Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My students cheated... a lot

crumplab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 1001 posts

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#301

Post by bhargav »

carls wrote: post #230

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 g…

That sounds great and all but I honestly have doubts about this software that detects similarities… there’s only so many ways to solve the bland questions that professors lift from books; kind of ironic. I’m assuming it’s basicallly doing AST analysis and it’s no smarter than eliminating things like variables being renamed.

They are basically stating that this “software” is 100% accurate. Furthermore it’s then left to whims of some TAs?

No algorithm can detect cheating unless the number of permutations are very very large (I.e being struck by lightening). Maybe one way to offset would be to use data as the student is entering the solution but that was never the case for us; just upload the source code to their custom made Windows app.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#302

Post by Fomite »

One of the most interesting things that comes out of Academia StackExchange when students are asking about what to do about academic dishonesty violations is how quickly they go to the "Cell Block Tango" defense.

"I didn't do it, but if I done it..."

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#303

Post by iamthirsty »

wly_cdgr wrote: post #291

The author has a responsibility to out the cheaters. It's unacceptably unfair to the students in his course who didn't cheat, and cheaters should be shamed publicly and have their career prospects severely damaged. I really don't give a shit what excuses or justifications someone might have had for cheating, if you had to run away from home sleep under the bridge and suck dick for wifi after your dad killed your mom…

Unfortunately, life does not have a responsibility to be fair. Although we would sure like it to be, it is not universally possible.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#304

Post by j7ake »

urthor wrote: post #255
j7ake wrote: post #201

This was a great read. I wonder if it's actually more time-efficient at some point to just do an oral exam rather than these paper exams. In oral exams, it's obvious whether you know the material or not. It may appear more time-consuming, but considering there is no need to grade or worry about cheating, you may come out ahead.

I did that for one class. It was both extremely time efficient and effective. The downside to oral examinations however is you can't really grade curve them. Which is a beautiful thing, but also not what the faculty wants. The faculty grades mostly because they want to cull the chaff from the hardest working grad student candidates. They aren't after pure comprehension, they want hard workers.

My most memorable exam experience as a student was an oral exam in thermodynamics or heat transfer.

They gave a randomly selected question to me and I had 30 minutes to prepare a solution (alone in back of classroom). I provide solution which took 10 minutes then 20 minutes was additional theory questions.

For each student, it took the professor 30 minutes. So for 100 students you can do it in 5 hours.

I believe the professor was John Thome.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#305

Post by hrunt »

carls wrote: post #250
andrewflnr wrote: post #205

Despite this teacher's miraculous extraction of some character growth from a handful of the cheaters, I still think he should have just failed all of them as soon as he had an airtight case against them. There is no moral or practical justification for tolerating cheaters. They make a mockery of honest students and the higher education as a whole. They're a menace to the society into which they're released with a sta…

I think the situation is more complex than just "we must assume they don't care about learning ... just fail the bastards." I think it's more important to first understand what were the social, environmental, cultural (and otherwise) causes of this behavior. Specifically, different systems of incentives and permissiveness will produce different behavior. I taught high school computer science for 4 years, and I can at…

> 1. The technological ease of which it is to cheat: it's easier to cheat on an asynchronous online exam than when you're taking it synchronously in a large classroom.

I went to school pre-2000, so the Internet existed, but was not as prevalent as it is today. What struck me most in the article is how easy it is today to cheat today. Real-time group chats, easy sharing of screenshots and quizzes, the volume of easily-copied content off the Internet, and tools available 100% of the time simply put fraternity list of historical quizzes and copied texts in the library to shame. The ease of cheating today is one less barrier that people have to cross to compromise their morals.

I think if a goal of post-secondary education is to prepare their populations for professional success, then you're right, simply punishing cheaters does not achieve that goal. But our world today is full of examples where it's easy to take the less moral or ethical road and suffer little to no consequences. Hopefully, schools will not succumb to that too much.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#306

Post by bojo »

ikt wrote: post #280
medler wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So by and by you're saying something like Cardano is definitely not a ponzi because it's extremely focused on doing everything academically? https://docs.cardano.org/explore-cardano/relevant-research-p... If this is a ponzi then I have to give them credit, to be doing research at a university level in order to swipe me of a bundle of dollars is amazing. They don't have anything about making themselves richer at the e…

I know what Cardano is because I've heard of it through the Haskell community. I bet most people have not. How do you sift through the thousands of ridiculous coins out there and say to yourself, "Oh, they probably have integrity"?

This continues to be a mystery to me as it seems no one can put themselves in the common man shoes. The common man doesn't care about tech. They don't care about the integrity behind it. They care about whether it can make them money.

List 5 coins I've never heard of and I'd probably say, "ponzi scheme" without hesitation. Do I actually know if it is? No. Does it matter? No. If the majority of shitcoins come off as a ponzi scheme, then why would anyone think something like Cardano isn't?

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#307

Post by hayleox »

andrewflnr wrote: post #205

Despite this teacher's miraculous extraction of some character growth from a handful of the cheaters, I still think he should have just failed all of them as soon as he had an airtight case against them. There is no moral or practical justification for tolerating cheaters. They make a mockery of honest students and the higher education as a whole. They're a menace to the society into which they're released with a sta…

I get where you're coming from, but I tend to lean more towards the teacher's approach. The big problem in this class was that there was a culture of cheating -- it was the norm, and anyone who joined the WhatsApp group was automatically pulled into it. I imagine many of the students who did cheat would not have done so if it didn't fall into their lap like that.

That's not to say that it's justified or right. Of course they shouldn't even cheated, even though it was popular and easy. But it's a much more understandable mistake to make, when doing the wrong thing is so popular and easy. When 5% of a class cheats, that indicates a serious moral failing on those students' parts. But when 70% of a class cheats, it's harder to believe that they're all so morally bankrupt.

Maybe I'm too much of an optimist, but I'm a strong believer in giving people second chances and encouraging them to learn from their mistakes instead of immediately jumping to punishment.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#308

Post by threatofrain »

User23 wrote: post #294
alexb_ wrote: post #287

I think a lot of people here are missing the root cause of why students cheat. College for the longest time has not had anything to do with learning for the VAST majority of students. You go to college because you have to have a degree to get a job. And you have to have a good GPA on that degree to get a job. College is not about actually learning anything - it's a purely monetary investment, where you go into debt t…

And this is why tech companies stopped giving a shit about undergraduate degrees back in the 90s at the latest. There’s literally no signal to be had. None of the above is meant to deny the benefits of getting into the ivy league self-dealing club.

Stopped giving about undergrad degrees? No signal to be had?! Somehow I'm not getting that read from the tech industry... what I am getting is a willingness to hire non-traditional candidates. That does not translate to not giving a shit.

If you have more information on the source of your confidence, please do share.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#309

Post by sam-2727 »

wly_cdgr wrote: post #291

The author has a responsibility to out the cheaters. It's unacceptably unfair to the students in his course who didn't cheat, and cheaters should be shamed publicly and have their career prospects severely damaged. I really don't give a shit what excuses or justifications someone might have had for cheating, if you had to run away from home sleep under the bridge and suck dick for wifi after your dad killed your mom…

I think it is pretty standard practice to keep cheating confidential (indeed, I think for a lot of universities professors aren't allowed to publicize student names in incidents of cheating). I understand where you're coming from, but college can be an extremely stressful place that can lead students to do actions they otherwise wouldn't have done (or so goes the typical reasoning from universities).

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#310

Post by yayitswei »

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…

Was it Do Kwon?
Post reply on HN