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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#431

Post by AdamH12113 »

>I knew that my students wanted a second chance, I wasn’t sure how many of them would take it. Part of completing the academic integrity assignment was a tacit admission of cheating, and some students seemed set on not admitting to anything. So, I was thrilled when I received the first completed academic integrity assignment.

>What did the student have to say? There were many full sentences and as I read them I got that feeling again. So, I copied and pasted some sentences into Google, and yup, the student was plagiarizing the academic integrity assignment. Whole swaths of text verbatim copied.

How broken of a person do you have to be to reflexively cheat on a simple assignment intended to give you a second chance after you’ve been caught cheating already? How can that be the first thing you go for? This is really sad. I seriously don’t understand the thinking here.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#432

Post by gmd63 »

kushan2020 wrote: post #415
gmd63 wrote: post #401

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 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.

Cheating could grade the honest student below you lower on a curve and deny them employment in a competitive job market. Then there'd be a dishonest person earning more economic influence on the world than an honest one.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#433

Post by kqr »

mikebenfield wrote: post #419
c3534l wrote: post #325

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…

> People cheat at sports all the time and people just sort of accept it. In pro bodybuilding, steroids are nominally illegal, but essentially every pro bodybuilder uses them, the physique necessary to be competitive in pro contests is not achievable without them, and the people running bodybuilding shows deliberately make no effort to enforce this rule. In that kind of context it's hard for me to say the "cheaters" a…

You're making a good point. We have to remember that rules about cheating are effectively social agreements within a group of people. If the majority of the people within that group don't (anymore) agree with the rule, for all intents and purposes it's no longer a rule -- even if it might nominally be stated somewhere as one.

Culture and social arrangements evolve implicitly at first, and are only later encoded. Of course, the modern homo bureaucraticus might do well to be reminded of this.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#434

Post by texaslonghorn5 »

silversmith wrote: post #428
failTide wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In theory the purpose of the university is to help you develop skills independently, so that you can bring something to the table when you do consult with colleagues in the workplace.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#435

Post by rtpg »

kqr wrote: post #412
derevaunseraun wrote: post #355

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…

> it screws up the class curve This is your problem right here. There is no rational argument for grading people on a class curve. That just makes the class a lottery and incentivises sabotaging for others to get an upper hand yourself.

Curve grading is such a messed up thing. It leads to professors assuming you should get all A's in all of your classes basically, cuz of this nonsense from US unis.

I did an exchange year, and sent my grades over to a professor. Guy was like "What's up with all the non As" and I had to talk about how we do things differently here (giving points for right answers, and then adding them all up).

Of course there's always an overall curving happening on a high level because teachers choose how hard to make assignments or not, and ultimately grades are not really fundamentally important, but when people just have those to judge you on and choose to, it really fucks things up.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#436

Post by cowtools »

kqr wrote: post #426
gmd63 wrote: post #401

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 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.

Sure, but at some point you have to actually learn skills yourself and stop relying on others. And that point is high school.

These are people who will eventually go into the workforce, into jobs that have certain expectations of individual knowlege and ability. You can't just coast forever on the people around you.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#437

Post by derevaunseraun »

Cd00d wrote: post #379
derevaunseraun wrote: post #355

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…

> If people cheat, it screws up the fairness I think it's strange to think cheaters are anything other than selfish. To make an altruistic appeal seems misguided.

I can imagine some people cheating not out of selfishness but just to get by. In the case of a curved class (which has its own set of ethical dilemmas), if nobody cheats then people will be OK on average. But because some people decide to cheat, it screws up the dynamic.

This isn't going to convince anyone in particular who wants to cheat, that wasn't really my intention

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#438

Post by texaslonghorn5 »

At the very end of the day, none of the economic consequences really matter, but the honest student gets to feel good about themselves for having integrity, the remorseful dishonest student feels remorse, and the amoral dishonest student was lost from the start.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#439

Post by alexashka »

gmd63 wrote: post #401

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 gap…

Systems that produce so much cheating, are bad system design.

You're at 'cheating = bad', which is the level of a 5 year old naive little boy.

Try upgrading that system instead of pointing fingers. You only have one life to live and all that.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#440

Post by aledalgrande »

remram wrote: post #84
aledalgrande wrote: post #66

Order of importance you get told at school: grades, experience, network. Order of importance you realize is out there in life: network, experience, grades. I have a masters and never have I been asked for it for work (either for credentials or because I actually needed the advanced topics in it). Grades never ever been on the table.

Do you mean that it's not on your CV, or that you don't send out CVs?

It's on my cv but never a requirement in a job description.
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