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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#51

Post by rockzom »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #42
rockzom wrote: post #37

So you join the chat, say nothing for months, and then pull the rug out from under your students? If a professor joined a group chat, without any corrections to what was being shared, "no news is good news" would be the assumption. Trying to read this was embarrassing.

After leaving the mormon church, I lost much of the attitudes that had been ingrained in me there, but one thing I didn't lose was a hatred for cheating. > So you join the chat, say nothing for months, and then pull the rug out from under your students? They pulled the rug out from themselves. Don't wanna fail? Then don't cheat.

Not all of what is going on here is cheating. The exams? Sure. The rest? If my professor was in a group chat, I would assume that what was going on was kosher if nothing was being said.

If my professor (now, seemingly) anonymously stays in a group chat without providing input...how can that be considered ethical, either?

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#53

Post by TulliusCicero »

usednet wrote: post #32

The best class I ever took in uni had 3 examinations taken by all students simultaneously, with variations between each exam making cheating nearly impossible. There was no attendance taken, all course materials were posted online, and the only grading for the entire class was the exams. I showed up to 2 classes the entire semester yet still learned all of the material and obtained an A. At least for certain STEM cla…

Our CS major's main weeder class had two unusual examinations. The first one was to recreate a small project that you'd done recently as an assignment within a few hours, on-site in a computer lab. It could be one of three possibilities, which makes raw memorization a bit harder (though not impossible).

The second was after the first big project, a project that's usually a few thousand lines of code; relatively large by the standards of a student. This exam was a bug fixing exam: the TA's randomly insert three bugs into your project's source, and you have to find and fix them within a few hours. Not terribly challenging if you really did the project by yourself, but if you cheated I imagine you'd have a hell of a time.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#54

Post by necovek »

pvg wrote: post #30
necovek wrote: post #3

Quite 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…

Another thing is that college is voluntary You voluntarily agree to abide by the academic integrity rules. If you don't want to do that, you can voluntarily go to a different institution with different rules and standards. The goal of the place is learning not pointscoring and cheating undermines that.

If you are doing that, why do you care about others not doing it?

I went there for learning, and I never felt that was undermined by others' cheating.

How does cheating undermine learning for non-cheaters in college?

I can see loss of motivation or external pressures (family or scholarship demanding a particular GPA) when you are curve graded, but that means that one cares not only about learning — which is ok, we all care about ranking to some extent, but as long as you recognize that it's a flawed system, you can either focus on that or focus on learning imho. And accepting that someone else cares about grading more than you do (which pushes many into cheating as well).

Edit: Oh, and loss of motivation for the teacher, as brought up by the author in the article.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#55

Post by [deleted] »

simonsarris wrote: post #41

> Aside from all the ways that I can be empathetic, there was a lot of evidence in the chat that students were blowing off the course and making a mockery of the whole thing. But, the brash language in the chat could also be covering up difficult issues students were facing in their lives that were preventing them from committing to their studies. This author really does not want to confront some plain truths about h…

[deleted]

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#56

Post by lesam »

mccorrinall wrote: post #21
nr2x wrote: post #5

Exams 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”.

This. Putting a multiple choice test online and expecting students to not take advantage of this examination method is very naive.

And in most courses will just reward cheaters who succeed in not being caught.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#57

Post by giraffe_lady »

simonsarris wrote: post #41

> Aside from all the ways that I can be empathetic, there was a lot of evidence in the chat that students were blowing off the course and making a mockery of the whole thing. But, the brash language in the chat could also be covering up difficult issues students were facing in their lives that were preventing them from committing to their studies. This author really does not want to confront some plain truths about h…

> this article is really a character study about the author, and not at all about cheating

Yeah exactly. Extreme cop energy in the writing those scripts and publicly documenting so much of the chat text verbatim. I started out sympathetic to the author, and still am abstractly, that's a hard spot for a teacher to be in.

But it started to feel like the author expected me to find it... titillating? attractively transgressive? Just a gross secondhand voyeurism type thing I didn't like it at all.

Talk to the students or fail them all and move on. I don't think the impulse to invest so much time and technique in this "investigation" should be encouraged.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#58

Post by LAC-Tech »

This is a widespread problem. The inevitable outcome is that university education loses more and more prestige.

Maybe this is the way it has to be. Self-taught people with impressive portfolios start becoming more and more attractive while well-qualified people become less and less attractive - or even suspect.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#59

Post by geraldwhen »

pvg wrote: post #30
necovek wrote: post #3

Quite 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…

Another thing is that college is voluntary You voluntarily agree to abide by the academic integrity rules. If you don't want to do that, you can voluntarily go to a different institution with different rules and standards. The goal of the place is learning not pointscoring and cheating undermines that.

The goal of college is to receive a degree to unlock job postings.

I did not go to college to “learn”, and I’m not sure I know anyone who did.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#60

Post by TulliusCicero »

Scramblejams wrote: post #9
necovek wrote: post #3

Quite 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…

> Tough to do when you’re sharing a curve with a bunch of cheaters

Are curves still that common these days? In my time at university, the only classes that got curved were a couple math classes that were curved in the students' favor.

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