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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#321

Post by KennyBlanken »

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…

The exams were open book, open note and they had a week to complete them.

When people were offered a nearly complete fresh slate, they still cheated. And then plagiarized.

He at length describes how much of his class were blowing off almost every aspect of the class; not attending lectures, skipping assignments, almost never attending his office hours.

Many of them openly say in the whatsapp chat that they didn't do reading, classwork, or study.

This is not even remotely close to behavior of people participating in a high-stakes all-or-nothing, if-I-don't-graduate-I-am-fucked-for-life situations.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#322

Post by mightybyte »

"A couple digressions. I have multi-dimensional empathy for my students. Is that a thing? It is. It means that I learn more from my students than they learn from me. There are more students than me, and they have so much more stuff going on than I do. Although I don’t condone cheating at all, I can recognize that students sometimes resort to cheating because of other life stuff going on. Plus, it was/is a global pandemic, with stress galore. So, we were all in a major life stuff happening moment."

The world needs more people with multi-dimensional empathy.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#323

Post by klodolph »

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…

"Shamed publicly and have their career prospects severely damaged..."

The prefontal cortex does not finish developing until age 25 or thereabouts. This is why it is logical and necessary to punish young people differently from the way we punish adults.

"Cheating is not acceptable or excusable, ever, period."

Children develop the ability to lie and cheat around 3 or 4 years of age, although they are very unskilled at it and initially tell lies that are not believable. I think we agree that we can accept and excuse 4-year-olds who lie and cheat, because it will take much longer for them to develop ethics and morals.

The question then is, how do we taper off the acceptance and excuses? Perhaps we agree that it's acceptable at age 4 and unacceptable at age 25, but what about 18? Perhaps people at age 18 still need to learn ethics and morals?

It seems like such a shame to destroy somebody's academic career if there are ways to save it.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#324

Post by bufferoverflow »

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…

> Given all of this, why wouldn't you cheat?

In my state college they had zero tolerance policy. You caught cheating, you're out.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#325

Post by c3534l »

I've never understood people's attitudes towards cheating, which is perhaps why its so prevalent. People cheat at sports all the time and people just sort of accept it. When people cheat in school, we just kind of go "well, yeah, kids do that, I guess we'll give you a few warnings first."

If someone is caught cheating how do I know they didn't cheat in previous classes, but got away with it? Do you really want to go to a doctor who, regardless of if he knows his stuff now, is the kind of person who can live with cheating? As I've grown older and seen more and more people get away with not a moment of weakness, but a deep, unfixable character flaw requiring planning and sustained effort to gain an advantage over people foolish enough to be doing things fairly, it makes me wonder why anyone chooses to tolerate this.

Who wants to get a degree from a university that knowingly and willingly passes students who cheat, but just makes them retake the course or in this case do what sounds like essentially extra credit. But rather than prevent people from participating in systems they have demonstrated are not trustworthy enough to participate in, we just give them a stern lecture and extra work, or an asterisk in their hall of fame record, or make them say they're very sorry.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#326

Post by TheApexTheater »

bhargav wrote: post #301
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 t…

From doing some cursory research, it appears the software in question is called MOSS (Measure of Software Similarity) and is currently being provided as a service [0].

Since it is intended to be used by instructors and staff, the source is restricted (though "anyone may create a MOSS account"). According to the paper describing how it's used [1], "False positives have never been reported, and all false negatives were quickly traced back to the source, which was either an implementation or a user misunderstanding."

Sources:

[0]: https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss

[1]: http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/publications/papers/sigmod...

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#327

Post by vikingerik »

lostcohort wrote: post #315
kstenerud wrote: post #242

Cheating is the natural result of an exclusive funnel for entry into the middle class. This has been going on for decades in Asia (which is why Chinese students cheat so much), and now America is finally here as well. Academics like to wax poetic about how students are "only cheating themselves" and "losing out on the educational opportunities", but the reality is much more mercenary and down-to-earth: Either you pas…

Quoted post unavailable.

This is not statistically significant. There are 130,900 public schools in America. Roughly 130,880 of them have never been shot at. It sucks for the ones who have, but they are 0.015% of the total.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#328

Post by bhrgunatha »

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…

> I've certain encountered teaching in my own classes,

This kind of mistyping reminds me of those example of people whose names fit their job but it's rare to find such an apropos example.

Sorry to derail your point but the juxtaposition of "ch" and "t" here is perfect.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#330

Post by proc0 »

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…

Seems a bit cynical of a take. Cheating prevents you from learning, otherwise you wouldn't need to. Also, college is very limited in how much it can prepare you for a real job. It only offers a subset of knowledge that is needed to be good at any given job. Cheating is basically showing up to class and avoiding the whole point of being there. Why would you show up to a training, to then ignore the training part.

I think it's a combination of culture and every person's upbringing which sets priorities on students to waste time cheating. They have to be there because of expectations either from parents or society, but they don't really want to be there. Students who aren't trying are just going through the motions and will take the path of least resistance which is cheating.

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