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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#481

Post by myrion »

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

No, the proper response to that is still not a curve, it's to identify which block of questions wasn't appropriate and removing those from scoring or turning them into "bonus points" and similar measures.

That way you don't incur any of the (pretty severe) drawbacks of a curve but don't punish students for questions that were badly phrased or weren't properly taught.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#482

Post by yardstick »

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…

Based on this logic we should all be criminals so long as we can easily get away with it? I’m not ok with that. That is not a civil society.

Cheating is a form of fraud, and fraud is a crime.

Doesn’t this logically lead those that don’t want crime and cheating to clamp down hard on these acts to discourage them? Ie should we have harsher punishments? Expel students? Convict students?

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#483

Post by tornato7 »

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…

The author didn’t fail all of the cheating students. Did you read to the end? Many of them ended up with an A+. That’s in fact the whole point of the article, to say that more engaging course material reduces cheating.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#484

Post by bcrosby95 »

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.

Or IP theft, depending upon the exact scenario. Off to prison you go.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#485

Post by eimrine »

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…

Sometimes cheating is a smart way to save some time. Scammers are just the other world, it is like when somebody with too much of spare time goes for hunting. All scammers do cheating but only a minority of cheaters go into scam.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#486

Post by kubav »

I do not want to defend cheating but I see 2 big issues which promotes this behavior.

1. Course was created to scale so cheating is super easy and harder to spot without side channel (common pool of multiple choice questions).

Author fixed this, which deserves huge thumbs up. Also making course more interesting is great and I would love if all teachers reflected this. Punishing students without changing course would probably did not solve anything.

2. Technical course students have zero clue about technology they use but they completely trust it.

It looks like they do not care about learning how thinks work. Probably they are there just for a degree. Imagine hiring someone like that, freshly from college, without experience and not willing to learn anything.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#487

Post by danschuller »

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.

Also the people who cheated, if successful, get credentials that mean they may be involved in the design and implementation of software or processes with extremely serious real world consequences. It also seems if you're willing to break rules to cheat, you're probably willing to break rules in other ways such as being open to bribes or cutting some corners where there's some benefit to you at the cost of others.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#488

Post by starky »

EvgeniyZh wrote: post #458

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…

I had a prof during university that had a really good method to get people to engage. You would be assigned a reading, and then complete the quiz as an individual for a small portion of your grade, and then do the exact quiz again in a team of about 5-6 people worth a much greater amount of your grade. Lectures would then have particular focus on topics that students had trouble with on the quiz.

Assignments were designed to require iteration until you met the specifications of the problem. If you got the same or similar answer as anyone else, then it was almost certainly cheated.

Exams were open book, but quite difficult and long. You pretty much had to make sure you knew where to find all the information required in the course materials and were often similarly open ended as the assignments in the course were.

>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).

Using this as a method to reduce cheating disturbs me. The goal shouldn't be that students have to make their homework a full time job, imagine is someone was taking 7 courses all with assignments like that.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#489

Post by iguana_lawyer »

It’s outrageous that students who logged into the chat but didn’t share answers were punished. What is a student supposed to do when literally everybody else is cheating? Take a C because the course is graded on the curve?

These chats exist in every course in every college course and the students who don’t join them either because they’re honest or don’t have the right friends have no chance of graduating with a decent GPA.

The problem is lazy professors and TAs creating assignments and quizzes that are easy to grade. Essays and papers are harder to grade than multiple choice quizzes but they also prevent students from cheating.

Do your damn job and cheating won’t be a problem.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#490

Post by brigandish »

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…

Maybe, just maybe, the students - who are legally adults, by the way - should not cheat.

> And frankly: why shouldn’t the students help each other?

Because they're not helping each other in a way that isn't cheating. You may as well say that stealing is borrowing.

> Such a huge amount of cheating is a clear indication that the whole system is flawed.

The system isn't supposed to be defendable against large scale cheating because if there are that many cheats then those people should not be included in the system, which is why they should be failed (and probably kicked out). That is the defence.

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