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My students cheated... a lot

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Re: My students cheated... a lot

#501

Post by elihu »

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…

Another thing (that the story goes into in depth) is that cheating creates a whole lot of extra work and stress for professors who would rather just be teaching material and not exerting enormous effort into policing other people's behavior and enforcing rules. (And that's really hard to do if you're afraid of making a mistake somewhere and punishing someone too harshly, or for something they didn't do.)

The students hunting for "the snitch" adds another layer of dysfunction. If someone joins the group chat and leaves because they notice other people cheating, then they could become targets of the other students. That's not the sort of college experience anyone wants to have.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#502

Post by sparrc »

Fiahil wrote: post #472

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 c…

What school in CA was giving multiple choice assignments in a CS class?

What you describe in France is exactly how my classes in the US were (at UW Seattle) ~15 years ago.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#503

Post by gmd63 »

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 remember it being common at my university for fraternities to maintain banks of old tests/quizzes so next year's pledges could cram and vomit more than the permitted amount.

This is like your ML model loading your test set into training without your consent.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#504

Post by atoav »

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 always tried to understand things. Craming was a last resort, when that didn't work. I find learning things I don't understand or have a mental representation for extremely boring and an utter waste of time and energy.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#505

Post by mastermedo »

I suggest adding an estimated reading time by the title. It took me ~45min, and I loved every other minute of it. The fillers were not so fun, but I enjoyed the way the promises pull the reader back into the story.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#506

Post by inglor_cz »

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 think that cheating is wrong, but I also think that building school systems that incentivize students to cheat is even more wrong, because it is a systemic bad decision.

During my schooling years, I observed that people most driven to cheating were the ones who could not absorb enormous amounts of material needed to pass an exam. I never had problems with that, so I wasn't tempted to cheat, but I also noticed that a year later, I barely remembered anything from what I have learnt so painfully to pass.

This isn't a good preparation for a job in modern world, where if you do something, you always have Google (or StackOverflow etc.) at your hand. And people who have a good ability to put 2 and 2 together tend to be more successful at such jobs.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#507

Post by Siira »

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 this kind of thinking was prevalent, it might work. It is currently not, and I doubt posting about it will help much. Besides, there are lots of incompetent people who prefer the current dishonesty, so breaking this Nash equilibrium is hard.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#508

Post by bhrgunatha »

mkl wrote: post #453
bhrgunatha wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Yes, my mistake, thanks.

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#509

Post by lastdong »

What a great read, thank you, this could prob end up being a book! :)

Memories come to mind, from students sharing same day exam questions to parents trying to help their son organise the prints of a final assignment he clearly didn’t write (I overheard ‘we need to call him, we paid good money’). Several levels, criminal even, of cheating.

In the end, for most of us, the gc was the group studies and discussing last assignments after results were out. Learning with each other and cooperation is so fundamental.

What I loved most about the story if most people are shown the way, they won’t cheat, and will thrive. makes you wonder if most cheaters just don’t know any better

Re: My students cheated... a lot

#510

Post by brigandish »

Fiahil wrote: post #472

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 c…

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

and yet

> 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.

So both courses have cheating, one possibly has less cheating, and that one has a more effective detection procedure, but cheating happens on both all the same. The problem does not go away with a better course but is - based on your anecdote and not from the presumably better view of the TAs - lessened somewhat.

Perhaps the same course could be run in California and would still attract the same level of cheating as the checkbox style one. Maybe it's simply that a course that appears more difficult to cheat on or is more difficult to cheat on attracts less cheating.

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