My students cheated... a lot • Hacker News Board

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#491

Post by dehrmann » Sun, May 29, 2022, 7:09 AM UTC

gault8121 wrote: post #463

dehrmann wrote: post #451

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 actuall…

These are tools for teachers to catch plagiarism. He is saying he wants better tools to detect plagiarism because these don’t handle similarity matches well.

My point was that he griped about students posting old exams, but had no problem with schools sharing students' work with plagiarism detection services. He didn't even recognize how it could be a problem.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#492

Post by Simon_O_Rourke » Sun, May 29, 2022, 7:09 AM UTC

My sister works with an institution that gives professional development and certification courses for financial institutions. Being the heavily regulated industry that it is, and that fact that in some places you can't sell mortgages unless your staff are certified, you can imagine the exams are scrutinized for any cheating.

Anyway, last month, some ditzy 20-something banker posted up on TikTok her scheme to cheat on the test, and referenced the institution. This got back to my sister and her colleagues before the exam, and when time came, the cheater was exposed, and ultimately sacked from what promised to be a lucrative career.

Probably more often than not cheaters prosper, but it does gladden the heart to see the odd one get their just desserts.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#493

Post by raverbashing » Sun, May 29, 2022, 7:09 AM UTC

> Not everyone in the class cheated. But, everyone who cheated failed miserably. I guess the wisdom of the crowd doesn’t count for much when the crowd didn’t go to class or read the textbook.

That's so much "average college student" it hurts.

And all the quizzes were open book, etc.

> The best advice was a student telling everyone they could just go to the website for the textbook, then control-F in the textbook and search for words in the question to find the answers

That's cringe

Forget about the cheating, I'm angry they can't even cheat properly!

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#494

Post by lodovic » Sun, May 29, 2022, 7:13 AM UTC

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.

Some say it's only cheating if you get caught.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#495

Post by bencollier49 » Sun, May 29, 2022, 7:16 AM UTC

Cheating doesn't seem to be punished any more in the UK because universities need the fees. I witnessed an egregious case of cheating in an MSc exam which was caught, and as far as I can tell, the perpetrator just had to resit.

One of the first year courses in an undergraduate degree ought to be in academic integrity.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#496

Post by bruce511 » Sun, May 29, 2022, 7:16 AM UTC

faeriechangling wrote: post #477

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…

There are two ways to look at this. One is that those that cram for tests are doing "what the employer requires" and do will make good employees, so the system is working. Those that go this approach probably learn stuff along the way as well.

The group that focuses on pure learning, and engaging with the material, may not end up with the best marks, but they have a deep understanding, and delight in the subject that will serve them very well over their working career.

Equally though, not all courses are equally useful (to one person). I enjoyed oceanography, I went to class, did the work (mostly) and learned something. But I don't like boats (get seasick) so I've never "used" any of that knowledge. Ditto astronomy.

Comp Sci on the other hand consumed all my spare time. We gave ourselves extra tasks, read far beyond the textbook, and pushed the envelope. This would be our career and we were all in. Sometimes test scores suffered (I didn't actually study for tests) but I got a job (one I still have and love) and 30 years later I'm still applying those fundamentals I learned.

Maybe I don't have the highest paying job, but I'm where I was made to fit, and money can't tempt me away.

Those that cheat, well, you can fool some people some of the time, but it's a lot of work. And a career spans a long time.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#497

Post by int0x2e » Sun, May 29, 2022, 7:17 AM UTC

faeriechangling wrote: post #477

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…

I think we need to stop looking at the students and start looking at the system. The students are responding to incentives set out by their faculty. If you really want change, you must evaluate alternative incentives.

Personally, I was an honors student until college, and I was often the one in my group of friends to figure out how to solve an exercise, yet I would often get average (or lower) results compared to some of my friends, because some of them were just great at drilling themselves until they could repeat every single style of solution quickly. I admit - that made me a little frustrated at the time, but 10 years later some of those folks that did really well in the exams are not doing as well in their careers because real life requires innovation and deep understanding, not just rapid application of past solutions.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#498

Post by zb1plus » Sun, May 29, 2022, 7:18 AM UTC

I have never understood why college professors / college classes are so uninnovative and have such an antagonistic approach to teaching/education. The entire grade culture at universities should be abolished in lieu of an evaluation system that is more reflective of the traits and skills that matter in industry and research environments. In CS programs geared towards helping graduates careers in industry, we should be rewarding students who help other succeed and in research oriented programs, we should have students conduct supervised research project oriented around their personal interests that require written and oral explanations of the work and why they choose the approach and what are the implications. There are so many easy ways to ensure cheating cannot occur that would also benefit students more than the current means of evaluation commonly used in higher education. On a semi related topic, if anyone is aware of research into experimental pedagogical approaches that move beyond traditional methods of evaluation and use concepts like mastery based learning in CS, I'd love to find a research group to work with on some ideas I have to improve instruction in CS and language learning.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#499

Post by jandrese » Sun, May 29, 2022, 7:19 AM UTC

alexb_ wrote: post #287

I think a lot of people here are missing the root cause of why students cheat. College for the longest time has not had anything to do with learning for the VAST majority of students. You go to college because you have to have a degree to get a job. And you have to have a good GPA on that degree to get a job. College is not about actually learning anything - it's a purely monetary investment, where you go into debt t…

You wouldn't cheat because once you are out in the real world supposedly applying the knowledge that you learned in college it is going to be really obvious to your boss and coworkers that you don't know what you are doing.

Everybody expects the fresh college grads to be fairly green, but you can really tell when someone has no clue about even the basic principals of their job, the one they supposedly have a degree in.

So the danger is having a good GPA but then washing out in job interviews with real companies. "Wow, a 4.0 in CS from CMU! So why do you seem to be completely mystified by Fizzbuzz?"

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#500

Post by geysersam » Sun, May 29, 2022, 7:20 AM UTC

wolframhempel wrote: post #421

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.

It's not the only quality we value. We also want people to be able to learn new things, and be hardworking when needed. I'd personally prefer bridges in the future not being built out of paper-mache just because it was easier than using concrete.