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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#221

Post by judge2020 »

leetcrew wrote: post #131
Scramblejams wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 wher…

> when everyone else is graduating with a 4.0, a 3.8 looks a lot like a 2.0 from a more rigorous school.

I've never heard of this interpretation before, it seems this is a difference in whether the GPA should represent a student's actual grade on assignments, or the student's overall achievement relative to their piers. It seems the curve exists for the latter ideology - you can't expect every FAANG recruiter to say "well they got 2.9 from Georgia Tech, that's better than this 3.4 from Duke", if they did, you'd probably have pretty arbitrary hirings (although, if it became policy, I can see some Googler making an internal tool to 'normalize' school GPAs); although it seems MIT has a "no curves" policy and graduates still manage top-tier GPAs.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#222

Post by onetimeusename »

jl2718 wrote: post #170

I taught two courses to undergrad CS students at Stanford. I think about half of students cheated on problem sets and tests. The answers were all way too uniform and done without correction. In the first course, there was a student who definitely didn’t cheat and was objectively horrible at all tasks assigned, consuming a frustratingly large portion of my grading time. This student ended up with a massively impressiv…

You can buy problem sets and answers online and I suspect that's one way people might cheat especially on homework. A lot of schools just reuse textbook problem sets or have a bank of questions they use for problem sets and exams, especially for larger classes, and people can buy all the answers online and find the ones they need. I think during the Covid pandemic when things moved online that really accelerated but previously it was a grey area since it could be just a form of studying.

It's sad because I think a lot of those classes are curved and people who don't cheat probably have a disadvantage. Despite putting more effort in and maybe even knowing more than other students, people who don't cheat could end up at the bottom of the curve but might have actually fared better under different conditions.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#223

Post by medler »

jl2718 wrote: post #170

I taught two courses to undergrad CS students at Stanford. I think about half of students cheated on problem sets and tests. The answers were all way too uniform and done without correction. In the first course, there was a student who definitely didn’t cheat and was objectively horrible at all tasks assigned, consuming a frustratingly large portion of my grading time. This student ended up with a massively impressiv…

Interesting that they both founded cryptocurrencies. It’s not surprising that academic success is uncorrelated with being able to run a good Ponzi scheme. Bernie Madoff was extremely successful in his time, but he wasn’t a prodigy either.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#224

Post by pryce »

jl2718 wrote: post #170

I taught two courses to undergrad CS students at Stanford. I think about half of students cheated on problem sets and tests. The answers were all way too uniform and done without correction. In the first course, there was a student who definitely didn’t cheat and was objectively horrible at all tasks assigned, consuming a frustratingly large portion of my grading time. This student ended up with a massively impressiv…

From my understanding of cryptocurrency and the people in it, I don't have the premise that founding a billion dollar (or 10 billion dollar) cryptocurrency is laudable.

It strikes me that your comment would read by crypto fanbase as a success story, and yet as crypto detractors like myself as even further reason to regard them as terrible... you may have just invented the "completely unintentional if-by-whiskey argument[1]"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#225

Post by zerocrates »

zelienople wrote: post #203

Cheating... I'm not sure that word means what you think it means. Give a quiz that can be completed in your own time over the course of a week. That sounds more like an assignment to me. So... the cheating was violating the rule that it can't be done cooperatively? If I'm cheating by asking other students about an assignment then I think I cheated on everything. And, of course, I did not. My answers to assignments we…

Come on now, if you're sharing screenshots of the test and asking other students for answers, you know, they know, everyone knows: you're cheating.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#226

Post by bstpierre »

ALittleLight wrote: post #146
gnicholas wrote: post #109

What would you tell your child to do if he/she were in this class, and were aware of the massive cheating happening in the chat? Should the student report the cheating to the professor? Assuming there was a curve in the class, how do you deal with the "but everyone else is doing it" argument with regard to benefiting from the cheating (even passively, by seeing the questions/answers posted)? I have wondered about sim…

I would tell my children not to leave a digital record of cheating and that they should choose a more useful major than psychology. Lots (probably most) of people are in college for the credentials. Most of the rest are there because they feel they are supposed to be there. They do the work required for the credentials. Most of what is taught in college has little value or applicability and is quickly forgotten. Chea…

This is a poor analogy. It doesn’t take any effort to drink a bottle of Gatorade, and it tastes good too.

