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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#451

Post by dehrmann »

Not speaking to how to address cheating, but I found this interesting:

> The content can be things like my old exams that someone uploaded without my permission

But later...

> And, sometimes as a professor who has access to online plagiarism tools like turnitin or safe-assign, you just want better tools.

So students submitting "your" content (it was produced as part of employment, so it's almost certainly not actually his, and it was arguably licensed to students by the university) is bad, but submitting their content to a service that retains a copy and profits off it isn't?

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#452

Post by seoaeu »

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.

Of course there’s a rational argument to using the distribution of scores to set the grades: If everyone in the class gets half the questions wrong on the final exam, you shouldn’t just fail the whole class! The test was probably just harder than expected

But in that same example, if many of the students get close to 100% on the final by cheating, then the remainder of the class will suffer

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#453

Post by mkl »

bhrgunatha wrote: post #328
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.

Not juxtaposition, transposition. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/juxtaposition

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#454

Post by kqr »

derevaunseraun wrote: post #442
kqr wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think that curves discourage cooperation and encourage zero-sum thinking. Curves are only really necessary when the professor is out of touch with the class and/or prerequisites. I don't think that people would typically go to the lengths of trying to sabotage someone else, in practice it could just look like a bunch of people working separately and not cooperating at all In an ideal world, there wouldn't be any cu…

I think of helping each other as part of the reason we put students in the same room to begin with. So when a student asks another for help with understanding a concept and the other refuses that request, that's working against the purposes of group education, i.e. sabotage.

But I admit I might be a bit radical here compared to most people. (Who I am sure will argue that utilising teacher time to the maximum is the only reason to gather students in one room.)

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#455

Post by strombofulous »

rtpg wrote: post #435
kqr wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't get it, don't curves limit the number of people who get an A each semester? But potentially everyone in a class that isn't curved could get an A (or F)

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#456

Post by tgv »

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…

> how do I know they didn't cheat in previous classes

You can safely assume many did, because every time teachers check for cheating and plagiarism, they find a lot, and they rarely look for it.

> Who wants to get a degree from a university that knowingly and willingly passes students who cheat

Anyone who considers it a necessary step in life, and doesn't care about the consequences.

It's totally shitty, and it's the consequence of letting so many people in, while at the same time incentivizing schools for throughput and making life hard for the staff. Then you get at a point where nobody cares anymore, and everything gets smothered under a layer of understanding.

The article demonstrates it. The author of the article is also making the right noises: "I learn more from my students than they learn from me", and similar bullshit. He also doesn't teach a hard course: it seems to be a cogsci intro. Yet he's under pressure not to flunk everyone, and offers some of the easiest ways out: writing a single multiple choice question. And since that didn't make them pass either, they had to rewrite some blathering statement about academic integrity. It's really about letting them pass, under the guise of caring for students, and teaching.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#458

Post by EvgeniyZh »

I'm sure same thing happens (or at least happened) in every other course. I'll go as far as to say that any assignment performed not in controlled environment will mean that student work all available sources, including other students.

One solution is make HW an evidence of effort, not knowledge. That's what happens in many courses in my uni: HW are some 10-30% of final grade and average is very high. Students share their solutions with each other and we are ok with it (well TAs are definitely aware) as soon as it is not copy-paste. It is so common that it is called "reference" solution.

Then there are courses that are hard to evaluate during the exam (e.g., programming ones). It seems that my uni solution is to give assignment so hard it will require understanding even when cheating (unless someone solves it for you of course). There are assignments taking north of 40 hours for top students (from scratch).

My point is that cheating is of course bad. But trying to catch cheaters beyond very obvious ones is just waste of time. Just design your course as cheat-proof as possible: ideally, the student who didn't learn won't pass given all possible external resources at home.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#459

Post by stadia42 »

The professor surely knows that cheating is near universal because the incentive structure of modern life makes cheating optimal in expectation. Nothing he can do will change this fundamental fact. So why bother?

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#460

Post by tgv »

colechristensen wrote: post #12
realitysballs wrote: post #4

I hate to be a cynic here but I feel like education should be engineered in a manner that either : (A) assumes cheating will take place whenever possible and create curriculum , assignments, quizzes and exams with this in mind. (B) disincentivize cheating. This is tough to do but if someone is motivated not by a grade but by the experience or knowledge gain itself cheating is no longer of interest.

Universities shouldn’t be credential factories. Get rid of grading and nobody cheats. Have a separate entity do the verification or make graduation more like PhD defense.

How? Do you have any realistic proposal how to achieve this? Or would it require a minor revolution?
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