My students cheated... a lot
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My students cheated... a lot
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Re: My students cheated... a lot
#2[deleted]
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#3Quite a read, indeed.
As a student witnessing the amount of cheating going on, I was always surprised about the noise raised by teachers on it: I always felt that my score was my own, and didn't care about comparing against others.
Perhaps that's why I didn't care?
Another thing is that college is voluntary, and everyone takes the courses for some perceived gain. If it's just a diploma with high GPA, I let them be.
There are also plenty of ways to legitimately score a high grade without really engaging with a course (basically silly ways to study just to pass), which in the end result is not much different from simply cheating (there was no appropriate engaging in the material) — while the main difference is in fairness, that's a moral value that's beyond some random teacher's ability to teach adult students — so I don't see why bother.
The main question I have for the author is if they would have offered the same get-out-of-trouble alternative syllabus if they had 10% of the students cheating? Basically, how influential was the proportion of students to be failed in their huge investment in reworking the course?
Obviously, they did a bad job with the original syllabus in promoting exactly the behaviour they didn't condone, but one should never discount the thrill humans experience in engaging in risky behaviour (like figuring ways out to cheat which is sometimes more work than studying, but more thrilling — and helping others along the way adds a nice cherry on top).
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#4I hate to be a cynic here but I feel like education should be engineered in a manner that either :
(A) assumes cheating will take place whenever possible and create curriculum , assignments, quizzes and exams with this in mind.
(B) disincentivize cheating. This is tough to do but if someone is motivated not by a grade but by the experience or knowledge gain itself cheating is no longer of interest.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#5Exams are the mark of a lazy instructor who doesn’t want to design appropriately challenging assignments, as the author says: “I hadn’t fully prepped the class”.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#6I hate to be a cynic here but I feel like education should be engineered in a manner that either : (A) assumes cheating will take place whenever possible and create curriculum , assignments, quizzes and exams with this in mind. (B) disincentivize cheating. This is tough to do but if someone is motivated not by a grade but by the experience or knowledge gain itself cheating is no longer of interest.
(C) don’t use exams, period.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#7Not surprised. Just about everyone performs some amount or cheating in high school and college. Really if anything these places are teaching you not to get caught.
To be honest I think academic integrity policies are stupid. Colleges administrators are living in a pretend world that doesn’t exist where they think the kids are there because they care and dont just want the piece of paper they are paying 200K for so they can go get a job in the real world and start paying down their debt.
Im so incredibly past giving a shit about cheating in college.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#8I hate to be a cynic here but I feel like education should be engineered in a manner that either : (A) assumes cheating will take place whenever possible and create curriculum , assignments, quizzes and exams with this in mind. (B) disincentivize cheating. This is tough to do but if someone is motivated not by a grade but by the experience or knowledge gain itself cheating is no longer of interest.
(C) don’t use exams, period.
You might call (C) and extension of (A) . Avoiding all pedagogical tools that can be systematically cheated on , is an effective way to reduce cheating.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#9Quite a read, indeed. As a student witnessing the amount of cheating going on, I was always surprised about the noise raised by teachers on it: I always felt that my score was my own, and didn't care about comparing against others. Perhaps that's why I didn't care? Another thing is that college is voluntary, and everyone takes the courses for some perceived gain. If it's just a diploma with high GPA, I let them be. T…
I always felt that my score was my own, and didn't care about comparing against others.
Tough to do when you’re sharing a curve with a bunch of cheaters, and the grades matter for your future.
I know in the program I attended I was up against a fair few who were taking cognition enhancing drugs, others who had exam copies from prior years to help them prep, and a lot of people who copied each others’ homework. It was frustrating to be on a curve with them.
I had a few professors who didn’t use curves. It was wonderful.
I think curves are in general unethical due to cheating, and feel they’re a sign that a professor hasn’t done the hard work to really zero in on exactly what knowledge the student is expected to master.
Open to counterarguments.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#10This is part of why academic credentials have both lost their intrinsic value and become mandatory for all candidates.
While it may seem contradictory at first, the appearance of low ability amongst credentialed candidates also lowers the perceived value of the non-credentialed; fore if the credentialed are so lacking in ability, then those unable to achieve even such a low bar must be worse, yes?
Of course, this isn't always true. But for hiring managers dealing with an insurmountable mountain of candidates any generalized filtering metric, however shaky in its footing, is appealing.
Widespread cheating is part of why we have credential inflation.