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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#351

Post by nynx »

phamilton wrote: post #332

In my degree (Comp Eng) we overlapped with the Comp Sci program a fair amount. Comp Sci was part of the college of mathematics and Comp Eng was part of the college of engineering, which were on opposite sides of campus and organizationally were very separate. The cultures could not have been any more different. The engineering labs were loud, full of collaboration and discussion. The professors would sometimes find o…

This is a small part of why I majored in engineering (Engineering Science/Physics) instead of comp sci. It seemed like a very oppressive environment to learn in, especially when I already had years of experience with programming.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#352

Post by Nition »

xpe wrote: post #184

I've read the entire article. The cheating was rampant. This part, however, jumped out at me: > At my most mystified, I proceeded to release a class announcement warning students not to plagiarize the academic integrity assignment. To cheat on the very assignment that is giving you a second chance is ... stupid and/or brazen and/or pitiful. So, why warn the students again? This was their second chance, right? I'm ope…

And that assignment was only 150 words!

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#353

Post by madhadron »

There's an easy solution to this kind of cheating: stop grading. Switch to evaluations and self evaluations. Evergreen State College and a few others already do this. If there's no GPA, there's nothing to game.

It means you can't run giant survey classes and asynchronous, online courses.

It's sad to see cheating this rampant. When I was doing my physics undergraduate degree, we had little to no cheating. We worked together on homework (as expected by the professors) and tests I think everyone was scrupulously honest on. The one time someone asked for help, multiple people yelled at him. This was at University of Virginia, which has an honor code. There was a lot of cheating in the big survey classes, but students in the upper level classes in their majors took it fairly seriously.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#354

Post by MattGaiser »

proc0 wrote: post #337
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…

> Either you pass this hurdle by hook or by crook, or you spend the rest of your life flipping burgers. It's not a hard choice. Yes, but the assumption is you're passing with the knowledge in your head. Having the career knowledge is what in theory allows you to get the job, and then not flip burgers. I'm not sure how students end up thinking it's literally the number of your grade that makes the difference. Maybe it…

> as important as demonstrating expertise in the first few months on the job.

But you must get the job first and you generally get a job with a resume. Doesn't matter what is in your head. You better have enough on a one page piece of paper to make people believe you know it. A grade is one piece of evidence you can use for that.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#355

Post by derevaunseraun »

This happened to me in undergrad with an autograded class. I remember soloing the class and thinking that the assignments were super hard. They would post grade averages for assignments and I was doing worse than usual.

I remember a TA posting about cheating being an issue. They even released a graph of anonymized student repositories with edges indicating a detected instance of cheating

Turned out that a HUGE cohort of people were cheating (I think maybe over half the class).

The scariest thing about cheating is that whenever a bunch of people do it (and aren't caught), it screws up the class curve so much that people who don't cheat will be forced to put in way more time studying, which will then take time away from other classes. It also screws up metrics that the professors and TAs use to understand how well they're teaching material, which assignments to drop, etc

imo this is why people shouldn't cheat. If nobody cheats, the grades might on average be lower but once the class is curved or assignments are dropped it will be a fair indicator of where everyone is at. If people cheat, it screws up the fairness and can encourage others to start cheating. If everyone (or most) are cheating, you have people who aren't getting anything out of the class, getting credits as prerequisite that they shouldn't be getting, moving on to future classes and continuing the cycle

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#357

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

Cheating is not about the instructors. As gutting as it may be to be a teacher and learn that your students are not interested in honestly engaging in what you may be passionate about, the harm cheaters spread is 10x worse for honest students than it is any instructor.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#358

Post by omoikane »

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…

If someone went to college with the belief that only the degree at the end mattered and that they weren't going to learn anything along the way, I can see how they might convince themselves that cheating is a low-risk shortcut toward that end goal. I do not subscribe to that belief and have learned quite a bit by trying to absorb the lessons earnestly, as opposed to taking shortcuts.

I have also had the experience where a professor interviewed me and one other student because our homework appear too similar. That experience reinforced my impression that cheating is a risky venture and I want none of it. (Also, leaving printouts of your code around is extremely high risk if helping someone to cheat is roughly as bad as cheating at your university).

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#359

Post by krupan »

phamilton wrote: post #332

In my degree (Comp Eng) we overlapped with the Comp Sci program a fair amount. Comp Sci was part of the college of mathematics and Comp Eng was part of the college of engineering, which were on opposite sides of campus and organizationally were very separate. The cultures could not have been any more different. The engineering labs were loud, full of collaboration and discussion. The professors would sometimes find o…

Sounds like you and I were at the same college! Us CompE's would usually raise a ruckus in the computer science labs too though. Good times.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#360

Post by vegadw »

phamilton wrote: post #332

In my degree (Comp Eng) we overlapped with the Comp Sci program a fair amount. Comp Sci was part of the college of mathematics and Comp Eng was part of the college of engineering, which were on opposite sides of campus and organizationally were very separate. The cultures could not have been any more different. The engineering labs were loud, full of collaboration and discussion. The professors would sometimes find o…

Odd, I'm also a Comp Eng grad and my experience was exactly the same - including the cross campus bit. I went to University of Nebraska - Lincoln.

There was still definitely a fair amount of real cheating though. Especially during the online classes of COVID.

Most of the cheating I saw was from classes that had clearly had difficulty creep up year after year due to un-caught cheating though, and had truly awful professors. Chegg, I think, has really inflated the difficulty for the hosest people.

I think the most common cheating i actually saw in engineering was group work where only 1 person did anything. Hell, I have an example on my GitHub where my partner made one commit with one line of code which I then had to redo anyway.

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