521–530 of 1001 posts
1. Tell students that the remote exam is open book. Everything is allowed EXCEPT for any communication between students. Moreover, there is a Zoom breakout room for discussing specific questions with ME.
2. Exam starts.
3. Students move to that breakout room to exchange solutions.
What would you tell your child to do if he/she were in this class, and were aware of the massive cheating happening in the chat? Should the student report the cheating to the professor? Assuming there was a curve in the class, how do you deal with the "but everyone else is doing it" argument with regard to benefiting from the cheating (even passively, by seeing the questions/answers posted)? I have wondered about sim…
As someone who studied pedagogy for years and quit due to an immense frustration with exactly this — how broken the system is — I would encourage you to entertain the thought that maybe, you as a person who is almost in all cases not a teacher, nor someone with any experience apart from once having been a student, do not have a good understanding of how exactly this system should be fixed, and that it’s not broken for fun but because there are some very difficult unresolved issues.
People love to rant about how bad tests are. “We just study for the tests” and so on. And yet this complaint seems to be international. Curious, isn’t it, how all these systems seem to fail in the same way?
In the case of testing it’s because you choose to focus on the obviously bad thing (current state of testing) rather than the very complex and difficult question behind it: HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it?
These are very hard questions, and it’s frustrating to read the phrase “we need to fix the system” because yes, obviously we do, but agreeing that things are bad isn’t the hard part, and probably input from people who have never worked in the field is of pretty limited value in how to resolve the hard part, and will not do much more than annoy teachers even more.
So what’s the solution then? Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics.
Cynically, this will never happen because reforms to battle educational issues in any democratic society usually takes more than 5 election cycles to show obvious results (and when the bad results start stacking up current leaders will take the flak regardless).
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…
> 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.
Particularly reading this, the whole enforcement of anticheating becomes a privacy nightmare. I do not want my students to learn that putting root kits on PCs is OK (for proctoring) or that archiving potentially private chat messages without consent (I am in Europe, so GDPR applies) is OK.
At the same time students have to learn how to use stackoverflow or copilot effectively. So I want to teach them that initial copying is OK if you fully understand the result and that often doing it yourself from scratch is better to achieve it.
I know we talking about slightly different things, but grading based on multiple choice seems to be at the core of the problem.
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…
Fair use covers the school's use of students work. Submission to such services might also be construed as fair use. It seems to have been litigated as such already:
https://www.eschoolnews.com/2008/04/17/judge-turnitin-com-do...
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…
Can you clarify what you meant by this? As it stands it sort of reads like you claiming actually smart people don't get into the best schools - which is absurd.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always felt that my score was my own, and didn't care about comparing against others. Tough to do when you’re sharing a curve with a bunch of cheaters, and the grades matter for your future. I know in the program I attended I was up against a fair few who were taking cognition enhancing drugs, others who had exam copies from prior years to help them prep, and a lot of people who copied each others’ homework. It was…
> Tough to do when you’re sharing a curve with a bunch of cheaters Are curves still that common these days? In my time at university, the only classes that got curved were a couple math classes that were curved in the students' favor.