On the other hand, attending a semester’s worth of lectures and engaging with assignments takes a lot of time and effort.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#227

Post by jimmyswimmy »

As an undergrad I was heavily involved in the student-led academic integrity organization. This story reads so true to my experiences (from the last millenium, mind you - there was no whatsapp, etc.). My largest cases came from the computer sciences departments. Students thought nothing of copying programs and submitting them as their own.

It turned out, of course, that structural similarities are so obvious. My worst case had 23 students accused of submitting the same program for a lower-level course. I held an event where all (or most) of them attended. Somehow they tried to explain how their use of not-just-similar-but-exactly-the-same variable names, structure and comments in a C or C++ (it's been a while) program. I mean, exactly the same. One spent an hour berating me on the phone (well before I figured out that I could just politely end the conversation and hang up) explaining that it was his work. It was not.

I was disappointed over and over seeing how blatantly and cavalierly my fellow students would break the rules. It was unpleasant for everyone involved, despite a reasonably lenient punishment process - students, faculty and us alike. I didn't like lording over my fellow students, but felt it was important to hold a line of sorts. I wish very much that there was no need for this function but time and again students turned in work that was not theirs. I strongly suspected at the time that most professors only turned in the most blatant open-and-shut cases. It was particularly sad considering how very much money each class cost.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#228

Post by Brybry »

jmull wrote: post #64

I honestly don’t get widespread cheating like this… You’re paying so much money for these courses — probably a ridiculous amount, so much you may never recoup — … so at least get everything out of it you can. Otherwise, why sign up in the first place? Let me tell you: essentially no one cares what grade you got in your courses. (Sure, there are cases, but over time they quickly attenuate from “sometimes” to “never” a…

Not everyone is paying a lot for courses.

My undergrad college tuition was 100% free via a state scholarship program.

Scholarship funding was dependent on maintaining a certain GPA, so I could see why some might be tempted to cheat. Most of my friends lost their scholarships due to GPA.

(For the record, I never cheated in college. I withdrew twice, for a variety of reasons, and never went back.)

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#229

Post by judge2020 »

celeritascelery wrote: post #217

At my college there was a class where one of the teacher assistants got ahold of the answer key and handed it out to class mates. The memorized the key, not the answers, but the actual “A,B,A,C,C…” of the key. We told the professor, so he just rearranged the answers. So every student that cheated got a perfect 0. This had the effect of them failing the assignment on their own, and also telling you who the cheaters we…

A perfect zero seems unlikely, unless the answers were changed to 'anything other than the original letter'?

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#230

Post by carls »

I recently took a CS class at Stanford with an interesting policy on cheating. While cheating almost certainly happened during the course, at the end of the quarter the course staff made a public post allowing any student who cheated to make a private message to the staff admitting they've done so.

If a student admitted to cheating, while they would face academic disciplinary action (i.e. receiving a failing or low grade), they would not be brought up to the administrative office that deals with issues of academic integrity, and therefore would not face consequences like expulsion or being on official academic probation.

However if a cheating student decided to risk it and not admit their guilt, they were at risk of a potentially even greater degree punishment. The course staff would run all students code through a piece of software to detect similarities between each other, as well as online solutions. Students who were flagged by this software would then have their code hand-checked by at least one course staff, who would make a judgement call as to whether it seemed like cheating.

I found this policy quite interesting. As a former high school teacher, I've certain encountered teaching in my own classes, and have historically oscillated between taking a very harsh stance, or perhaps an overly permissive one.

The one taken by the lecturers of this course offered a "second chance" to cheaters in a way I hadn't seen before.

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