My former boss was an utter buffoon who knew nothing whatsoever about his field but managed to make $3 million as a "director" in the couple years before he was finally fired. Cheating seems to work well.
My students cheated... a lot
511–520 of 1001 posts
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#512It 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.
I disagree, much of the cheating is not "desirable cooperation", but blatant copy pasting.
I guess it's no wonder that there are so many bits of open source code or stack overflow answers copied into proprietary (and sometimes open source) codebases. A significant fraction of engineers seems to think that ethical standards don't apply to them and in my experience the percentage is higher than in other technical areas (lawyers are much worse still in my experience, but that's a different story).
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#513It 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…
By cheating, you're voting for a society of scammers, and you think you deserve more than the honest student because you're willing to eat honor instead of preserving it and growing it for future generations.
Scammer implies there is a victim. Who is the mark here? The college that charges huge tuition despite having a huge endowment? The professor who is being paid a salary to tech courses ppl are uninterested in? The employer for requiring degrees for jobs that don't need them? If cheating became so widespread that degrees stopped mattering, employers would have to find other ways.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#514> I had been avoiding grading weekly writing assignments because I had many students and no teaching assistant to help me with the grading
Bruh. During the remote-only pandemic? Sounds like you were a lazy professor. I get that it's hard to do work, but this is obvious stuff. Give your students easily cheatable assignments and it's no surprise that they cheat.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#515Seems like the students spent more time into getting their cheating scheme to work than actually studying the material
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#516The fault lies with the teacher, not the students.
Designing an exam that can be so trivially gamed to get 100% is irresponsible.
You cannot blame the students for taking the optimal sequence of actions to maximize their chances of a perfect grade while minimizing their chances of a bad grade.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#517It 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…
Students cannot do much on their own about the system of incentives that rewards cheating. You may as well post "By tax-optimizing, you're voting for a society of rent collectors who do no useful work and just understand the tax system better than other people"
If someone realizes that they have become an agent of a much larger system tasked with the grunt work of a harmful and illegitimate process like college education as a career credential, and if that person wants to avoid being evil, they need not lift a finger. It is easier not to do the paperwork than to do it!
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#518It 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…
Are you labouring under the illusion that the learning was singsong to do with enhancing rather than retarding the individual? Did you believe the purported reasons for the education systems being as they are?
No, educating people is about the governance structure de-individualising people making them all think its a similar way that both fosters uncritical love on the system as well as dependence.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#519It’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 dece…
As a TA, I can tell you that there is no form of assignment that can not be cheated on. For example, essays and papers will usually contain sections copied straight from literature or from other students.
Another common proposal is to give individual assignments to each student, but it is usually impossible to make equally difficult assignments, so this approach is not very fair. It also does not work when students are paying other people to do the assignments for them, which has become a huge problem over the last few years with the commercialization of cheating through various platforms.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#520One of the longest read I've completed online this year.
The author obviously care a lot about integrity and plagiarism and a lot has been discussed from the author's perspective. I wonder if we can analyze this case study from a game theory angle.
What's the payoff matrix looking like for students in the class at various phases of development?
Were students incentivized to cheat due to the structure of curriculum?
What are the Nash equilibrium scenarios for both professor and students? And how many of them are Pareto optimal?