It strikes me as odd that the very qualities that we value in engineers (efficiency, outside the box thinking, finding solutions that make the most of the constraints of existing systems) are the ones we detest in engineering students. This is even more true for jobs that are meant to exploit inefficiencies in existing systems, such as entrepreneurs.
My students cheated... a lot
421–430 of 1001 posts
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#422It 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 gap…
Cheating is related to human problems, and engineers aren’t psychologists. It’s human problems when there is a mismatch between teachers and students, between schools and expectations, and students are at the bottom of the ladder and aren’t in a position to discuss what is demanded.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#423Anyway, I don't see anything in the article about what the academic office said when he turned all those reports in. I'm really curious, these kinds of situations tend to make national news when some prof brings a large number of students up on academic honor code violations. (ex: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/08/20/least-100-nav... ) I'm firmly of the opinion that the negatives of group study out weight t…
> I'm firmly of the opinion that the negatives of group study out weight the positives and generally should be banned in college
That's a... strong opinion.
I'm genuinely at a loss of how you can think that. If studying in groups was harmful enough to be banned by colleges, then shouldn't online classes have been tremendous boons to learning? On a personal level, I can barely straighten out two thoughts in my head unless I have someone I can talk it over with, I couldn't imagine collaborative study being outright banned.
Am I missing something here?
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#424I'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…
> If someone is caught cheating how do I know they didn't cheat in previous classes, but got away with it? I could be wrong but I don't think this happens that often. If you cheated enough not to understand what was going on in calc 1 may god rest your soul as 2 and 3 are going to be downright impossible. For those types of classes you need to mostly understand the material even have a chance at cheating successfully…
They're not just talking about prerequisite courses. If someone is willing to cheat in a Comp Sci course, they're probably willing to cheat on a Literature class.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#425I 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…
Speaking from experience using similar software on students assignments, it is often blatantly obvious when cheating is occurring.
To start with, at an undergrad level, most students had fairly distinct coding styles - usually with quirks of not "proper" coding. Some cheaters had the exact same quirks in multiple students assignments.
Also, some cheaters had the exact same mistakes in their code, on top of the same code style.
Yes the software picks up people that write correct solutions with perfect syntax, but those are the ones that you just toss out because there isn't any proof there.
The people that get caught cheating generally don't know what correct solutions and good code look like, so they don't understand how obvious it is when they copy paste their friends mediocre code.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#426It 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 gap…
I don't think people are defending cheating. People are saying that what in the normal world goes under "desirable cooperation" is called "cheating" in school, and for as long as that is the case, students who exhibit normally desirable cooperative behaviour will be called "cheaters" and that's not a reasonable thing to do to them.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're going to college at the worst time in our lives. When I was in college I did exactly what you described. I didn't really cheat much (I remember just one time), but all I cared about was grades and getting a job. I couldn't have cared less about learning or retaining anything. And I didn't learn much. This strategy worked out well for me, but it was a huge waste of time. I'm in my 30s now and I would absolutely…
> I'm in my 30s now and I would absolutely love to go back to school to learn. You love the idea of doing something you’re not doing now. I see further down in another comment, you dismissed the idea of learning from free online resources. If you were in your 30s and in school, you’d love to be able to go off in the and work with your hands — or something else to distract yourself.
I didn't dismiss the idea of learning from online resources. I constantly work through online courses/lectures and books. I only noted that the experience is inferior to going to college where you can completely focus on learning with a group of peers, and where you are held accountable.
I'd love to have the "college experience" again now, but this time with a focus on learning instead of a focus on getting good grades. Focusing on good grades (over learning) is the rational choice as a young student and I don't regret doing so, but now my goals are different.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#428This 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…
I was taking an upper level marine biology course - the tests were VERY difficult, but they were take-home, do them at your leisure. I was cool with it. But walked into a coffee shop one day and found 75% of the class sharing answers and cheating anyway.
It seems very funny to me as a programmer, that what university calls "cheating" and threatens consequences, the industry calls "consulting with your colleagues" and encourages.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#429It strikes me as odd that the very qualities that we value in engineers (efficiency, outside the box thinking, finding solutions that make the most of the constraints of existing systems) are the ones we detest in engineering students. This is even more true for jobs that are meant to exploit inefficiencies in existing systems, such as entrepreneurs.
If you're using that as an argument for why cheating should be allowed, you're missing the key part of what what education is supposed to be about: understanding the fundamentals well enough that you can think of of the box and find solutions without relying on someone to always be there.
Would you really want to work with a software developer who doesn't understand how functions, loops, etc work?
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#430It 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 gap…
If you get away with cheating it’s not cheating. The real problem is whether it’s worth the risk of getting caught and/or losing an opportunity to learn something which will help you later.
No, the real problem is dishonesty and unfairness to your classmates and teacher.