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How to Catch a Cheater

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Re: How to Catch a Cheater

#51

Post by joezydeco »

Semiapies wrote: post #43
joezydeco wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the new material built on the old, shouldn't the old material be a solid lock?

Only then, and most courses are not straight progressions. In high school and particularly AP, those courses are blatant cycles of 1) cram, 2) test, and 3) forget all but the core of what that section was about. (If you want to say, "You should learn it all for the final" keep in mind nobody does , nor are final exams built around remembering everything from the whole course.)

I've taken 5 APs and none of them were cram/test/dump. There's one large test at the end of the season. It would be counterproductive to forget each chapter as you go.

Re: How to Catch a Cheater

#52

Post by Semiapies »

joezydeco wrote: post #51
Semiapies wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only then, and most courses are not straight progressions. In high school and particularly AP, those courses are blatant cycles of 1) cram, 2) test, and 3) forget all but the core of what that section was about. (If you want to say, "You should learn it all for the final" keep in mind nobody does , nor are final exams built around remembering everything from the whole course.)

I've taken 5 APs and none of them were cram/test/dump. There's one large test at the end of the season. It would be counterproductive to forget each chapter as you go.

And the AP courses I took were and had multiple tests, like the example given.

Re: How to Catch a Cheater

#53

Post by Semiapies »

tomjen3 wrote: post #46
Semiapies wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how many perfectly honest students did worse on the impromptu re-take two weeks later, with entirely new material on their minds.

Agreed it seems that it is always the honest students who gets the short end of the stick. Thats a good thing though - it prepares the students for the real world.

I think it perpetuates the ideas of how to wield authority. The concept of enticing people to cheat in order to be able to catch people at cheating is of a piece with "anti-terror" operations where federal agents set up fake terrorist cells, recruit feckless malcontents, and guide and cajole them until they can get them to do something illegal.

Re: How to Catch a Cheater

#54

Post by danielford »

jamii wrote: post #44
wwortiz wrote: post #4

> We were explicitly told that searching online for answers to homeworks was forbidden. I might be in the minority but I am of the opinion that if you are grading students on something that can be easily obtained through a google search you probably shouldn't be grading them on that.

For my MSc exams we were given the papers to take home and it was considered perfectly acceptable to look up the answers as they as they were correctly cited. Someone clearly decided that the easiest way to prevent cheating was to set questions that took more than a few seconds googling to answer.

That can be really hard in certain situations. My background is in biology. One of the more interesting and fun assignments I was given in college was a series of case studies. Basically, the patient has symptoms X, T, and W, what is wrong with them?

This is a situation where you can't give problems to an undergraduate student that are easy enough to answer while they're simultaneously impossible to Google. I'd love to give my own students the opportunity to experience these types of critical thinking questions. Unfortunately, I know that I'm completely incapable of assigning ungoogleable problems without turning them into some Dr. House shit that can't be answered by a college student.

Re: How to Catch a Cheater

#56

Post by Semiapies »

Here's a funny thought - what if someone did the assignment, put it away, then wondered, "Huh, so why is the Glorblar Problem notable?"

Dirty, dishonest intellectual curiosity - you have to catch those people, right?

Re: How to Catch a Cheater

#57

Post by tzs »

xenophanes wrote: post #34
pohl wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you're actually in the majority. I bet that, rather, the minority position is that the instructor should create whatever conditions they want to so that they can exercise the students as they see fit - and that the students should extend enough respect to consider why those conditions are being created. This is my view. Replace the teacher with a coach in a weightlifting class. One day he wants you to lift…

Many math teachers ban calculators on math tests. I'm pretty sure this has majority support, not minority. Google does simple math, so that's basically an equivalent issue. IMO it's dumb -- in real life you have access to Google. But I mostly wanted to say I think there's clearly majority support for artificial grading conditions, since the no-calculators thing is so popular.

> IMO it's dumb -- in real life you have access to Google.

If one is taking a class merely to learn how to Google for the answers, then one should not be in a university. One should be in a trade school which only teaches you enough of your fields of study to be able to figure out the right terms to Google for.

When you take university classes, the goal is to learn to be the people that provide the solutions that the trade schoolers will Google for.

Re: How to Catch a Cheater

#58

Post by archgoon »

xenophanes wrote: post #34
pohl wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you're actually in the majority. I bet that, rather, the minority position is that the instructor should create whatever conditions they want to so that they can exercise the students as they see fit - and that the students should extend enough respect to consider why those conditions are being created. This is my view. Replace the teacher with a coach in a weightlifting class. One day he wants you to lift…

Many math teachers ban calculators on math tests. I'm pretty sure this has majority support, not minority. Google does simple math, so that's basically an equivalent issue. IMO it's dumb -- in real life you have access to Google. But I mostly wanted to say I think there's clearly majority support for artificial grading conditions, since the no-calculators thing is so popular.

If you have access to Google, you have access Wolfram Alpha. However, the point of math courses is not to demonstrate that you know how to punch buttons, but that you know the methods and algorithms behind those tools.

Re: How to Catch a Cheater

#59

Post by rms »

Semiapies wrote: post #30
dkarl wrote: post #10

My AP (Advanced Placement) Chemistry teacher noticed some cheating on a major chemistry test we took. The cheating was pretty obvious; some kids just decided they were going to fail the test so they might as well have some fun. A week later, after a week of lecturing on a new section of the chemistry book and no mention of our scores, a student asked. No, he hadn't graded the tests. He was sorry, he had been really b…

I wonder how many perfectly honest students did worse on the impromptu re-take two weeks later, with entirely new material on their minds.

In terms of actual learning, rather than the sort of grade optimization, it probably was valuable in terms of spaced repetition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

Re: How to Catch a Cheater

#60

Post by hdctambien »

I think some people are missing a few critical points of this exercise:

1) the homework was supposed to work out your thinking muscles. Getting the "right" answer wasn't the point of the assignment as much as trying to discover how to obtain an answer. (much better described in these comments by pohl)

2) On crying "entrapment": See Orpheus and Eurydice (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orpheus#Death_of_Eurydice). There were rules clearly put in place and whether they made sense or not, if broken carried with them penalties that the perpetrators were well aware of. If that doesn't smell like the "real world" I don't know what does. With that said...

3) Universities are NOT the real world. They barely resemble the real world. The point of university has never been to "prepare you for the real world."

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