLearn is a new Indonesian-made testing platform founded in 2018 by a small team, and it is currently owned by PT Teknologi Pendidikan Utama. Despite its young age, YLearn has already stirred up significant controversy and discussion especially between teachers and students in the IICS community.
On one hand, YLearn makes test-making simple for teachers, with features such as easy conversion from documents to question banks, allowing for drop and drag test making. Teachers can set word limits, attach media to questions, do proper math formatting, ask students to answer on a canvas, and multiple choice questions are autograded.
The student is somewhat benefit as well, as they are provided a full text styling, canvas, and math formatting panel alongside seamless integration with Google Classroom. Students can now see comments from teachers on questions they got wrong, and teachers can grade tests faster than before. But there is one feature that makes many students feel uncomfortable with the platform.
YLearn does not condone cheating, and as such it is sensible that they randomize question and answer choice order. However, YLearn has one additional cheating-countermeasure that is often called the focused or unfocused system. Teachers, from the start to the end of the test, know whether their students are online/offline, as well as whether they are focused on YLearn or are unfocused because they interact with other tabs, programs, etc.
The focused or not module has caused much controversy in IICS, especially with some teachers using the “get unfocused once and get kicked out of the test” option. Other teachers may also implement policies such as “get unfocused thrice and be considered cheating,” as teachers get a full report about this after the test.
Much of the controversy originates from students and teachers not knowing the precise thresholds of the system, such as what counts as being unfocused, or how much time the system takes to update. Students have expressed how opening another tab, such as opening Meet to ask a serious question, will still be marked as unfocused. And with so many students, it's hard to keep track of which student is really unfocused, and which is trying to ask. Though many of the specifics of the system are unknown, the following HTML and Javascript code may shed some light on how this module works.
In the code’s <head>, the program imports a script from the given link. Then, in the <body>, there is a text box called focused and it's set to display the word “Focused.” Then in the script, there is an event listener, or observer, that waits until the YLearn module is blurred, switched, or you happen to interact with another program. The observer then changes the text to say “Unfocused.” There is a second event listener after that that does the reverse.
The actual YLearn script is indeed more complex, as they need to send data to the database. But the mechanism remains the same, and you can test it by copying the code and running it with a browser. The question of whether that piece of code is a viable method of declaring whether students cheat, still remains, especially considering that no system is perfect, and crashes, bugs, and accidents happen constantly in the tech and world around us, as we are all human.
This post is not about the teachers who use it timely to assess students, and the students who use the platform to prove themselves and attempt to earn the marks that they each deserve, and quite literally, shape their future. That’s next week’s post. This week is about the technicalities and the features of the system, and it’s about “How much can we really trust the system?”
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