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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#401

Post by gmd63 »

It makes me sad that so many engineers seem to think cheating is a just and or good solution. Cheating is objectively bad system design (for society, we're designing our society with daily actions every day), as it rewards people without integrity who want the easy way out. Sure, you can blame the system for encouraging incentives that reward cheating, and there are benefits to thinking like a cheater to identify gaps and problems in design, but we only have one life, and one go at growing the society we want to live in.

By cheating, you're voting for a society of scammers, and you think you deserve more than the honest student because you're willing to eat honor instead of preserving it and growing it for future generations.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#402

Post by aidenn0 »

StillBored wrote: post #365
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…

have to have a good GPA on that degree to get a job. Maybe at some big name co, but you will probably learn more at some little self funded place that pays a little less and can't attract the top tier graduates. After a couple years, get a job at a small startup where you and 5 other people write the entire product. From there you will be a far stronger candidate just about anywhere with a real engineering culture. M…

I graduated with a poor GPA. The only place that gave me an offer did so because they forgot to ask me for my GPA. I got dozens of rejections purely for my GPA. Not all of them were from large employers.

[Edit]

To state something more on topic, I never once even considered cheating in school. I don't think it ever entered my mind, even when I was in danger of flunking out.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#403

Post by kqr »

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…

That collaboration and cooperation often counts as cheating in our education system is a stupid relic from some hundred years ago.

If you want to mould a Taylorist's dream of obedient, quiet factory workers who spend their lives making the left side of the head of a pin then yeah, go ahead and discourage cooperation.

For anything else? Especially the creative work that will be expected of current students in the future? Cooperation should be a major goal of education.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#404

Post by donkeybeer »

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…

The results of checking against existing and other test takers solutions must be taken with a strong human judgment. Programming problems such as would be asked in tests are essentially like mathematical formulas/algorithms, and there isn't much variation in how a given formula or algorithm can be implemented.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#405

Post by [deleted] »

paulpauper wrote: post #202
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…

they got into Stanford, which confers above average intelligence and also bestows connections, so that probably helped. Interesting stories.

[deleted]

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#406

Post by comex »

alexb_ wrote: post #338
yardstick wrote: post #311

I’m surprised at the number of people here justifying or supporting cheating. It’s not a victimless crime. Many university courses have minimum requirements to get into. Eg Engineering, Medicine, etc. Cheating to inflate your grades will result in people who didn’t cheat missing out on, or having less chance of, being accepted into their desired degree. Which they worked honestly for, without cheating.

Look at it this way. Cheating and not cheating has its own risks associated. And when the risk/reward of cheating vastly outperforms on average compared to the risk/reward of not cheating, every single rational actor will cheat. In fact, not cheating is a purely irrational thing to do given that you know these odds - it's based on a belief that your individual action will make any sort of meaningful difference. And w…

Personally I see it as a moral imperative to be honest, and that includes not cheating on tests. This isn’t rational in the sense of being a logical consequence of some other, more fundamental principle. But it’s also not irrational. It’s just a different set of goals.

…On the other hand, a big part of the reason I ended up with that set of goals is that it worked well for me when I was young, for both practical and emotional reasons I won't waste your time with. So I won't claim to be holier-than-thou. And I don't feel entitled to judge people for having different principles.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#407

Post by secretsatan »

As i was reading this, i kinda thought, the teacher could have jumped in sooner? As they waited longer and longer, more students would see the cheaters getting away with it, it would be harder not to join in.

They’re chastising the students for not reporting it, but then, it seemed to take a while for the teacher to do it as well

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#408

Post by Sirened »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #60
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…

> Tough to do when you’re sharing a curve with a bunch of cheaters Are curves still that common these days? In my time at university, the only classes that got curved were a couple math classes that were curved in the students' favor.

Curves are extremely common in STEM classes today at Berkeley. I think I've only had a handful of upper division classes that were not curved. A lot of the internal discussion on curving vs not curving is based on the fact that building an exam which generates a good distribution is really hard, especially for classes where the understanding is very stratified due to differing backgrounds in the area.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#409

Post by Aeolun »

I dunno, I never cheated, but I would never report other people for doing it either. It’s not my job to detect and report other people cheating, and getting dinged for not reporting people that cheated would make me hate you very quickly.

That said, I just don’t see the point in cheating. University isn’t that hard if you have some basic level of skill. You go to the classes, you read the stuff the assign you, do the assignments, and you should mostly be able to pass the course.

Cheating always seemed like a complete waste to me. I’d be paying a lot of money to learn nothing (aside from how to cheat better). If I’m going to be there anyway to get my degree, I might as well put in the work.

And then later you have these instances where it turns out that because you actually paid attention in school, you know more than people from top universities that (apparently) cheated their way to a degree.

Of course, they’re also 2 levels above you earning twice what you make. Because that’s the way these things work :/

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#410

Post by jl2718 »

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…

GP said uncorrelated. I don’t think that’s an effective counterpoint, although GP seems to be indicating anti-correlation. Either way, this is about undergraduate students, and I also don’t think you can claim superlative undergraduate performance for that particular founder. Maybe crypto is where motivated underperformers found a place at the table because the overperformers are settled in more civilized places. Also, these research papers in cryptocurrency are probably not comparable to serious contemporary work in mainstream journals of pure math and theoretical computer science, but I am personally fascinated by the way that old research is slowly finding it’s way into applications through the sometimes absurd financialization of these ideas, enough to get scammed and swindled a bit myself.
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