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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#471

Post by adlpz »

seoaeu wrote: post #452
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.

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

I disgree. How hard it is to pass a class should be an absolute. It shouldn't be easier for one cohort over another just due to the first being, on average, less prepared than the second.

If an exam turns out to be too hard the teacher can investigate, consult their peers, talk to their students and decide if it's worth to scale all grades by a factor to correct.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#472

Post by Fiahil »

Ah cheating ! I did a year abroad in California when I was studying computer science and I remember there was a huge difference between cheating there and cheating in my French school.

In the later, we were given harder exercises and asked to deliver a working program with some constraints. This program is then tested and graded by a CI and examined by TAs. Usually TAs would get a cheating report for reused bits of code and things that would solve an exercise with techniques far away from students knowledge or forbidden functions. TAs would ask you questions about your code and trigger cheating review if you could not explain why you wrote it this way. It was usually effective for detecting people that didn't wrote their own exercises. As the exercises were harder than expected for a class and projects were long and difficult, students were encouraged to talk, discuss and exchange ideas. Ideas sure, code meh.

Then, in the US, exercises were stupid checkboxes-style questions and graded on a curve. So of course everyone "cheated".. I must confess that I did it too. It was unworthy of my time and attention, as it was just about taking the course material and regurgitate it with different words. Of course, I can't imagine anyone learning anything from this way of working.

Stupid assignments encourage students to cheat. Make them interesting and this problem will go away.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#473

Post by Sebguer »

lysium wrote: post #469

I find this f’d up at so many levels. The instructor seems to be more concerned about how to fill out forms to report a huge amount of her own class and come up with (surprising the student) countermeasures than about how to teach her students. Such a huge amount of cheating is a clear indication that the whole system is flawed. This should have been the instructor’s top priority. Instead, she chose to fail her stude…

Your unconscious bias is showing by the fact that you think this professor is a woman.

Quick edit: Also, it's very obvious that the professor had no issues with the class 'helping each other', but what was happening was people literally just sharing answers to the exam, and being completely unable to succeed without doing so. This wasn't a factor of students sharing study notes - the Professor's example is people literally just posting questions from their exams and asking what the answer was.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#474

Post by dehrmann »

jmull wrote: post #64

I honestly don’t get widespread cheating like this… You’re paying so much money for these courses — probably a ridiculous amount, so much you may never recoup — … so at least get everything out of it you can. Otherwise, why sign up in the first place? Let me tell you: essentially no one cares what grade you got in your courses. (Sure, there are cases, but over time they quickly attenuate from “sometimes” to “never” a…

How old are you? I doubt the average 19-year-old is thinking about it in terms of getting everything they can for their money. In 10 years, they'll probably be horrified of how little they got for the $2000 the class cost.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#475

Post by voiper1 »

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…

It's not _just_ trying to be lenient and offer a second chance - it's a way to catch more cheaters. "Turn yourself in and we'll go easy on you... because we might not catch you."

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#476

Post by derac »

etataetaet wrote: post #387
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…

> 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…

The amount of cheating and the industry around writing papers for others might surprise you.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#477

Post by faeriechangling »

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'm very jaded. I see students who are experts in cramming a set of material, vomiting out the answers, and doing this repeatedly for every exam. I see other students who are experts in cheating without getting caught. It's hard for me to see a distinction between these two groups in practice since they're both committed to passing the exam rather than learning anything, but one is apparently imbued with honour since they're gamifying the exam within the written rules instead of breaking the rules.

It's not that I like or respect cheaters, it's that I'm just entirely unbothered by them. They're just students taking a high risk strategy and they'll sink or swim and I'm not angry about them or shedding any tears for them. Students who actually focus on trying to learn instead of trying to pass tests are screwed even if there wasn't a single cheater in the classroom. They won't go to the best schools or get the best jobs because they aren't cramming flash cards of likely test answers.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#478

Post by eimrine »

> If real life was about being monitored by proctoring software that spies on you at home and forces you to test under duress, it would be a sad real life.

Welcome to real life with all kinds of proprietary software.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#480

Post by nivertech »

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…

Agile is cheating

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