You guys in US do it all the wrong way. I remember how examiners fought cheating when I was a student at Warsaw University, Poland (1990 - 1995). They simply allowed cheating. So, at the beginning of every exam an examiner announced something like: "Ladies and gentlemen. You are allowed to cheat. You can browse your books and notes,
no questions asked. But I must warn you that exam tasks are designed such a way, that they require thinking - and thinking is not compatible with cheating, because thinking is fast and cheating is quite slow. So, you are allowed to cheat, but if you will it is very likely that you will not complete minimum number of tasks required to pass the exam.
I wish you good luck."
How to Catch a Cheater
81–90 of 99 posts
Re: How to Catch a Cheater
#82My 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.
I think that's a great thing — not only have you caught and disadvantaged the cheaters, but you've also screwed the crammers as well.
You either know the material, or you don't know the material. The timing, location or preparation for the test is irrelevant. The test is irrelevant.
Re: How to Catch a Cheater
#83Earlier 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…
> the instructor should create whatever conditions they want to so that they can exercise the students as they see fit I don't disagree, as long as the instructor is able to defend the pedagogical purpose of the limitations he demands. The OP is essentially contending that few situations warrant such limitations, and I agree with him about that.
as long as the instructor is able to defend the pedagogical purpose of the limitations he demands
I just had a thought over my morning coffee: I would agree that the instructor should be able to defend such choices to the head of the department. The instructor may choose to defend the choice to the student, but the instructor should only be required to defend the choice to the student if the student is also required to be able to defend why they should be allowed to be there. I fear the most precious thing we've lost in our modern society is a student's willingness to bring themselves to the process, and so if I (as an instructor) must defend why I've set boundaries on an exercise then then you (as the student) must be able to defend that you really want to learn what I have to teach.
Alas, higher education has been reduced to a transaction for a service, and "the customer is always right".
few situations warrant such limitations, and I agree with him about that.
I have the opposite view. Most of the homework that I've ever seen (as a Math & Comp Sci double major) was about the benefit of the exercise, and very rarely about strengthening research abilities. But, then, I was in school when Tim Berners-Lee was gestating the world wide web concept at CERN.
Re: How to Catch a Cheater
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The solution to this is to reserve a time and space (maybe with a TA) when/where the students are expected to do the work, instead of doing them at leisure.
Few people would say it's wrong to not be able to google during an exam, but most would agree that not googling during exercises is insane.
Re: How to Catch a Cheater
#85This is a neat little sting, but looked at honestly, it's entrapment. "Commonly referred to as The Glorblar Problem" That phrasing is a cue that the student is expected to either look something up or to refer back to notes or memory of lectures or discussion of the Glorblar Problem in class. Why else mention it, if it were an honest homework problem? We know they didn't hear about the Glorblar Problem in class - it d…
Looks like you guys didn't read the whole story. The professor specifically asked the class not to search online. The goal of the homework was to get the students to teach them to think through the puzzle.
Looks like you didn't actually read what I wrote - well done.
ETA: Or, charitably, you didn't recognize that the big UPDATES at the top of the blogger's post indicate that since my original post, he thought to clarify the context and indicate that he'd actually misremembered the phrasing of the question.
Or maybe both?
I wouldn't consider the actual professor's question from the linked exam to be entrapment, as it happens. That in mind, I'll save my disgust for the people who thought the scenario of entrapment originally described was so terribly clever.
Re: How to Catch a Cheater
#86This is a neat little sting, but looked at honestly, it's entrapment. "Commonly referred to as The Glorblar Problem" That phrasing is a cue that the student is expected to either look something up or to refer back to notes or memory of lectures or discussion of the Glorblar Problem in class. Why else mention it, if it were an honest homework problem? We know they didn't hear about the Glorblar Problem in class - it d…
"So, the professor deliberately tempted people to look up something online, then amused himself by busting the people who did. Cute method, but it proves nothing other than "schmuck bait works"." The way I see it, the people that are actually doing their homework wouldn't even be tempted by it..because they are actually doing their homework. "Remember that this is homework, not a test. Yes, presumably the problem is…
Thank you - this is the most vapid thing I've seen today not written by a TSA official.
Especially:
"Checking your work against the correct answer and Googling the answer (and just writing it down) are two different things."
And you can tell the difference based on a server log...exactly how?
Re: How to Catch a Cheater
#87Earlier 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.
I think that's a great thing — not only have you caught and disadvantaged the cheaters, but you've also screwed the crammers as well. You either know the material, or you don't know the material. The timing, location or preparation for the test is irrelevant. The test is irrelevant.
It's great for a teacher to screw over the people who've learned to study in exactly the way teachers like him have trained them to study?
That's a long way to go for a little intellectual arrogance.
Re: How to Catch a Cheater
#88I 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…
As for 1, I think you're missing that a lot of people responded before the blogger updated the post (twice) in order to explain those points, including that he'd misremembered how the question was phrased.
As for 2, heaven forfend anyone apply ethics to the actions of those in authority.
As for 3, well, you've just cancelled out your second point.
Re: How to Catch a Cheater
#89Earlier 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.
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
That would only make sense if he did that for all his tests.
As a one-off stunt to punish the students in his class, that clearly wasn't his intent (or any plausable effect).
Re: How to Catch a Cheater
#90Earlier 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.)
Good AP courses are completely the opposite, and I had several in high school. We had regular reviews to make sure we refreshed and retained the material until the end of the year. The great thing about AP classes was that the teachers could really teach, and they could justify themselves by pointing to the AP test if anyone complained about the rigor of the work. The students were game, too, at least the ones who di…
When I took mine, they were exactly what they were commonly considered - cram-fests to get out of some first-year coursework and bump up your grades.
I still wish I'd taken more; I could have gotten out of more dull first-year classes.