My students cheated... a lot

> 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.

I disagree; there's no objective criteria for what students should be "expected to master" in a particular course. it's inherently relative to what the typical student at that institution is capable of. a class where everyone gets an A is probably a waste of time for everyone involved. it strongly implies that more material could have been covered.

if a whole institution is like this, it gets back to the original problem. when everyone else is graduating with a 4.0, a 3.8 looks a lot like a 2.0 from a more rigorous school.

ideally, the material itself would be designed to get a good distribution of As, Bs, and Cs with a few Ds and Fs for people who didn't try or understand at all. but it's pretty hard to get this exactly right. better to err on the side of making things a little too hard. then the occasional bright student will really shine, and you have enough signal to compress the range into the expected letters at the end.

I'm curious what you call it when, say a car company programs their vehicles to notice when they are on an emission test stand and will operate differently to get the best test result possible. Because regulators call it cheating and society as a whole suffers from it.

The honest students actually value being told if they understood correctly. I guess the most inveterate cheaters wouldn't care, but most students are at least somewhat hopeful they've actually learned, and the summative assessment process is feedback for those students.

It so happens that looking after the mechanics of (computer based) university examination is part of my current role. We do have some mechanisms in place that are intended to make it harder to cheat, but ultimately some students will cheat and one of the interesting things is watching the reaction of a young colleague who went from those exams (a year ago) to his current job, at this same university.

For example there are signs outside every exam room prominently warning students that the university owns video cameras and they are being watched while doing exams. It's true, but of course the main reason we're watching isn't to catch cheaters but to anticipate problems the room's invigilators are about to call us about. Are we watching to see if that girl is wearing a short skirt because she's written notes on her own thighs? Are we watching to see if the Fitbit on that guy's wrist has been modified to display relayed multiple choice answers? No, we're watching because the room has 85 green "OK for this exam: BIOL1024 Genetics" screens and one orange "Pre-check failed. DO NOT USE" screen and in a minute the retired administrator herding students into the room is going to remember that we said Orange = Bad during training and call us about it, by the time they do we want to know why it has an orange screen, whether that room is actually booked for 86 students so that they can't just leave the machine unused, and where else on campus we can put one extra student if we need to move them pronto. We aren't trying to actually fix it, because that's likely to take hours, and we have minutes or sometimes seconds.

One of the most valuable uses of those cameras doesn't actually involve seeing anybody, cheater or not, student or not, at the end of the day if there's one PC which stubbornly claims to still be doing an exam, is it really? If the room is empty, maybe even dark, then the answer is that despite instructions to students and invigilators they left a machine logged in, running an exam, and just walked out of the room. On the other hand, if there's still people stood in the room looking at the PC, well, radios work both ways, lets find out why the hell they aren't finished.

Okay, then I'm going up against people who are willing to risk their health to gain an advantage. Should I be penalized because I'm trying to make sure my equipment's going to last as long as I need it?

I suppose we accept that in sports -- even without doping, if somebody's gonna sacrifice their body to make a play then that's their call -- but in academia, too?

I agree with you in many cases, but note that different institutions, in different countries, teach differently, and grade differently. While cheating in a core class that builds important knowledge in your major seems like a horrible idea, that's not all there is. For instance, anyone studying computer science in my state school in Spain, a few decades ago, had to take a deadly physics class in their first year. It contained, easily, the material of three physics classes in a sensible American university. There's no such thing as TAs, and time with the instructor outside of class is just not a thing. The pass rate was under 20%, and that's on purpose: failing people was part of the objective, as it served as a way to keep people enrolled, but unable to access later classes, which don't really need any advanced physics. This kind of cribbing was (and it might still be?) popular in that state university. The goal for the students is not to get the best grades: It's just to pass at all, so that they can get on to the classes that might teach something they are interested on.

In an American university, I've seen people being quite motivated to cheat because their financial aid was depending on a GPA. Nobody might have cared about the GPA later, but when you have thousands of dollars a year on the line, and your first midterm didn't look good...

So sure, most people in an American university, in most circumstances, shouldn't even be considering cheating as an option. But systems and circumstances can be different for others. The fact that this students were using Whatsapp already tells you that maybe their circumstances were different, and they really might be in circumstances where the incentives to cheat are strong.